Emerging
moving mountains — a slow return
Hello.
It feels significant to be writing this to you, to this particular space, after such a long time away. There is something about returning to a page you have created — a third place that holds your voice, your thinking, your inquiry — that asks for intention. For presence. For honesty about where you’ve been and why you’re here now.
I am here because I feel genuinely moved and inspired to contribute again. To share what is alive in my studio, what is moving in the world around me, what the creative work is teaching me about how to live. To be in this correspondence with you in a way that feels real.
But before I can begin that sharing — before I can step into what’s next — I need to name what has been happening in the time I’ve been away. Not as apology, but as context. As the invisible ground beneath everything that follows.
Eighteen months ago, my life changed in a way that I am still finding language for.
I have had the privilege of studying the impacts of environmental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative stress in a way I could never possibly have imagined. Being impacted by one of the largest forest fires in United States history is still something I don’t yet have words to describe.
What I can tell you is this: for four months, the stress was relentless. Day after day, it was searching for a home for my family and our three dogs — a home that was affordable, a home that could exist in a market turned upside down. It was living at the generosity of dear friends for three and a half months. It was relocating to a completely new city, an hour and a half away from everything I had known. It was the marathon you run when you have no choice but to keep running.
But something happened in that running. Something I could not have anticipated.
I withdrew. Not from necessity alone, but by choice — a choice that became increasingly clear as essential to my survival, to my sanity, to something even deeper than that. I needed to insulate myself. To go inward. To get quiet, amidst an unimaginable amount of external chaos.
And in that withdrawal — in that turning inward — something began to restore itself.
Eighteen months later, I am happier than I have ever been in where I am living. Carpinteria has become home in a way I didn’t know was possible. My studio is alive. My body is beginning to remember itself.
But what I want to say most clearly is this: I would not have survived this period without my creative practice.
Not just survived. Made it through alive and well. Resurrected.
My creative work — the act of making, of getting out of my mind and into my body, of working with elemental mediums, of transforming feeling into physical form — became the most direct path I had back to myself. It gave me tools for rearchitecture when everything else had fallen away. It allowed deeply complex emotion to find form outside of myself. It created a language that words alone could never touch.
Art was my way through.
And now, having lived this, I understand more deeply than ever before what it means to have a creative practice that is uniquely, intimately your own. I understand why I do the work I do — why I create spaces for others to discover this same relationship with their own creativity. Why Moving Mountains exists.
Because creativity is not a luxury. It is not a hobby or a personality trait or something you do when you have time.
It is a way of staying alive. Of staying sane. Of transforming what would otherwise destroy us into something we can hold, study, and learn from.
In the coming weeks and months, I will be sharing from this new ground. Field notes from my studio in Carpinteria. Reflections on the creative work that saved me. Case studies from the intimate residency container I call Apertura — a practice born directly from these eighteen months and everything they taught me.
I will be introducing you to a framework I call the Triadic Aperture — Symbol, Pattern, Language — the three elements through which I believe we access our deepest creative intelligence.
And I will be writing about what it means to live as a creator in a world that is itself in crisis. How the act of making — in whatever form that takes for you — is not separate from our survival. It is central to it.
For now, I simply want to say: I’m here. I’m back. And I’m bringing everything I learned in the silence.
Welcome to what comes next.
Thank you for being here with me.
Xo, Jobi
Moving Mountains is a Sēfari publication — for the creator in all of us. To learn more about Apertura and the work beyond these pages, visit iamsefari.com
Excited to learn more, Jobi!
Can't wait!!