Life as art

Revelutionaries...

First, an announcement:

We'll be showing Jebus and rocking out at Gulfport Brewery this Saturday, July 19th at 8:30pm.

I'll join ProjectFree & Solar Flair for a special performance of Love is My Religion, then we'll all laugh through Jebus together, then we'll keep the party rockin'. Simple. Easy. Fun. Like life should be.

If you're in the St. Pete area, come through!

Huge thanks to the always active Gulfport community for making this happen. The awesome folks at WonderWorks put this together and Sheepish Productions for providing the projector & screen.

Second, a thought:

I’ve been thinking about how everything in life—if you look at it the right way—can be art.

Not just the stuff you make, like music or film or writing. But how you show up. How you treat people. How you move through pain. How you choose to respond instead of react.

You get this one lifetime. One little moment. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it means everything. But either way, you can make it beautiful. You can make it poetic.

That doesn’t mean perfect. It means real. Honest. Alive.

Even business can be art. Pay people right. Share the upside. Take care of your crew. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Even friendship can be art. Show up for people when they’re hurting. Bleed a little with them when they need it. Not because you have to, but because you choose to.

That’s the core of it—choice.

I’m not out here trying to look like a good person. I’m just choosing to do things that feel true. Sometimes I miss the mark. Sometimes I self-sabotage. But I keep choosing.

It reminds me when I watched Baby Reindeer. It made me angry. The dude kept making the same mistake, over and over. It felt like watching someone burn down their own life. But the more I sat with it, the more I saw myself in it. The ways I’ve chosen pain. The ways I’ve blamed. The ways I’ve repeated patterns I swore I was done with.

And then I saw the point.
It’s about self-sabotage.
About how we hurt ourselves when we don’t fully love ourselves.

And maybe that’s what all of this is.

Art isn’t just the thing you create. It’s how you create it. It’s the energy you put into every part of your life—even the broken parts. Especially the broken parts.

I’ve been through hell. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually. I’ve been laid out and thought I might not make it. And even then, in the middle of the worst of it, some part of me said: This is gonna be magic.

That was the moment everything started turning around.

Not because I knew how.
But because I chose to believe it could.

That’s the work.
Turning the trauma into a song.
Turning the scar into a story someone else can feel less alone in.

So yeah, life is hard.
But it’s also art.
And every moment, you get to choose how to paint it.

Love,
Coley

P.S. See some of y'all this Saturday :)