BONUS EPISODE: Receive Your Kids - Christina's Convo on Chasing Excellence

This bonus episode is from Christina’s cousin Pat’s podcast, Chasing Excellence. A big thank you to Pat for offering us the audio free of ads. We hope you enjoy!Chasing ExcellenceRaise | Receive Your Kids - Don’t Just Shape Them (w/ Christina Watka)What if raising a child well means releasing your vision of who they’re supposed to become — and learning instead to see who they actually are?Patrick is joined this week by Christina Watka, an installation artist whose entire practice is built around entering a space without a plan, noticing what’s there, and letting the work lead.In this Raise episode, they explore how that same artistic openness transforms the way you parent: the role of noticing, the power of solitude, and what it means to receive your children instead of trying to shape them.Episode TranscriptChristina: Hey, I just walked down to the farm to get some wine, and they had peaches. Now I’m walking up the street with wine in my bag and a peach in my hand. One peach, just for me. So good. But I wanted to tell you just a thought. I, I was telling my cousin Pat that we’re starting this podcast, and it’s based on the voice memos that we sort of would exchange.And he was like, “Oh my God.” He has a very successful podcast right now, and that’s not why I was telling him. He’s just someone I... I was like, he’s a, just a great person to talk shop with, and he was like, “Don’t sleep on the idea of actually doing a podcast with voice memos.” And I think he thought that I meant that the podcast was just a bunch of compiled voice memos.And he was like, “That’s the idea I’ve had. It’s a really good idea. You should totally do it.” And I wonder, it’s kind of an interesting thought, what, what it’d sound like to have, like, one episode just be our voice memos back and forth. You know? Interesting. Um Kind of like nice to have like the ambient sounds I’m hearing right now behind my voice, you know?Like the clanking of my wine bottles, the breeze, the crickets, my peach. Well, I love you. I love you.Becky: Welcome to Noticing, A Podcast About Nothing And Everything At The Same Time. Christina and I are still on break, and while we’re out enjoying all that Maine summer has to offer, we thought we would leave you with a little bonus. So in this episode is a conversation that Christina had with her cousin Patrick on his podcast, Chasing Excellence, as a part of his Raise series. In this conversation, they talk about noticing the life of an artist and what it’s like to receive your kids, not just shape them. So we hope you enjoyPatrick: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Chasing Excellence. I am Patrick. I am here. I’m joined by somebody I’m very excited to talk to because she is my cousin. I’m joined by, uh, Christina Watka. How are you, Christina?Christina: I am great. How are you?Patrick: I’m so good. I’m so excited to talk to you. This is another episode of our Raise series, and our Raise series and whe- is when I have conversations with folks, uh, similar to conversations we often have here on the show, but just bent a little bit towards our roles as parents or teachers or coaches or guides to young people.And so we have similar conversations that we often do. I just like to kind of point us in the direction of that particular role that we have in our lives, and I’m really excited to talk to you about this. I want to start with a little bit of background as to who you are, ‘cause I think it’s gonna provide enough context as to why I wanted to talk to you about this particular thing.So can you please tell us what an installation artist is, so that we can understand it enough so that we can understand a conversation about, that we’re going to have about how to raise our kids as though they were art projects? But first, what is an installation artist?Christina: Great question. An installation artist is a newer art form, and I like to talk about it in the sense that I, as an artist, prefer to walk into spaces and deliver my artwork and change the essence of the room.So I work in my studio, where I’m recording with you now, to make a lot of different small pieces that I weave together in a space so that it would never feel exactly the same in a different space. So it’s a lot of little things coming together to create one larger thing, and it oftentimes can play with your senses.So obviously, artwork is playing with your sense of sight, but installations can include smells, sound, lots of different things. So it’s environmental and spatial like that, and different than sculpture in that it’s not something I could just put in a box and mail somewhere and have it look the way it looked here.Patrick: Got it. So folks will bring you in to either... I know you’ve done work in hotels and in, in personal residences. You’ve also done some outside installations. Can you just give a little bit of the mechanics of, like, how one is and becomes a installation artist?Christina: Well, I have a theater minor. Going back to college days-I was always interested in, in experiencing spaces. I’m also the kid who rearranged her room every month to feel the energy shift. So I think, yeah, I think installation art just brings a completely different perspective. I have installed in, in lots of different places. Nowadays, people are thinking really differently about the architecture of spaces and the way they feel, so having an installation artist could be a really wonderful thing for, say, a curved stairwell where a four-by-six painting wouldn’t really work.I’m also someone who makes work that interacts with light, and so that is the quality of the air and the surrounding environment that I am attuning myself to when I go somewhere to install.Patrick: Mm-hmm. We will continue to talk about what it means to be an artist, I think, as we get through this conversation.That’s why I’m really excited to talk to you, ‘cause I don’t know that a lot of folks know personally somebody who is in any way one might use the definition an artist. I think a lot of people are artistic, but I think you’ve carved out this wonderful existence where you are, you both get to be artistic and an artist in the sense of that’s what you do for a living.That’s what you do when you, when you