Portrait of an artist on the move

On creative roots.

“Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being…”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

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Dear friends,

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to share your sounds of home last week — nearly thirty of you! I was so moved by your stories, and you’ve got me very inspired to bring them all together.

But first, I’d love to share a more personal update with you this week — on some big changes that have been taking place behind the scenes around here. 

My husband Jose is an architect, and since he was in high school in his hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay, it’s been his dream to work in Europe.

When we first met in 2016, on Norway’s beautiful Lofoten Islands, his sights were set on cities like Stockholm and Copenhagen, given his love for Scandinavian design. But over the past few years, he’s found himself drawn to a different part of Europe. 

Every time he’d go searching for inspiration online, every studio he came across was located in Belgium. But not only Belgium — they were all in the city of Antwerp, set in the northern region of Flanders. 

This spring, he applied to his dream studio in Antwerp, and when he was offered the position, we suddenly realized:

We had about six weeks to prepare for the move, but naturally it wasn’t until our final week in Montevideo that we started packing in earnest.

And before I packed any of my or Elena’s clothes, before I packed up all of her favorite toys and books and her beloved foldable bathtub, I packed a small gray suitcase that would serve as my carry-on — and into it went all of the things most beloved to me.

There were my five Moleskine travel sketchbooks, and the art journal I began keeping on New Year’s Day of 2016, not knowing that just a few months into the year, I would meet Jose on Lofoten. It’s the journal I now cherish the most, as it tells the story of our beginning. 

There were three thin volumes that go with me everywhere: Mary Oliver’s House of Light, The House of Belonging by

David Whyte

, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. No future desk of mine could ever be complete without their wisdom.

And there were more than a dozen tiny jars of acrylic ink paint. I carefully enfolded each one with bubble wrap and tape, and did the same with my brushes and the tall coffee mug I use to keep my brushes in — the one that says, Let life surprise you. 

When I finished placing each object into the suitcase, I took a picture of it from above, and there was just something about the photo that brought me joy. 

But not only joy — it brought me an unexpected, and much-needed, feeling of comfort and reassurance.

We’ve now been in Antwerp for nearly a month, and the word I keep coming back to to describe this experience for Jose and me is that we uprooted ourselves from the life we had built in Uruguay.

We sold our furniture. We donated clothes and baby things we hadn’t ended up using with Elena. And we said goodbye to Jose’s entire family, to all the friends he’s known since he was two, and to the dear friends I’ve made in Uruguay myself. 

All of that reminded me of how incredibly uncomfortable and unsettling moving can be. You can almost viscerally feel your roots being pulled up from the ground, dirt still clinging to the mess of tendrils, with no promise of when you’ll feel settled again —

When I’d almost finished writing this post, I took a moment to share it with Jose, to get his thoughts on what I had so far. And after I’d finished reading it to him, he said something that took my breath away:

“That suitcase is like the soil still hanging onto your roots.”

It’s one of the things I love most about Jose — the way his mind works, and how he’s always seeing connections I hadn’t seen myself.

It hadn’t occurred to me to draw a connection between my small gray suitcase and the picture of an uprooted plant that I’ve been thinking about so much lately — but as soon as he said it, my nose got all tingly, in that way it does before you start to cry.

It was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. To be reminded that even while we’re not yet rooted in a new place, we can still be rooted in ourselves — through the things that have always helped us feel grounded in the world, and will continue to do so in seasons of change and transition.

As I opened up my suitcase in Antwerp and started unpacking in our new home, it felt like the suitcase was reassuring me, “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

And the funny thing was —

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P.S. I’ve been wanting to try out hand-lettering over my photos for a while now, thanks to the inspiration of two other creative heroes of mine: Debbie Millman and Wendy Macnaughton (of

DrawTogether

) ✨