Goodbye 2024

My 2024 recap is a little late but it always takes me a little longer than some to process things. TLDR: Good things take time ❤️ time to sit, time to settle, time to sprout, time to swell…

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Last year was tough but sweet. So many bright spots, a myriad of challenges, and lots of opportunities to grow.

I regret nothing.

And as I reflect, I’m grateful for the mess, the chaos, the entropy. These are the building blocks of creativity - staring into the abyss, daring yourself to see some potential , and caring enough about your own story to breathe a new thing into existence.

It is the good news of what it is to be human: that we have been burdened with something so beautiful as imagination. That we can make and muse and make some more until dreams can be made manifest.

I used to have a recurring dream around the age of 8, when my family was stationed at Fort Hunter Liggett in California. Something I had fixated on would show up randomly in my dreams and I would grab hold of it, as tightly as my mind would let me, slowly encouraging myself awake. After a few tries, I’d convinced myself that if I stirred from sleep at just the right rate, I could pull that imagined treasure straight through into the material world.

For years, I’ve wondered what it meant —everything has meaning, if you ask me.

The memory popped up again today. And some meaning along with it: dreams take time and intentionality to manifest. They cannot be pulled through from the mind to the matter on a whim.

They take time, Samantha. Patience. Persistence.

They require us always to shift our gaze and our grip - to remain glued to their fruition but flexible in our perception of their form and function. Our dreams are like living, breathing things, begging us to see and sense them in the context of the moment.

I burned the words “MAKE” and “MUSE” and “MANIFEST” into 3 journals I had customized back in January 2021 right in the middle of the pandemic. I’d just completed my 3-year planning for my music (and my utility contracting firm - I don’t idle well 😂) and those words came to me in a moment that felt like a turning point.

I wanted a way to compartmentalize the creative process, no matter what I was working on.

3 years later and not one is even half full.  I spend a lot of time in the making process. Not enough musing intentionally. And I have a sneaking suspicion that, were I more focused on documenting the moment rather than enjoying it, the pages in “MANIFEST” would be fuller.

I didn’t really know what I was after back in 2021 when I bought those journals, but whatever seed I was sowing has begun to spout. Whatever the vision, it’s starting to come into focus.

Making anything—progress, art, good, love, change, meaning—requires reflection. Something over which to muse.

The ability to muse—to reflect and be reflected—requires some externality. A prior manifestation—mine or someone else’s. But there must be something that came before.

And the act of manifestation demands that something be made.

This 3 year chapter is over and another begins. I hope to take with me this understanding that my need to move—inability to idle, if you will—is my heart reminding me that I’m a maker. An artist to the bone.

The meaning may change between now and the not, but this is the meaning at this moment, and the one I nedd to keep up the momentum. To keep moving forward.

Thank you to all the friends and fellow artist musicians who made 2024 a year to remember. And a special shout out to Zack Clark, Jared McFarland, Matt Galik, Chris Turnbaugh, Dan Mehrmann, Brian Lucey. Can’t wait to make, muse and manifest with you all again this year.