sit down to work, you are an artist. And so really excited to talk about that perspective because I think it’s, it’s relatively rare and incredibly valuable when it comes to, again, our role as parents or again, coaches, teachers, et cetera. So here’s what I’d love to do I wrote a note to myself.This was probably a few years ago now, and I remember writing it after getting to spend a little bit of time with you and your kids. And just for context, your kid, you’ve got an older son and two twin daughters, and they are almost exactly, almost exactly the age of my two kids. Like, they... It was rather funny.And so you and I, when we get to spend time together, I get to see how you and your husband Andrew parent, and it is always really inspiring to me to get to hang out with you and to get to see not only how you work, but also how you bring that artist mentality to mothering and to parenting. And so again, I wrote this to myself.This was just a note that I wrote to myself, and when I started this Raise series, I remembered the note, and I knew that I wanted to talk to you about it. And so this is kind of gonna be the basis of our conversation, uh, from here. So this is what I wrote to myself. “Raising a child is like raising an art project.You have a sense of things at the start, some ideas, some experience, some expectations. A bad artist would then spend years trying to keep the art project as closely aligned with that initial vision as possible, fighting tooth and nail to rein it in to make it what it’s supposed to be. But an evolved artist knows that the art project leads and the artist follows.Experience, intuition, intention, effort all still matter, but they are put where they belong, with the flow of the child, not with the flow of the parent. I don’t have two children. I have two art projects.” And so I would love for you maybe just to respond to that generally, and we’ll take that response, and then we’ll kinda have some fun with it.Christina: I love hearing the context of that quote. You sent it to me earlier, but I didn’t realize that it came after a visit. The first thing that I’m thinking actually is I come from two wonderful parents who thought of themselves as guides for my two siblings and I. So I think I lucked out in the parent department where I was encouraged to express myself in ways that felt true.They are not artists. One, my dad was in the military. He was a Marine, and my mom was a s- was a nurse. So, and they were just both aware that everyone is different and your children are not necessarily something that needs to be defined by you. Even to this day, they talk about how they did their best to guide us and really lucked out with what happened because we’re all living lives that we feel proud of, that we feel are in alignment with our values and our authenticity.But I say that first because I believe, I think I pushed it even further. I had my own kids and I met them I’m someone who didn’t even find out who they were until they were born, including twins, which everyone got so mad at me for not being able to tell them names I had, how their rooms were designed already, what I thought they were.I intuited some things about them, but I didn’t want to have any preconceived notions of my children until I met them. The same way I don’t want to have preconceived notions about people before I meet them. I love leading a life through curiosity so that I can have a clean slate as often as possible.And to me, that’s very much what an artist can be, should be maybe I would even say, is someone who’s just looking with an open heart and is willing to see what’s in front of them and meet that person. The whole parenting thing, a lot of times, generations before us, generations that preceded us, I often look at them and think that they were trying to put their kids in boxes that they believed they fit in.And as soon as I became a parent, it was so clear that that was not my job. You know, my job, I think I, at the end of the day, I believe I will have done a good job if I have been able to meet my children where they are honestly throughout their lives, which is a practice.Patrick: It strikes me as there’s some interesting parallels, ‘cause I know enough about how you work t- to have a sense of things.But it strikes me that there’s an interesting parallel between your work as an installation artist, and you, you alluded to this already in what you just said about, like, I wasn’t going to meet my kids until they arrived. And it’s, it’s that we can say, “Okay, Christina, can you please come install in my, you know, the new house that I’m doing?”And without knowing more, you’d think, “Yeah, okay, Christina can go. She’ll just show up and she’ll do her thing.” But actually, what you do is you have to go into the space and you have to say, “Okay, I’m bringing my art to this space. That’s why you’ve brought me in here. But until I’m in the space, until I see what the light does, until I understand where maybe the movement of air goes, I can’t tell you like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna go over there, it’s gonna go here, it’s gonna be seven feet big or seven feet wide,’ or whatever it is.”And so there’s that, that lack of judgment until the moment where you have enough understanding where you can then respond to the environment or to the individual, right? So it’s n- it’s, it’s holding back the sense of I know what to do here until you actually know what to do there.Christina: Mm-hmm. It’s also releasing the expectation that there’s only one way.Patrick: Hmm. Hmm, I love that. Yep. Mm-hmm.Christina: That is something I think about all the time. What I do is I believe in my tools I believe in myself. I come centered in a place in myself where I believe I can walk into a space and respond to it, and I trust the process enough. I bring more than I need so that I’m never making a decision for the work that comes from a place of lack, and I respond to where I am.And it’s very much like parenting. It’s very much like raising a kid. So I used to... When I was in art school, I am the oldest daughter of three daughters, and I am an artist, but I’m also very type A. So my journey, and I include parent, parenting in that, has been that I would find the correct way to do something, and I would have lists