000007 — Beyond The Wild Things

Yesterday, I found myself sitting in the middle of an exhibit, pen in hand, absorbing the world of Maurice Sendak. I was there to see the work, but more than that, I was there to feel it. I wrote. I processed. I sat with the emotions that surfaced as I moved through the space. Somewhere between the pages of his early sketches and the finality of Where the Wild Things Are, something opened up inside me.

Maurice Sendak’s early creations reveal exploration, raw curiosity, and the stretch of uncertainty before a body of work takes form. Long before the world decided who he was, he was still searching. Long before Max, his work reflected a search, experimenting, stretching, leaning into uncertainty.

One piece that stood out to me was his relationship with Rosie, a defining moment in his life and work. Through her, he experienced emotions that shaped his most authentic creations. His work is an invitation to feel deeply and imagine without limits.

Creation is not only the finished thing. It is the strange, unfinished process of learning what keeps asking to come out of you.

The world recognizes finished products, the polished outcomes. But what I sat with in that space yesterday was something else: the process, the messiness, the searching. When deeply connected to your most authentic self, you create from abundance. You create because you must. And in that act, you encourage others to find their own untamed spaces.

We are wired to create, shape, build, and express. But in a world of constant consumption, it takes intention to make space for what we were meant to do. Yesterday reminded me of the cost of that conditioning.

As I reflect, I come back to something I wrote in the middle of the exhibit:

“The work is never done. We are never finished. Creation keeps revealing parts of us we could not access by thinking alone.”

This moment, this season, this stretch of my journey; I want to leverage every tool available to unlock the depths of my own self-awareness. To create as I go, to document in real time, and to let the work stay close to the life producing it. If Maurice’s early years were marked by becoming, then perhaps this is my stretch of the same. Not in search of an endpoint, but in search of the most honest, expansive version of my own creativity.

That is the work. That is what I am after.