Something Luu Li and and I talked about yesterday landed deeply. She said, “Wow Papa, 54 years! I'm so glad you’re starting to do art again.” And I told her—honestly—it’s never left me. But after that, I found myself thinking: when I was homeschooling Luu Li and CT, I wasn’t just not doing art—I was expressing my creativity through my life with them.
The artistic impulse in me was always alive—it just moved differently then. It inhabited the structure of my days with them, the way we moved through learning and noticing and rhythm. It wasn't that I stopped creating; it was that the act of raising them, being with them, holding them in awareness—that was art. Not metaphorically. Literally.
When I reflect on it now, I realize: I don’t know that any other work I’ve made—no poem, no prose piece—has ever matched the sense of totality I felt in that period. My creative self was fully embedded in relationship. They weren’t my canvas. My daughters—especially when they were small—weren’t “inspiring” my art. They were the form through which my artistic impulse found full, transmodal expression.
That time wasn’t a detour from my artistic path—it was the path. The center. The full alignment of impulse and form.
Now that I’m returning to visible creative work—poetry, prose, and embodied expression through acting and movement—it feels like an echo of that time. Not a replacement. A different modality, perhaps. But the same inner motion. When I say a poem feels alive, it’s the same as how they felt—when I could return to them daily, not for meaning, but for presence.
That was my art. Not an analogy. Not a pretty way to say I loved being a parent. It was the realest art I’ve ever made. And I can say that now—quietly, plainly, without needing to justify or elevate it.
It was always there. I was making art—through relationship, through presence—woven into our shared becoming.
This speaks to me Domon! (James)
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