Dear Friend,
Each time I try to hold this year at a distance and understand it, it slips out of frame — not because it lacks meaning, but because its meaning hasn’t finished forming yet.
It has been a year of overlapping pressures, lived differently by each of us, yet carrying a shared weight: moments of personal strain, political unease, bodily vulnerability, and connections between people that have been strained, cracked, or broken. A year that asked for vigilance without release, responsibility without control.
I’ve wanted, more than once, to gather it all into something coherent — to explain it, resolve it, set it down. Perhaps it’s a moment for loosening — allowing what hasn’t resolved yet to remain unfinished, and therefore alive.
A poet once wrote, “Live the questions now.” I return to that line not as reassurance, but as a form of discipline.
This year has taught me that wholeness doesn’t come from certainty, and strength doesn’t come from bracing harder against what frightens or overwhelms us. What I’m learning instead — in my work and in my life — is how attention itself becomes a way forward.
Seeing clearly, without turning away, allows us to respond rather than react.
In a world that often feels unkind, this may be one of the most human acts we have left: to stay present, to stay open, and to choose care even when fear would be easier.
What I hope for myself — at this turning — and quietly for anyone reading, is not certainty, but steadiness. Strength, I’m learning, doesn’t come from hardening against what’s wrong, but from remaining open enough to recognize what still matters: respect, care, and the dignity of one another.
When we can stay present without collapsing or armoring ourselves, we can respond without losing ourselves in the process.
In the studio — or perhaps more honestly, in how I wish to work — this understanding has been changing my relationship to the process itself. I’m paying attention to where effort turns into control, where discipline slips into bracing. Loosening the grip doesn’t mean caring less — it means trusting a deeper current of attention and creativity to move without fear.
Lately, one question has been staying with me: What no longer needs to be held so tightly for the work to appear?
I don’t mean effort, or care, or devotion — those remain essential. What I’m noticing instead are the habits of gripping, controlling, or bracing that once felt necessary. Loosening isn’t the absence of attention — it’s attention without fear.
When I look at Clay Figure, I see a form that isn’t gripping or defending itself. It doesn’t explain where it’s been or where it’s going. It simply stands — unfinished, exposed, and intact.
Perhaps this is what this year has been asking for — not answers, but a softening of the grip. I’m grateful for the chance to keep looking, to keep learning, and to continue this quiet work alongside you. Should
The New Year — may it be a time of gentle seeing, softening the grip, and discovering what’s alive within us.
At the edge of light,
~ Melanie
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
— *Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters