AMY GRACE
To call myself and artist is equal parts self-conscious and necessary.
I’m guessing some of you know exactly this messy truth.
Words have always hunted me down with fixed eyes, clarity, and persistence. When the world spins out in dark paint splatter, when my own gravity wavers, words appear as tools to make a ladder out. They find me and make me work to find myself. They sometimes trail a beat and a melody. They have saved my life through the inspired, blessed, tortured mouths of writers and leaders and friends.
They lead the light to my eyes.
They build the frame around the pictures we chisel from this whole massive world.
My daughter has been saying since she was little, “I wish my eyes were cameras.”
I tell her they are our most important ones, a direct line to memory. The whole story is forever in our heads and hearts. The whole story, forever ours to shape and share and shout.
My most cherished moments are spent with my daughter and son, and friends I am blessed to call family. A perfect day would be outside in Heaven, otherwise known as Northern California. No matter what hard things come to rattle our world, I am grateful my soul found its home. I am grateful for books in print and the crazy luck of playing by ear, for the first sip of wine and open windows in any weather, for the gift of freezing time and feeling and holding it in a photograph, for the light of wisdom laced into dire mistakes, for the freedom and guts I’ve found stepping off edges and taking leaps of hope, for all the thread and tape and laughter and release of scary truth, that mends any human fracture. Thank you will be the last words I say if I’ve learned anything.