I carried my sketchbook through the park, stopping to create value studies where I felt the land presented itself. It was freezing (as most of my creative days seem to be) which I didn’t mind. The cold thinned the crowds, leaving me mostly alone with my thoughts and my sketchbook. Geyser after geyser, I stood listening to the music of water vapor meeting the sky, a soundless hymn that feels sacred to witness.

It’s a music exchanged between the deep earth and the open air, happening whether anyone is there or not. Time after time, the land draws on its own boiling pressure and releases it into motion—conducting pain into existence, melodic in its rising. As a witness, you feel the weight of that process. You know the beauty is born from heat, compression, and unrest deep below the surface.

And still, the earth does not flinch. It doesn’t apologize for the distress required to create something so striking. Standing there, watching it rise and fall, you begin to understand the lesson being offered: that pain and beauty are not opposites, and endurance does not require self-pity. The land teaches simply by continuing, by transforming pressure into presence, and simply reminding us beauty does, in fact, come from pain.