that I would cross off, and I would be able to do it all just as I planned.And that helped me a lot in life until it didn’t. And parenting is such a beautiful way to realize how little control you actually have in your life. But there was one particular instance in art school, in sculpture. I was in a sculpture class, and the teacher was really... She was really hard. I butt up against her so often, and I’m so grateful for it, and we’re still in touch.We were actually texting two days ago. And I had a thesis. It was my biggest project, the last project of my program, and I was really proud of it. And basically, without having to explain all of it, I had these shirts that I had sort of glued as, like, a wallpaper, a three-dimensional wallpaper. And I did it.I executed it to exactly what I thought it was gonna be. It looked just like I expected it to be, and I was like, “I am done.” Like, pat myself on the back. “Good job, Christina.” And we had a crit. That’s what you do in art school. You, you talk about what’s in front of you with other people. They give their ideas.You can take them or leave them, whatever. And She picked a particular spot and was like, “Why? This doesn’t feel like it’s free enough, Christina. You just have to...” And as she was talking, she walked up to the wall and pulled some of these shirts off and changed their shape. And some art teachers might think that’s a boo-boo.Like, usually you kinda ask before you actually touch or change something that someone’s made. But she pulled it off, and I was like, “Oh! Oh, don’t... Oh.” And I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh my God, that’s 10,000 times better than my plan.” And that was a singular pivot in my life, where I realized I was actually doing a disservice to the work by being so rigid in my thinking.And I think about that all the time in art, for art’s sake, and also for life’s sake. There’s always another way to get to a result that you want, and it’s really essential that you listen to the work instead of telling it what to do. Listen to the kid instead of telling it what to do. It’s the same.Patrick: Yeah.One of the questions I really like to unpack in these, in this Re series is What should we be modeling ourselves for our kids with the, uh, the understanding that what we model is by far the most impactful thing that we do as parents, right? Albert Einstein once said, “Example isn’t another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.”And so with that in mind, and with everything kind of the context of you as an artist, like what is it that as an artist you think you are modeling to your kids, both again, uh, in the work itself, but then in, in life more generally, right? You talked about the, the practice of meeting people where they are.We’ve talked a little bit about responding to the space and not, not before you understand what the space is. Like, what is it as an artist that you think is, for those of us who aren’t artists or for folks who aren’t artists, like what is it that we can learn from an artist that we can then do our best to try to model ourselves?Christina: I’m glad that you gave me this question before we had this conversation because I had a minute to think about, think about it, ‘cause this is a big question, and modeling is... It really is how, how kids learn, how we all learn. The thing that I really came to was practicing presence and listening to the world.Mary Oliver talks about listening to the world. I don’t know if any of your listeners are real poetry fans, but Mary Oliver, she talks about listening to the world, and I think about that all the time, and how artists are listening to the world. And what they’re doing, I believe, what we are doing, is listening to the world, listening to ourselves, and filtering the world through ourselves and expressing it with the gifts that we were given for creative expression.So when I think about what I’m modeling for my kids, I am modeling a way to be present, a way to be open-hearted and awake to what is in front of me through a lens of curiosity And I think that’s something that I see them doing all the time. I mean, we live in, in Maine in an old farmhouse in Cape Elizabeth, which is this beautiful coastal town, and our property is surrounded by nature.And we chose it that way because nature informs my work. It’s a place that I think everyone can find a beautiful mirror to cycles of life, to ways that they function in themselves as well in nature. And there are things that we listen to together here. Just this morning, my daughter and I, when she woke up, she knows she finds me outside on the front porch, and I’m usually looking at the sky or the, counting the flowers that have popped up in front.And I think it’s just all a way of, of being where you are and knowing that you are allowed to listen to the world at a pace that is slow.Patrick: Listening to the world, that seems in direct opposition to some of the things we’ve ta- already talked about, which is rigid thinking and expectations and judgment, right?Like, that’s really hard. It’s really hard to listen to the world. It’s really hard, and I love the example you just gave. It’s really har- um, I, at least for me, it’s really hard for me to sit on the front porch and look at the sky. So how... Like, is it that you are an artist because you’re naturally inclined to an ability, an interest to look at the sky?Or is it that you became an artist, and you realized the value and the beauty that comes when you slow down and when you look at the sky?Christina: I think it may be is a little bit of both. I think I have a natural tendency to that. I was also raised with the permission to be outside with nothing else to do. The town that we live in, I’m learning, is a really athletic-focused town.I was the captain of my high school volley- volleyball team. So, like, I am a multifaceted human being. I don’t just pin myself as an artist only. So there’s value in that. There’s value to being a part of a team. And I think especially for the ages that my kids are, they’re your kids’ ages, 6, 6, and 9, for me, I believe it’s important for them to have slow time.I believe a lot of people that are our age now are remembering how to listen to the world and be able to sit and slowly watch ants crawl across the sidewalk