
It happened during a dance class, in one of those rare moments where the music moves faster than your mind, and your body takes over. A phrase floated in, soft but clear:
Here I am, and here I stand.
I thought for a moment about leaving the dance floor to write it down, afraid I would lose it, but it wasn’t the right time.
There was something more important happening. So I let it go. I stayed in the movement, let the music wash over me, let the words disappear. Later, without forcing anything, they came back, fuller, surer, as if they had ripened in the space I gave them:
Here I am, and here I stand.
This is what love built,
and this is where love lands.
It struck me that so much of the life I am building, with the painting, the writing, the days spent tucked away in studios or rushing through airports or sitting at kitchen tables with late-night edits, is not built by strategy alone. It is built by love.
Nothing particularly glamorous. Nothing particularly visible. Mostly small, personal choices. Mostly boring, hard, delayed gratification choices. Mostly quiet mornings and difficult decisions.
Mostly showing up, again and again, for something that feels alive.
The old paths are still there; the ones shaped by fear, urgency, and scarcity. You know, the Gremlins…The ones that whisper that things might slip away, that good fortune might vanish, that love or luck cannot be trusted. Some days, I still absorb someone else’s anxiety. Some days I still doubt or cling.
But the patterns that once felt so emotional are softening.
They aren’t being fought. They are simply becoming irrelevant.
Not because I am stronger, but because something better is being built in their place.
It reminds me of the way Buckminster Fuller described real change.
“You do not fight the existing system. You create something so compelling that the old way becomes obsolete.”
Even a bee knows this. Tiny, almost invisible, humming through a world that does not always welcome it. In a world of pesticides and pollution, still making honey.
Still moving toward life.
That is the work, I think, for all of us who create. Choosing love even when no one is watching. Choosing the slow, often monotonous labour of making beauty and meaning, even when it feels small.
Knowing that small things can become ecosystems. That private choices can build public worlds. That invisible work can become undeniable nourishment.
It is not about what you do. You can be a lawyer, a painter, a gardener, or a parent. One of these, or all of them at once. But it is all creation. A small, private act with a public effect. A quiet cause born of love that ripples out as its own kind of medicine.
That is what Gremlins has always been about: using creativity to build a world from love. Easy love. And hard love. But love, nonetheless.
Here I am, and here I stand.
This is what love built.
This is where love lands.
In the paintings.
In the writing.
In the soft architecture of a life made by hand.
And maybe, just maybe, in the hands of anyone willing to choose love over fear, again and again, until something new is quietly made.
From The Factory >
Film photos from our work-in-progress shoot in Ibiza, captured by Sylvie Gianella for Studio Tia.


Prompts >
JOURNAL:
Ask yourself: What is something small I am building now that could become nourishment for others in the future?
ASK SOMEONE:
When has love landed unexpectedly? Recall a moment when love or inspiration arrived unannounced. How did it change you?
ACTION:
Eat some honey. What is your honey? What sweetness are you quietly building that no one sees yet? Can you enjoy it for a moment?
Musings >
"I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver."
– Maya Angelou"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
– Margaret Mead"Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach."
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
– Albert Einstein