I get stopped a lot by wanting to be good at everything I do.
What I mean is I stop myself from doing a thing I want to do, because I perceive my skill at that thing as low-level. “I can’t draw,” for example: I’ve said that a lot, for a lot of years. And it’s true that I have no innate talent for representing figures or emotions or ideas in a visual medium.
What I do have, increasingly, is joy in doing that. I love the glide and scratch of a very specific type of ink pen, the texture and saturation of the lines and curves I can make with it.
Something else I have, increasingly, is days when words don’t serve me, nor can I serve them. Pen-and-ink drawing, however, isn’t asking anything from me. I have no responsibility to it, and no proficiency to measure. (And no true sense of how to do so anyway). It’s pure play—though what it more often feels like is a sort of healing friend.
I have—and I have to realize this over and over—accumulated so many healing friends. And I hold—I have to remind myself of this as well—immense gratitude for all of them. Sometimes I call them “tools” (thinking in therapy-language), but I like the ease of “friends.” Sometimes there’s no fixing your life, you know? There are friends who help you live it.
Human friends, also. Confronted with the statement that “I can’t draw,” my wonderful human friend Lucy Bellwood shrugs and says, “So do a bad job.” By which she means that skill is not everything, not the first thing, not even a necessary thing to enjoy drawing.
I think about this often. (Among the many other wise things Lucy says.) And, increasingly, I let the words go for awhile and I do a bad job drawing instead. Which feels good.
Tara K. Shepersky 
I enjoyed reading this today and have recently painting a “Paint by number” canvas. It is half way through and I return to work
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Hi Doanne! Hooray for joyful paining. :)
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Hi from Seattle. Please delete after reading. Just thought it was so fun last May to be talking with Grant @ Smith River Ranch. And he said you had inquired about staying at their ranch.
I just emailed them in April heard nothing back, then in May I got an email from Grant saying stop by. By then I was in Jedidiah Smith State Park.
So he said come over and I visited, clicked with Kasey the caretaker and Grant, and they asked me if I’d guest caretake for the weekend so Kasey could get away.
Grant had mentioned you wanted to stay there and write. Did you two ever connect?
I love your thoughtfulness. And that 2021 post with all those poems is going out to friends today.
You know how so much of what is stirring today is terrible, and we are curled and then outraged, the perpetual violence on offer so addictive and optional all at once?
Our collective consciousness here is being programmed day and night, the psychopaths chaos and random daily disturbing murders and mayhem is a kind of a pulse blender on our nervous system.
So these poems you send out are the lotus flower to all the muck we are getting, don’t you think?
I’ve rambled enough. If you haven’t been in touch with Grant I’m happy to cc you two.
Timothy @ Good Nature Publishing in Seattle
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Hi Timothy,
How wonderful that you know Grant and SRA! I’m a big fan of their work. They caretake the river that raised me. Which I haven’t been back to visit (nor have I been in touch with Grant or Kasey) for perhaps a year. It’s been a year of great change; many (even most?) of my old paths are overgrown. Still composing, though, and still learning and reciting, and I do love the idea of poems as lotus flowers, persistenly blooming and rising and blooming again.
Tara
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Love this post, darlin’! There was resonance for me in my own approach/avoid that can leave me feeling so flat! I wrote about my evolving creation of nature mandalas in a recent Abbey of the Arts guest post – and mentioned my perfectionism in the process: https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/2026/01/07/monk-in-the-world-guest-post-melissa-layer-2/
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These are so beautiful, Melissa. And by that I mean not only visually beautiful—though they are also visually beautiful. The colors and textures in your photos… I want to let them wash over me like gentle waves off the Sound. You’re making poems without words.
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