from one side to the other. I mean, I- would that be excruciating for you? Probably, right?Patrick: I don’t know. W- uh, I don’t know It’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s the right question, is like, is that really...Like, how hard would that be? And using that answer as an indication to how much you are listening to the world versus how much noise is distracting you I think that’s interesting.Christina: Another example that just came to my mind, another way you can listen to the world, I mean, you can listen to the world by watching ants move across the ground.You can listen to the world at a soccer game. You can listen to the world with your eyes open. My son, Jack, who is nine and is... He has one speed, and that is fast. That is all in.Patrick: Yep.Christina: He meets life where it is, and the other day we were just going shopping for new summer clothes, and he’s someone who I have intentionally brought him into this practice of listening to the world with me.And we walked by, we were leaving Target, and there was a Target employee who was probably, I don’t know, like a young man, maybe 19 years old, and he was forlorn. We left to go to a deep part of the parking lot and, and I noticed him, and I sent him a little wish for gladness or whatever would help him. And Jack noticed him.And when we got to the car, and this is in the cacophony of a family of five just- ... leaving Target. The girls are like, “Oh my God, my pink ba-da-da-da.” And then Jack said, “Did you notice that man? He seemed very sad.” And there was no effort to solve this man’s problems. It was just Jack noticing somebody, saying what he saw, and then we all thought, “Yeah, I wonder what that could have been about.I hope he has a better day.” So to me, that’s just a way that he is directly relating to the world in front of him with open eyes, and I was so pleased that that happened because I didn’t say, “Hey, did you see that guy?” He saw it. He listened to the world in a way there, too.Patrick: Yep. Do you remember when you started...I mean, you already mentioned it. You went to art school. This has been part of who you are for as long as I’ve known you, and I’ve known you, I think, your entire life. So like-Christina: You have.Patrick: Was there a moment when you were like, “Oh, listening to the world,” like what- however you would have phrased that back then before Mary Oliver gave you the phrase, was that something that you’ve practiced consciously, or is it something that you’ve noticed yourself doing and thought, “This is the path”?Like how much work, I guess, is the question. Like how much work did it take you, or has it taken you, or does it take you to continue to listen to the world without judgment, with curiosity? Again, because the alternative to that is so easy to do, which is to hope that the world listens to you and to put no effort in, in being reciprocal in that practice.Christina: It was cultivated in me. I think it’s a natural tendency. So- The thing that I want to say first is that it took me until my late 30s to realize what a natural tendency this was because the more that I shared my way of being authentically with others through art and other ways, it was mirrored back to me.Life mirrored back to me the fact that I was not like everybody else, that there were more people that might not be listening so deeply, which to me honestly was the greatest permission slip ever to just share my experience more widely. This tendency was cultivated in me as a child by my dad Who I remember, not only did I have ample time outside without distraction, but he would do what I do with my kids now and say, “There’s a summer thunderstorm.We all gotta get out to the porch.” And it was, like, the most important thing we could do together, and we would sit there and count the space between lightning and thunder. We lived all over the United States because he was a Marine for about half of my childhood, so we’d move every one to three years, which meant that oftentimes we were planting ourselves in new landscapes and new environments that were ripe for learning about.And so instead of putting us in all of these activities, we would root in the place together and spend a lot of time being curious about it. And it was so profound to me, and it’s given my life such meaning that I, I do the same thing every day with my own kids.Patrick: Hmm. I don’t think we’ve used this word, but we’re certainly talking around it.Noticing. You actually have a podcast that I love called Noticing, uh, so folks should check that out. Can you talk a little bit about what noticing means, and both how it... What it means to you as a human, but also what it means to you as a mother? What does that look like?Christina: Noticing, to me, is a practice. It’s similar to listening to the world.It’s meeting your life as it is, meeting others as they are, without judgment, without this is good or this is bad, this is right or wrong. It’s simply this is. So when you are in a state of noticing, you are simply seeing things as they are. You might even notice... I notice that I get angry a lot when my twins have back-to-back tantrums for 18 straight months.Maybe that was something that I noticed in my life. It is important... For me, it’s been a beautiful practice of just, of just being with it. Noticing is like being with something. I think as far as, as far as, like, parenting goes, it, it kind of comes back to what we started talking about at the very beginning.I notice who my kids are. I notice how they’re changing. I notice patterns that they might have, and I help them notice their own lives and themselves in the context of their lives as well.Patrick: Noticing Feels like one of those things, especially when you’ve got young kids, that you feel like you don’t have time for.And so I’m really curious how this practice looked, and of course still looks, ‘cause your kids aren’t exactly out of the house. But, like, with the craziness of having twin infants, with the craziness of Jack’s now nine, so he’s of course running all over the place. With the ca- the chaos of everyday life, with the chaos of Andrew working.You know, he’s a EMT and firefighter, so he’s gone out of the house for, you tell me, 24 hours at a time every couple days, right? Like, how... Because to