The last two years of my life have been heavily marked by grief. This grief was felt across two different scales: personal and collective. On the personal scale, I  lost my beloved, a death that shook me to the core. Her passing has had such a profound effect that everything seems to revolve around that single event. It clearly has delineated a before and after. This grief cast a blanket over everything, not just coloring the everyday mundane activities, it changed time. The past became a blur, imprecise and further distant. The future is non-existent and the present slowed down until I could hear my own breathe. In doing so, each second became so dense that it suffocated the air, making me focus on the now, the space between breathes.


Inspired by the Japanese tradition of witting jisei (death poems), I looked at how monks had synthesized all of their accumulated wisdom into a single poem. The compact flashpoint of a few lines brought eloquence to the richness of life while diminishing the impending loss they were about to experience. The work I made doesn't provide direct answers, nor are they meant to be deciphered for kernels of knowledge on how to grieve. Perhaps they are better understood as inflection points of insights and emotions that invite contemplation into our own experiences, and as such they bring us together in our collective sense of loss, and therefore embrace our own suffering while reaffirming the life we live.