I am an art teacher with a master’s degree—trained by brilliant professors who believed that art could do more than decorate walls. I offer safe spaces for teenagers to grow—nourishing soil where their imaginations can take root.
And yet… I am assigned to hallway duty.
This is compulsory education, after all.
So I sit—posted like a sentinel—watching young lives stream past.
“Get to class,” I say with a smile and a nudge.
The system wants attendance; I’m hungry for presence.
Armed not with a whistle or clipboard, but with a pen—
my scribble’s soft insurgency.
The hallway stretches out like a geometric hymn.
Columns and corners chant structure.
Teenagers swirl past—half-formed galaxies of limbs and laughter—
their orbits chaotic, their gravity pulling time forward.
I begin to draw.
Not their tardiness, but their motion.
A shoulder. A blur of sneakers.
A tilted head chasing freedom.
Feet flickering like seconds.
Each mark a pulse.
Each smudge a breath.
My paper becomes a seismograph of seeing—
trembling gently through the mundane.
This isn’t about making art for a frame or a feed.
It’s about refusing to leak away in the fluorescent hum of obligation.
It’s a quiet mutiny against the clock.
I do this on long car rides, too (passenger side, mind you).
Letting the lines grow wild, jagged, and unapologetic.
Not for polish—
but for presence.
This is how I remember I’m still alive.
Still growing.
Still watching.
Still choosing to see.
Because sometimes mental health looks like
a piece of scrap paper,
a moving pen,
and the simple, sacred act of
marking time with wonder.
Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)
“My life has been regulated by insomnia,” Bourgeois told an interviewer in 1993. “It’s something that I have never been able to understand, but I accept it.” Bourgeois learned to use these sleepless hours productively, propped up in bed with her “drawing diary,” listening to music or the hum of traffic on the streets.
“Each day is new, so each drawing—with words written on the back—lets me know how I’m doing,” she said. “I now have 110 drawing-diary pages, but I’ll probably destroy some.
- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands...”
― Louise Bourgeois
“Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.”
― Louise Bourgeois
#dailyrituals #inktober #LouiseBourgeois @masoncurrey
Woody Allen (b. 1935)
I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers.
“I think in the cracks all the time,” he has said. “I never stop.”
- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
“Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply'. But not in those words.”
― Woody Allen
#dailyrituals #inktober #Woody Allen @masoncurrey
Meadhbh in front of wall of plants. 2024, Ballpoint pens on 5” x 8” (10” x 8” Double page spread) acid free Moleskine sketchbook paper, Adobe Photoshop.
