Some insights arrive as lightning bolts. Others emerge through patterns that have been there all along. Through mark making, a simple realization emerged: we are all makers.
As I’ve spent time exploring paint, paper, photographs, symbols, and words, something unexpected has happened. What surprises me isn’t what the paintbrush teaches about art. It’s the lens it offers for seeing something I’ve long known in a different way.
For years, I’ve devoted myself to practices that help me experience life more deeply. Journaling has never been a mere record of events, but a place of reflection, inquiry, insight, and integration. Meditation, prayer, movement, learning, and love have each shaped my days. Through this new lens, I began to recognize the pattern connecting them.
A New Lens
Journaling becomes sense making. Meditation, prayer, and mindful noticing become peace making. Dance, stretching, movement, and yoga become shape making. Learning, curiosity, and wonder become mind making. Devotion to the people, places, and ideas we love becomes love making.
The practices aren’t new. The language is.
Once I saw the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it.
It appeared at the dinner table, during mundane tasks, inside difficult conversations, and in those ordinary moments when I stood at a crossroads between reaction and response.
Gradually, the lens widened.
The Makings
Every day presents us with the same raw materials: time, attention, energy, and love.
A challenge can become growth or resentment, a conversation can create understanding or distance, and an ordinary afternoon can dissolve into distraction or deepen into wonder. We’ve all made muck, and we’ve all made magic—often from the very same raw materials.
Life remains gloriously unpredictable. Storms arrive. Plans unravel. Outcomes don’t always obey our preferences. So much will always remain beyond our authority.
Mark making invited me to see things through another lens—not merely as a series of actions, but as an ongoing act of creation.
The word maker no longer belongs only to artists, builders, inventors, and entrepreneurs. It feels far more universal than that. We make relationships and memories, peace and conflict, connection and distance.
What We Make Of It
Perhaps that’s the invitation hidden within this simple shift in perspective: to pause and consider what we’re making with the lives we’ve been given. We may not choose every circumstance, but we do help shape what emerges from it.
Our lives are given. What are we making of them?
The Beatles sang it beautifully:
“And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make.”