I've noticed that my creative life moves through seasons.
There are seasons when I'm drawn outward, wanting to explore people, places, customs, and landscapes. And there are seasons when the movement becomes more internal.
Since arriving in Panama, I've been in a longer season of internal exploration.
I sensed that before I came here. In Mexico, I spent much of my time moving through the world around me, meeting people, exploring places, and learning about customs and traditions. Panama has been different.
There is plenty of history, culture, and Indigenous life here, but I haven't encountered as much of it in the part of the country where I've been living. Because I need reliable internet and electricity for my work, I chose a beach community a couple of hours from Panama City. The tradeoff has been a quieter life with more time to work, think, and reflect.
And perhaps that is exactly what I needed.
The water we don't think about
A couple of weeks ago, a small inconvenience in my building led me into a much bigger line of thinking.
My building has backup power and water in case services go down during a storm. As part of regular maintenance, the water storage tanks on the roof needed to be drained, cleaned, and refilled.
We were told the work would begin around 10 p.m. and that the water should be restored by around 6 the next morning.
It didn't happen that way.
What was expected to take about eight hours took closer to 24. The municipal water supply had extremely low pressure, so it took much longer than expected to refill the tanks.
For me, it was an inconvenience.
I knew the water would eventually return. I had access to bottled water. I wasn't wondering whether I would have enough to drink.
I also knew how privileged I was to experience this as an inconvenience.
But it made me curious.
Where does all of this water actually come from?
The more I learned, the more complicated the answer became.
The Panama Canal and much of the country's drinking-water system depend on the same freshwater watershed. Gatun Lake, created during the construction of the Panama Canal, became the enormous reservoir that made the Canal possible.
But creating that lake transformed the landscape on an enormous scale.
The Chagres River was dammed, and a vast area of land was flooded to create the reservoir. Entire communities and homes disappeared beneath the rising water, and many people were displaced.
That was difficult for me to sit with.
Something I had always thought of simply as a lake was also the result of a massive reshaping of the landscape and the lives of the people who lived there.
I kept coming back to one question:
At what cost?
Not as a criticism of Panama, but as a question about us.
How complicated is our relationship with the resources we depend upon?
What do we see when we look only at what something provides for us?
And what might we miss when we don't look more closely at what had to change to make that abundance possible?
When abundance becomes vulnerable
Panama is known for its rain.
That makes the vulnerability of its water system particularly interesting to me.
During the severe drought associated with El Niño in 2023 and 2024, Gatun Lake fell to unusually low levels, and the Panama Canal had to reduce the number of ships passing through because of the limited water available for the locks.
Now El Niño is developing again.
I've also noticed that the rainy season seems different this year. People I've spoken with here have commented that we're receiving less rain than they would normally expect at this time of year.
I don't know what that will mean.
But I've started thinking differently about the water I normally don't think about at all.
Water simply comes out of the faucet.
Until it doesn't.
Paying attention to what moves
I've also started paying attention to the animals around me.
I've been wanting to take a boat excursion to see the humpback whales that migrate through these waters. August and September are generally peak months for humpback activity along Panama's Pacific coast, and the waters around the Las Perlas Archipelago are an important breeding and calving area.
But this year, the people I've spoken with locally have told me something feels different.
Only a few whales have been spotted so far.
I've also noticed more pelicans around me recently.
I don't know what either observation means.
And I'm trying to resist the temptation to decide that I know.
Perhaps that is something I'm learning through all of this: awareness doesn't always mean knowing what something means. Sometimes it simply means noticing.
The earth beneath us
That has been especially difficult to ignore since the earthquake.
On August 10, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia. We felt the effects here in Panama. My entire building swayed for what felt like an eternity, and I ran down 13 flights of stairs to evacuate while waiting to see whether there would be aftershocks.
It was frightening.
And while I was grateful to be safe, I also felt deeply sad watching the destruction and loss of life unfold in Colombia.
The earthquake reminded me how little control we actually have over the physical world around us.
We build buildings.
We create systems.
We store water.
We make plans.
And then the earth moves.
I had spent the day before recording a video about my watercolor series, Reckonings with Unconsciousness. [Watch the video] I was talking about water shortages, a changing Earth, and the ways we can become disconnected from what is happening around us and within ourselves.
Then the earth moved beneath me.
I don't think it was a message I was supposed to decode.
But I couldn't ignore how much more immediate those questions felt afterward.
A season of noticing
Maybe this is what this season in Panama has really been about.
Not necessarily seeing more, but noticing more deeply.
The water. The rain. The birds. The whales. The history beneath the landscape.
I've been thinking about how easily we move through our lives without seeing the things that sustain us.
For me, becoming conscious isn't about having all the answers. It is about remembering our connection to the Earth and becoming willing to pay attention to what is happening around us and within us.
That is part of what Reckonings with Unconsciousness is about.
The paintings are my way of exploring that connection. The writing is another way I find my way back to it.
Perhaps this season in Panama has given me a deeper reason to look.
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Stay connected
I'm creating a watercolor series alongside these reflections, and subscribers can follow the paintings as they're being created and access my exclusive online gallery before the work is shared publicly.
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Continue exploring
If you enjoyed this reflection, you might also enjoy The Way Trees Hold Themselves, a reflection from my time in Mexico about slowing down enough to notice what the natural world can teach us.
[Read The Way Trees Hold Themselves]