On rising from the mud

The lotus does not resent the water it grows through. It takes what the mud offers (the dark, the stillness, the slow pressure) and answers with a bloom. I keep returning to this because it is the whole of what the atelier is trying to say.

We are taught to hurry past the difficult part, to arrive already finished. But every piece here begins in the dark: a blank page, an uncertain line, a colour that refuses to settle. The work is not to escape that stage. The work is to stay in it, gently, until something rises.

So this first note is really an invitation. Let the mud be mud. Trust that it is feeding something. The bloom, when it comes, will carry the whole of where it grew.