me, that’s the battle. It’s like, yes, in theory I would love to sit and notice, but God, I got so much to do and there’s so much noise, so I can’t. So how have you, like, how do you s- make sure you are continuing to notice in the midst of what can feel like a tornado?Christina: This is a beautiful question, and thank you for fleshing this out, because it is true. Life is cacophonous. My life is cacophonous. It’s all spinning all the time. Noticing is quiet. It is like anything. It’s like a muscle that you can practice working out. Maybe for someone who doesn’t feel like this is a possibility for them, I would encourage to spend, even if you set a, set a timer for five minutes.Five minutes is something that most people can commit to, and you simply exist where you are. It can happen anywhere. Like, I’m sitting right here right now. I could notice the way that my body feels. I could notice different things, different sensations. I could notice where my breath is filling my belly, or is it filling my chest?I notice my dog waking up. There’s so much around us that’s happening all the time, and we right now are in, right now, right here, we are in a society that sort of discourages this type of presence because it’s something that only you can receive, right? To me, noticing often begets peacefulness And like, I can’t...No one can take that from me.Patrick: Mm-hmm.Christina: But it’s not productive, which is difficult in our society to claim something that does not produce anything. Although I could argue that my life spent noticing has produced quite a lot in the form of something tactile and material. I started the process of noticing even though I grew up with it and with parents, mostly my dad, he was the more enthusiastic of this particular thing, this particular practice.Even though I grew up with it, I started really noticing when I had a newborn baby the first time. All of a sudden my Life changed, and I would take Jack at the witching hour, you know, which also corresponded with golden hour at the time that he was a newborn baby. I would strap him on, and we would walk, and I had a dog at the time too, and we would take the dog and just go for a walk on these trails.And I would notice everything because I wouldn’t... I might sing to him or something, but I didn’t have anyone else to talk to. I would just be where I was, and I would notice him settling on my body. I would notice the light dappling and through the trees on the ground. I would notice the birds. I would notice everything around me, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this has been here this whole time.”And I think a lot of us get to this place at some point. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis that people often find this in, where the tornado of life has brought them to a point, and their nervous systems are a little frenetic, and they feel so fast. The practice of noticing is, it really is, it’s just this quiet invitation that you can take at any moment that you want to.Patrick: And do you feel like that practice is an effort to push away the ego, the push away what can sometimes feel like a sort of automatic selfishness that we have, and instead replace that with even just a neutral perspective? Again, you’ve already said this, but, like, I, I... It’s neither good nor bad, it just is.And I think that when we’re noticing, when we can slow down, what we’re not doing is thinking about ourselves, and I think when we’re not noticing, when we’re doing a, a poor job of slowing down, when we’re doing a poor job of creating the space for us to just notice, what often we replace that with or what we fill that in with is ego, is thinking about ourselves more than we’re thinking about what we are in the midst of or who we are surrounded by.So do you feel like, like, that’s part of the value of this is that it, it turns down the voice of your ego, what I need, what I want, what I think is good, what they’re doing that’s affecting me, and it just turns up the... or really it just turns that down, and what we have in place of that is some degree of silence?That we all ultimately need more ofChristina: Mm. I mean, the first thing you said is, like, I think you used the word effort, and I wanted to jump in and be like, “Noticing takes no effort, Matt.”Like, the two words that pop out at me are, like, effort and value, and that to me speaks to the systems that we’re in, actually, and what noticing is sort of the antidote to. When I am in a... the deepest place of noticing, I realize that I am actually just a part of everything. And so you’re think- You’re talking about the ego leaving, and yeah, maybe it’s in service of that.Maybe it’s in service of actually realizing that, that there’s no separation between me and you. There’s no separation between my experience and the s- the experience of, of the tree outside of, of my studio that I can see right now. It sort of levels everything to this very still and kind of acceptable place where you’re just...Everything’s right in front of you, and, and you can... It’s like taking this pause to notice what’s over, what’s around you, and then make a choice, right? Instead of... I think when we’re not in a place of noticing, we are just spinning forward without actually stopping to choose something. It also makes me think about how the practice of noticing can sort of take the peaks and valleys of life and maybe bring them a little bit closer together so that they’re not quite so high and low.For example, both of my grandmothers passed away over the last six months, right? Them that we share. And through this practice of noticing that realistically I’ve been doing for the last nine years but really deeply since we’ve moved here and I’ve been a parent, it feels less massive, I guess, in that I notice someone passing, and I noticed all of the beautiful little things that happened up until that point, and I notice the aftermath, and I notice the way that flowers have seasons of aliveness and endings that then transform into something new.Patrick: Yeah, because noticing is also, sounds sort of obvious, but noticing is also seeing the truth. It’s not hiding from what is in fact right in front of us. It’s not distracting ourselves with something that’s maybe, I don’t know, more comfortable, a little easier