There’s five new Bebes in the shop: Arthur, Fortune, Chaos Magic, Neon Watermelon, and Citric Acid.

The Relics are well underway. [YouTube video | Instagram Reel]

Orlando Pen Show prep is well underway, also. 

It’s easy to get absorbed in the planning and to do lists, in schedules and deadlines and quotas. There’s a measure of satisfaction in checking off the lists and telling myself I’ve almost done enough today. There’s still this lingering conditioning to chase Enough; to appease the gnawing sense that if I do enough, there will finally be a peace and stillness inside my chest and head. It’s an old learned pattern, the one where if I can list enough things done to the Inner Asshole, this amalgamation, this egregore, of all the people who told me I was not enough, I will silence it’s litany of Not Enough, even if just for a brief moment of reprieve.

It’s an old habit, that grasping and chasing after externally-defined Enough, and I watch for it now. I know that there is no negotiating with that inner terrorist – the goal posts will always be moved, I will always hear back how I could have done more if…

I know now that when I get wrapped and tied up in the optics of doing and achieving, in being defined by productivity and meeting metrics, I miss out on experiencing. I miss getting to enjoy doing the things I love doing, the satisfaction and peace I find in the experience of doing the things I love experiencing. I miss being in the flow of the moment, I miss feeling the enjoyment and delight and satisfaction of what I am doing. I deprive myself of the singular, transcendent moment of forgetting that both time and I exist, which is about as close to experiencing the immortal and divine as a human can get.

Whenever I catch myself getting caught up in trying to manage today for tomorrow, I pause and remind myself to not lose today in thinking about tomorrow too much.

– A. Markov