A reflection on exposure, erosion, and the fragile rituals of becoming

There are seasons that take more than they give.

Not all storms arrive with thunder. Some come quiet. A slow unmaking. The soft collapse of something once sure. An ache beneath the structure. A crack in the foundation you didn’t know was bearing the whole house. This is how rust begins. In the unseen. The slow. The exposed. It isn’t sudden until it is. And then, nothing holds.

By the time I recognized the season, I was already inside it. The after of everything familiar. The undoing of what I thought I’d secured. Body. Belonging. Language. Belief. Erosion made itself known not as a metaphor, but as a condition of living. A theology of exposure. The soul’s slow oxidation under weather it cannot control.

Rust is what happens when we stay exposed long enough for life to leave a mark.

This series was born from that place. From the rusty season. Marked by fracture, unraveling, tenderness, and terrifying clarity. There were no answers here. No restoration arcs. Only the raw dailiness of persistence. Some days, I woke. Some days, I simply didn’t disappear. That was enough.

Each piece in Rust carries this weathered language. The work lives in tension. Between what is breaking and what is forming. Between collapse and confession. Between the grief that names us and the grace that dares to stay.

There are no finished edges here. Only layers. Only texture. Only presence.

The science of rust teaches us that corrosion begins at the point of exposure. Where the material is vulnerable to air. To moisture. To time. But it also tells us that rust is proof of contact. Proof that something touched. Stayed. Affected. Rust is the aftermath of relationship. This, too, is theology.

What remains after erosion is not always beautiful. But it is honest. And there is beauty in that.

This work does not explain. It does not resolve. It makes no promises of repair. It offers instead a liturgy of staying. A brutalist practice of presence.

Every painting is accompanied by a poetic essay. Not as explanation, but as companionship. A voice to walk beside the texture. A small gesture toward meaning, where meaning refuses to come easily. Together, they form an archive. A field record of what it means to live through what nearly undoes you.

Rust is not a performance of triumph.
It is an altar of evidence.
A hymn for what stays.
A gesture toward the breath beneath the ruin.
A quiet prophecy that even here. Especially here. Something vital is trying to grow.
And it will.
In due time.

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An Invitation

If you are moving through your own rusty season, don’t rush it away. Sit with it. Ask what it is demanding of you and what it is making of you.

And when the smallest ember of beauty appears, choose it. Hold it. Let it shape the version of you that emerges.

Let the cracks speak not of your undoing, but of your becoming.

THE THEOLOGY OF HOLDING ON

Samuel once said, “And David encouraged himself in the Lord.” Donald Lawrence sang it too: “Sometimes you have to encourage yourself.”

I’ve whispered those words more times than I’ve believed them, because doubt was often the only form of faith I could hold. I’ve been angry. At God. At the world.

At how long it takes to heal,

or to believe that healing is still possible.

And still, I hum the song.

I’ve held myself in rooms where no one noticed.

Told this tired heart of mine: cry if you must,

laugh if you can, but please, do not vanish.

That’s belief too—to ask yourself to stay,

even when the staying ruptures something inside you.

Faith is not a fixed thing. It’s a dare.

A bewildering invitation

to keep holding what makes no sense at all.

Sometimes the prayer is just remembering.

Sometimes it’s arriving; disillusioned, unsure, but still breathing.

This is what I know: to believe, even while dissecting belief,

is not a contradiction.

It’s the most human thing I’ve ever done.

Because faith, like grief,

is stitched together with the threadbare remnants

of what we’ve risked to forget.

And still, in our bewilderment,

our breath is a balm.

And we live in the seams.

BEFORE IT BEGINS AGAIN - POETIC ESSAY

I often find myself driving just before dawn—

especially on Sundays.

Those hours feel untouched,

as if the angels are still making their rounds,

and the noise of living hasn’t remembered how to rise.

The roads are mostly empty,

save for the others like me—

those fleeing something,

those searching for something,

or those simply obeying the rhythm of breath.

There is something tender

about an unclaimed morning:

the breeze brushing the window,

the birds rehearsing their entry into light,

the mind loosening its grip

on the heaviness it held through the night.

Night has its safety.

But dawn offers a different kind of mercy—

not fearsome,

just solemn.

Like death’s gentler twin.

An exit.

A door.

A quiet way out

of all that refused to rest.