This is more than just a place to capture my thoughts. It’s a place where I can rummage through the debris to find the treasures that may or may not surface occasionally as I rebuild a life that once had some form and structure.
These are the Lego pieces: a wall here, a roof there, a door, a window, even the pieces of the little Lego person sitting in a driver’s seat or fishing off the side of a ramshackle houseboat. The colors don’t match. The pieces sometimes don’t fit uniformly. And no one at Architectural Digest would sanction or suggest the weird configurations and lopsided rooms. But somehow they make sense to me the same way they did to my childhood imagination.
Following the Lego analogy—I never was big into the ones where you follow the steps and create this mega masterpiece. I mean, they were awesome, right? You ended up with a Millennium Falcon for goodness sake! But man, the moment something went wrong or it broke, all those hours of meticulous dedication to following those rule-laid-out steps for someone else’s creation seemed wasted. It’s not like you could play with the Millennium Falcon. It was something to look at and be pretty. But once it was built, you were done.
On the contrary, I spent hours on the carpet (I wanna say it was green carpet with sort of paisley designs embroidered in it so that there were tracks if you ever wanted to use them for Hot Wheels), building variations of houseboats with crazy designs that seemed like fantasy and reality all rolled into one.
Maybe I need to get a houseboat. Lol.
I don’t know why I made houseboats instead of just houses or cars, but I really liked to make houseboats. There would be a place for the driver, usually on the right-hand side. A window for them to look out. A door in the front with a deck for fishing and jumping off of. A motor in the back that had little fan blades, and it would go up when it was not in use and down when it was zooming through the imaginary waters.
Had I ever seen a houseboat at that age? I honestly can’t remember. But I think it was the epitome of freedom and innovation and unconventionality. Rarely did I have the right pieces to make it all look uniform and pretty and polished.
And I can’t help but go back there and draw striking lines between that and my life as I’ve known it for 50 years. It seems I have always been mixing creativity with the analytical in some form or fashion, coming up with this hybrid-with-a-huge-question-mark-on-it—will it float? Will it sink?
And so Brains & Heart morphed into my adult Legoland, where I explore the creativity, the analytical, the spiritual questioning and the surety of my faith in Jesus, the joy of freedom and the sheer terror of it, the not-quite-fitting-in and the ability to make people feel seen, very real and practical goals alongside disdain for too-rigid structure. The need for anchors and motors and steering wheels right alongside the whimsy.
This will feel chaotic to some people and that’s OK. It may not be your place. But it is my wish and hope that within these pages, within these writings, you’ll see a little bit of yourself and find permission to create your masterpiece… whether anyone else understands or not