May is relentless in its brightness. Everything blooms. Everything performs. The light comes early and stays late, as if darkness has been banned for the season.
And every year, without fail, I feel the pull in the opposite direction.
Not toward sadness. Not toward hiding. But toward something truer — a place underneath the surface where things are still allowed to be unresolved.
This is when yin yoga calls me. This is when the dark paintings want to be made. This is when I need the weight of something real more than I need the comfort of something easy.
I think we have been taught to fear the dark. To fix it. To brighten it. To move through it as quickly as possible. But the dark is not the problem. The dark is where the real work happens.
There is a concept I keep returning to — golden handcuffs. The beautiful constraints we choose. The ones that don’t diminish us but hold us to something true.
The obligation to go deep. The refusal to stay on the surface. The commitment to make something that actually matters even when it would be so much easier to make something pretty.
That is what the dark asks of me. And I have stopped trying to negotiate with it.
The painting in this post is unfinished. It doesn’t have a name yet. But it already knows something I don’t. I can feel it.
That is enough to keep going.