This weekend, Release will be finished.
And for the first time in my life, I completed the first painting in an entire series.
I’ve started many things.
I’ve dreamed countless beginnings.
But this—this is different.
Release is the most intense piece in The Shape of Form Without Freedom, and finishing it at Imbolc feels anything but accidental. This quiet turning of the wheel—when nothing looks different yet, but you can feel that you’re no longer standing in the same place—marks something profound for me.
For most of my life, I’ve been fluent in beginnings.
Beginnings are intoxicating. They arrive with fire and possibility, with the rush of movement and the comfort of distraction. They keep the mind busy, the nervous system occupied, the body moving forward before it has time to feel.
Finishing does the opposite.
Finishing asks you to slow down and remain. To stay present when the excitement fades and the weight of what you’re making begins to speak back. It asks you to stop running.
When you grow up in chaos, running becomes second nature. You learn how to keep moving, how to stay alert, how to shift your focus just fast enough to avoid getting swallowed by the moment. That isn’t weakness. That’s intelligence. That’s adaptation.
But those patterns don’t disappear just because life keeps going.
What’s changed now isn’t that the chaos has quieted—it hasn’t. The world is still loud. Life is still demanding. What’s changed is me.
I’m learning how to meet the noise without scattering. How to stay with something even when my instincts urge me to leap ahead. How to finish without fleeing.
That is what Release demanded.
There were moments when this painting felt heavy just to approach. Moments when it would have been easier—so much easier—to distract myself with the next idea, the next spark, the next beginning. But instead of abandoning it, I stayed.
I stayed when it asked more of me.
I stayed when it stopped being exciting.
I stayed when finishing meant feeling everything I would have once outrun.
And then, quietly, undeniably—I finished it.
Not by force.
Not by burning myself out.
But by choosing, again and again, to remain.
Imbolc is a threshold, not a finish line. It doesn’t promise ease or certainty. It asks whether you are willing to tend the flame anyway—to keep going even when spring is only a feeling, not a fact.
This weekend, as Release reaches its final breath, I’m allowing myself to celebrate something I once believed I couldn’t do.
I finished the first piece of this series.
I changed how I move through creation.
And that feels epic—not because it was loud or dramatic, but because it was real.
This isn’t just the end of a painting.
It’s the moment I proved to myself that I can stay.