Six Months Back in the Bluegrass

A not‑so‑New‑Year check‑in

Six months is a strange threshold. It’s long enough for the story of return to wear off, and long enough for the body to start telling the truth. I’m no longer arriving. I’m residing.

Being back in the Bluegrass hasn’t felt like a reset or a retreat. It’s felt like a settling — the kind that happens underground, quietly, without announcement. Roots don’t ask for applause. They ask for time.

This check‑in is an attempt to name two things that feel newly clear after six months: what has stabilized, and what I no longer have to prove.

What Has Stabilized

Not outcomes. Conditions.

• Pace. My nervous system has slowed enough to notice when urgency is manufactured. I can tell the difference now between what matters and what merely wants attention.
• Orientation. Creative Recess no longer feels like something I’m trying to explain or justify. It feels like a field I’m tending – through invitations, encounters, and limits.
• Boundaries as structure. Saying no has become architectural rather than reactive. Fewer containers. Better holding.
• Seasonal trust. Winter didn’t need to be productive to be faithful. Letting things lie fallow turned out to be part of the work.

What’s steady isn’t certainty — it’s coherence. I know where I’m standing, even when I don’t yet know where something is going.

What I No Longer Have to Prove

This might be the bigger shift.

• I don’t have to prove that my work is rigorous by making it louder or faster.
• I don’t have to translate living, relational practices into extractive formats just to be legible.
• I don’t have to stay in rooms that require me to fragment myself to remain present.
• I don’t have to perform optimism to be taken seriously about possibility.

Leaving certain systems clarified something essential: the pedagogy didn’t fail; the containers reached their limits. Knowing that has loosened a lot of old muscle tension.

A Different Kind of New Year

This isn’t a resolution post. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a weather report.

The work ahead feels less like scaling and more like stewardship. Less like launching and more like hosting. Fewer promises. Better questions.

If there’s a guiding curiosity right now, it’s this:

What becomes possible when we stop asking work to justify itself, and start asking what conditions it needs to remain human?

Six months in, the answer isn’t complete. But it’s clearer than it was.

And for now, that’s enough.

An Invitation

If any of this resonates — if you’re noticing a similar shift from urgency to stewardship, from proving to tending — I want to extend a simple invitation.

Creative Recess now holds three ways of entering, each designed for different rhythms and levels of engagement:

• The Playground — a personal practice space for gentle re-entry into creativity and reflection, without pressure to share, perform, or produce.
• The Studio — a shared practice space where creativity, leadership, and inquiry become relational, supported by gatherings, workshops, and collective sense-making.
• The Field — a small, high-trust container for people holding responsibility for ideas, people, and systems, oriented toward deep inquiry and stewardship.

You’re welcome to begin wherever feels appropriate, to move between spaces as your season changes, or simply to linger at the edges. None of these are funnels. They are containers — meant to support staying human, practicing possibility, and letting unfinished work remain unfinished.

If you’re curious, the Playground is often the easiest place to start. Join or upgrade your membership today!