I choose a word. A phrase. Something that I need to be true — or needs to become true. They are usually something I am wrestling with, returning to again and again in the way we return to anything that will not let us go.

I prepare the paper. I determine the size first — which means the commitment is made before the first mark. The scale determines how long it will take, how many times the word or phrase will be written, how many months of sitting down and beginning again. These pieces take between four months and one year to complete. They are not made quickly.

And then the writing begins.

I Love You. Be Kind. Courage. Peace. Forgive. Flow Like Water. How Are You Helping? There's Enough For All Of Us. I Already Have It All. You'll Find Your Way Home. It Will Be Okay. What Are You Chasing? Why? Just Be You.

Each phrase is written between 2,000 and 120,000 times depending on the scale of the work. Written by hand, with pen and ink, line after line, the same words filling the page until the surface becomes something else entirely. The phrase stops being language and becomes texture, landscape, a thing you stand in front of and feel before you read.

But the center of the page is only half the work.

In the margins, in pencil, I write what the meditation brings up on any given day of making. Not what the phrase means in theory, but what it triggers in practice. The resistance. The doubt. The unexpected grief. The dark humor of sitting with a word for the four hundredth day and suddenly arguing with it. Writing I Love You 35,000 times and asking in the margin — does that include me? Writing I Don't Love Doing This Today on a Tuesday in month seven and writing it anyway.

My thoughts in the margins are the other half of the conversation — the raw, unguarded record of me working toward something I do not yet fully believe or understand, on the days I am certain, and on the days I am not. They are where the armor comes off. Where the practice meets the person.

This is endurance art. It is also devotional practice. It is also, in its margins, something closer to confession. The three are not separate. Each meditation begins as something I need to hear — a truth being worked toward, an instruction being written into the body through the repetition of the hand. The margins record what happens along the way. By the time a piece is finished, months later, the words have been lived with long enough to become something close to belief or some kind of understanding. The margins show you the cost of that.

What you see is a surface dense with language — intention at the center, truth in the margins, the whole of it a record of months of my life. Months of returning and insisting that this word, this phrase, this thought is worth the whole of the paper and the whole of the time.

It is.