to understand, a little easier to comprehend, a little easier to take in.And it’s in fact saying, “Oh, this is what it is.” It’s hard. Sometimes it can be joyful. But again, it’s like, it’s... If I don’t bring judgment to it, whatever it is, if I don’t bring judgment to our grandmother passing, then I can see little moments of joy inside of what is real- a really hard experience. I can also see real true and honest sadness in a way that I wouldn’t if I didn’t let myself get close enough to see the truth of the thing, right?And so I think there’s something really kinda profound about this idea of noticing, ‘cause I think noticing can feel almost, like, removed. Like I’m gonna remove myself from this, and I’m just gonna notice what’s happening as if it were happening over there. But I think one of the things I’m thinking about as, as you talk, and of course we know each other, like I think one of the things that noticing has done for you is that it’s put you in the middle of everything So that you could see it, so that you could feel it, so that you could hear it.And then when y- because you’ve been able to put yourself in the middle of life, you can then, as you talked about before about, like, what an artist is, you can then filter all of that through your perspective and then turn it into something new, which is, in and of itself, what an artist does. Does that make sense?Christina: Beautiful.Patrick: I think that that’s as... You know, thinking about our roles as parents, it’s like noticing as a parent is not changing the child. It’s not changing who we see, but it’s seeing it with enough honesty that we can experience the person. And then to your point, what you- you’ve already said kind of as what your parents did for you, which is like, and then we can guide them as they see, as they emerge into themselves versus I’m gonna point you over there because I think I know what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong when, in fact, we have no idea what right and wrong is.We have no idea what good and bad is. We can have some general understanding or general sense of these things, but as, as that child, as that person, specifically to that person, we don’t know what right and wrong is. And again, if you don’t ever practice the non-judgment, if you don’t ever practice the sitting there and experiencing it all around you, of course, when the kid is struggling or the kid is making a decision or the kid is just becoming who they’re gonna become, you don’t have the skills to be the guide.All you can do is push in the direction you think it, that person should go. You think you already know what the art project is when the art project hasn’t yet emergedChristina: Yeah, exactly. Or the art project is taking an unexpected turn, and you have to see it where it is and realize, “Oh, I need to actually change the way that I’m thinking about this.I can mold this thing to its ultimate form, and we’ll all be better for it.”Patrick: Yeah. Again, ‘cause you said Jack’s nine, the twins are six. How do you talk about what you do to them? Or do you talk to them about what you do at all, and you just let them experience it s- to the degree that they experience it?Christina: Yeah. I mean, we’re both pretty open about what we do. It’s... Lately, I’ve been thinking about being an artist as, as, like, a way of being more than, um, an occupation because so much of my life folds into the experience of creating things with my self, and maybe not myself, but that’s also another conversation.But... And Andrew is a firefighter. He’s a first responder. But he’s also a jazz musician, so we have... Yeah, we have a really creative home, and the wallpaper of our kids’ lives include a lot of unfinished projects that they’re witnessing in many iterations. We welcome them into our processes but also keep them...Like, they also know that our studios are kind of sacred spaces that they can’t just come in and mess around with. We have to kind of be here with them. That was an important boundary we put up because I want my kids to realize, both of us do, we both want them to realize that there’s creative energy and potential kind of all around us at all times, and don’t touch that.You know what I mean?Patrick: Yep.Christina: Like, don’t bring your friends in here and think you can do this. Make sure that I’m with you.Patrick: Yep.Christina: So they’re not, like, totally free range. They have their own studio space in the house that they share, but I think a lot of it is definitely modeling. One thing that I would love to mention too that we do consciously is take time away from family life to nurture our creative centers.Andrew and I do this on purpose. For me, lately, that looks like going away, like, mm, quarterly probably if, if I’m lucky, maybe three or four times a year, where I go into a cabin in the woods, and I take maybe three or four days and nights away. And at first, it was really difficult to explain to them that that’s what I was doing, and that it had nothing to do with them, and it was only me spending time In my own solitude because that matters to me as a parent, me as a partner, me as a friend, me as a creative person.And once I started doing it, Andrew was like, “That sounds amazing.” I was like, “You should do it, too.” So we do that. We do that for each other, and we talk openly about that as an example of how to have a really strong family foundation, ‘cause that is a, a deep, deep focus for us, and still nurture yourself outside of that because I am not only a parent.Patrick: Yeah, I would love to talk to you about solitude a little bit more ‘cause I do think that that’s a really useful layer to this idea of noticing, which is that noticing feels hard, but actually, I think it might be the solitude that feels hard. It’s the solitude that we respond to when we grab our phones in a moment, uh, where we have a minute of peace or a minute of quiet.It’s, it’s why we fill our calendars with things that we don’t really care about, but man, it feels better than sitting at home because, but we’re not being productive at home, so maybe we should go be productive. Maybe we should, we shouldn’t go stare at the sky because there’s laundry to be folded, and there’s, I’m sure, a room that needs to be, to be picked up or groceries that need to be grabbed, right?So solitude feels like this luxury that in some ways we don’t feel like we’ve earned yet, and that when I get all this other stuff done, maybe then I’ll earn some solitude. But what you’re saying is n- no, no, solitude doesn’t come unless you go seek it out. So can you talk a little bit about more, more about that pursuit of solitude as it relates to noticing and as it relates to your ability to show up to your kids, to your husband, to your life as fully as possible?Christina: Like I said, eldest daughter of three, type A, go-getter, and all of a sudden I, I dropped two babies out of my body at the same time in the middle of COVID, at the beginning of COVID. COVID, like March 14th. It was right then. And I was served the thing that would help me meet my limit of things that I could hold.And so it wasn’t like a big crisis or anything. I just noticed myself feeling more frenetic more of the time because all of those things that you just listed pile up And I could handle them until all of a sudden it was just way too much. So I don’t know why I knew to do this. I don’t know how I knew how to do this because I didn’t have, I didn’t have a mother that did this.There was no example of this, but maybe it was just a very strong intuition or something. But I just knew that I had to focus on my solitude. And with newborn babies and a three-year-old in a pandemic, that looked like giving crying people to my partner and going to the beach for an hour to just be completely empty, completely empty myself out so that then I could, at, at the same time, refill myself in that hour.And, and it’s gotten longer and longer. I’ve been able to offer myself more and more. To me, I think about my life as a... If I’m thinking about it in, in, like, the shape of a pyramid, the foundation is actually me. The foundation is not my marriage. The foundation is not my kids. The foundation is my groundedness, where all of those other things play into it, of course, but if I’m not stable, if I’m not coming at the rest of my life from a full cup, everything falters.And so I had to get over the societal, like, whispers of like, “Ooh, that’s so selfish. Ooh, aren’t you a mother? You should probably be doing this.” I had to get over those and realize that actually the most important thing that I can do for everyone in my life, including me, is to make sure that this bottom tier is solid.And for me, that looks like lots of different types of quiet, and solitude is one of them. And that has been so essential for me over the last nine years of being a parent to actually admit to myself that what I need looks different than what was modeled to me from a parenting perspective. And I think as an artist, someone who deeply desires to create things and filter this listening to the world through me, I just have to accept the things that make me feel better are essential.Even this studio, I mean, I’m sitting in this studio, and we built this. You and I were even building our own studios at the same time, Pat. We have so many alignments. But receiving this, and I say it with that word because I had to reframe this experience instead of thinking like, “Oh, have I earned that? Do I need to...Like, should I really take that?” A wise friend of mine said, “Why are you talking about it that way? Why don’t you just talk about it as if you’re receiving it?” And that one-word shift is incredible, and I repeat it often. Like, if you could talk to people and think, what if you could receive your life? How would that look different Than if you were earning it.Like, what are you worthy of receiving? Because I believe we’re all worthy for, to receive the life that we are meant to have so that we can share our gifts as safely and openly and as abundantly as possible.Patrick: I even think there’s something beautiful about the idea of can you receive your children instead of can you, whatever, parent them, usher them, even guide them.Can you just receive them? I think of- Teach them.Christina: Yeah.Patrick: Yeah.Christina: Can you receive? ‘Patrick: Cause they’re there. They’re in there. They’re fully... They’re becoming, but they’re in there somewhere, and I think the more we can receive who they are, the better we can guide them, the better we can teach them, the better we can be the kind of parent that they need so that when they grow up, they don’t need to figure out who they are.They don’t need to unpack things that were packed for them that they never needed to carry because they, they were never burdened with all of that extra luggage because their... We as parents didn’t say, “Well, you might need this in your bag, so grab that. You might need that, so you might, you might really want this red shirt,” right?And then at one point they’re gonna wake up and they’re, “I got all this stuff.” And either I can keep trying to drag them along, which I think is what most, most people do, or they can say, “All right. I’ve gotta unpack all this stuff.” And so I think that’s what I’ve been thinking a lot about, and it’s why this series is what it is.It’s like how do I pack only the essential things for my kids so that when they are ready to do their own packing, when they are ready to go out into the world, they have what they need, but they don’t have so much stuff that they then need to get everything out of the bag and figure out, like, what is good, what is real, what is signal, who am I, and then start to put the pieces back together.I think that that’s... Just the idea of, like, receiving your children I think is a way to get to that, again, to that, to helping that person become... Or pu- putting them in that position versus the inverse, which is like, “I got too much stuff and I don’t know how to keep on moving.”Christina: Yes. The word receiving is so much more of a passive experience.I’m thinking when you said receiving your children, I’m thinking even of the image of, like, when you receive something, you extend a hand that is open and something goes in it. I receive this. It’s placed in my hand. If you’re trying to pull something along, it’s closed, and the act of opening a hand and having something that you receive in that hand, I mean, just, just imagine how much more opportunity it has to become whatever it’s meant to become.Like, it can take form in an open hand versus a closed, let’s go, pulling hand. Receiving children is such a beautiful thought. I’ve never thought of it like that. I’ve experienced it that way, but I’ve never spoken it like that. It’s a gift. Your kids are... I believe kids choose their parents in like a cosmic way.But if you think about that, like I’m receiving my life, which includes receiving these children and the opportunity to learn from them while they hold a mirror to me so that I can notice the things that I want to change, move forward with, all of this, it’s so beautiful. I love being a parent. I love being an artist.It’s the most... Parenting to me feels like the most creative thing in the world.Patrick: Yep. I completely agree. Last question. I would love to just stick on the solitude one- for just one more minute, ‘cause I would love your advice, because I th- this is, you know, I think you’ve used the word practice a, a bunch in this conversation, which is the right word, and I think it’s worth recognizing, like, what that word means.And so I would love your advice on, in these moments of solitude, which I think solitude is the precursor to really noticing, and noticing is the precursor to receiving, roughly speaking. And again, like w- like I said before, like, the solitude I think can feel really hard, because when it’s quiet, when we’re not in the midst of doing something else, when we don’t distract ourselves with our phones or, or something else, the voices sort of bubble up.And so can you... Any advice you might have for us as to what you do in those moments of solitude, whether it’s the full weekend away, whether it’s an hour at the beach, and everything in between. How do you make su- Like, what are you doing in between your ears to make sure you return to life, whether it’s work or kids or, or Andrew, and you’ve actually, you have in fact filled yourself up and not just made yourself more anxious because you spent the last hour thinking about, “I gotta do the laundry, I gotta go grocery shopping, I’ve gotta respond to this email, and blah, blah, blah.”Right? ‘Cause I could also see that being the result of, “I’m gonna go take an hour walk and I’m gonna try to stare at the sky,” and you come back from that hour and you think, “Not only am I now an hour behind, but I’ve remembered the 17 things that haven’t been done yet.” So just, like, any advice you have to make that solitude generative, I think would be a great place to wrap up.Christina: Yeah. I think of it in terms of, like, if it’s hard for you to actually empty your mind, which I understand that that’s hard for most people, you can think of it in, in sensory ways. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? And then that, that puts you in your body in the moment. And then also recognize that part of it is that your mind is gonna keep spinning until you practice enough of just noticing your thoughts versus judging your thoughts.Like, a friend of mine taught me, like, “Hi, thought.” You can just notice them, and oftentimes they’ll get They’ll get quiet once they’re noticed. It’s like a kid. “Mom, Mom, Mom.” “Hi.” “Okay. We’re good.”Patrick: Just wanted the acknowledgement.Christina: Yes, you just wanna be acknowledged. The thoughts just wanna be acknowledged, right?So, like, I think just acknowledging them, noticing them, and, like, realizing that you’re gonna have to continue practicing letting them fall away. Also, allowing yourself the permission to follow the whims of whatever might occur to you. So I can think of an example of a time where I was at an artist residency in California, and I had one destination that I would go to every day.This was a luxury of time, five days that I was there. So I had one thing to do every day, and the rest of it, I would just follow my curiosity. Like, there’s a farm stand over there, and it says this. Maybe I’ll go see what that’s about. And just remember that ultimately you’re promising to yourself that, that, like, the other stuff can wait.Grandma always said, it’s a great place to end, but the cobwebs can wait. They can. They will. They’ll be there. The list will always be there.Patrick: Spot on. If folks were curious about actually seeing the work you do, christinawalko.com, is that the best place to point them?Christina: Perfect. Yep. Uh, Instagram, I, I still spend some time on there, and then we have The Noticing podcast now, too, yeah.Patrick: Yeah, I definitely recommend The Noticing. If you like this conversation, definitely check out The Noticing podcast. I adore you. Thank you so much. I’m sad that we did this remotely because, as you mentioned, we, we aren’t actually that far from each other, but the chaos of life kept us apart. But, uh, I do, I look forward to seeing you soon.Christina: Thanks, Pat. Love you, too.Patrick: Thank youChristina: The music was recorded live as a part of the sound service at 3S Art Space in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in January 2025, where musicians responded to the changing light in the room that reflected and refracted through Christina’s suspended artwork. Andrew Halchak, the composer of this piece, is playing bass clarinet, and Tomas Cruz and Katie Siler are singingBecky: Hello, my dear friend. I just finished the episode, with Pat, and it was so good. I really, really loved it. So clear And yeah, we should definitely share it. Absolutely. It’s so in alignment, as I knew it would be. Um, I really loved hi- what... I mean, I loved all of it, but I, at the end, I don’t even have kids, but the way he was talking about packing your kid’s, uh, backpacklike, packing it with just the essentials was so powerful because I think about, like, all the things or, or I think about all the adults that I know that have so much work to do to, to sift through their own backpacks, you know? Of like, what were they given, because so many of us were given so much, uh, from our parents that don’t belong in our packs, you know?I just thought it was such a good metaphor. Um, I also love... I l- I just love life. I, I’m so grateful to be at this point in my life and, and for everything along the way. I’m so grateful for all of it. Um, anyway, this is long enough already. I love you. I love you so much This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noticingpod.substack.com