My friend Darren Smith entered my life at Unruly. We moved through things together—Cold Spring, different places, different states. We lived and worked side by side.

He became a painter there. Before that, he had already moved through other roles—actor, curator—someone who could shift between forms. At the same time, he worked in a social institution connected to foster care.

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Sam and I painted every evening, and gradually Darren joined. When he moved into Unruly, he fell into that rhythm as if it had always been his.

He related to the world in his own way. Instead of greeting people, he often said, “happy birthday.” He collected crystals and minerals and treated them as animated presences, which did not feel strange to me. We spoke about complex things, but always with humor. He moved inside everyday mysticism, in the sense that everything is connected. When he spoke, it felt calm and direct, as if he was not inventing words but letting them pass through. There was something shamanic in him—wild, grounded, without performance.

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Over time, our paths diverged. I moved to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where my Korean-American friend Sam lived. He offered to share a large studio. A Japanese artist had lived there before and disappeared without explanation. Sam told me to take the space.

The building was called Chicken Hut, at 169 Spencer Street—a former sheep hide processing factory. In the early 2000s, it had been a central point of New York’s underground scene. Every surface carried traces of artists. Exhibitions, performances, layers of work—nothing was untouched. Each floor felt like its own reality. For me, it was a natural environment.

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By the time I arrived, most people were gone. It felt like only Sam Jay and I remained. He had shifted his focus to tattooing, working with clients constantly, though we had once painted together intensively. At some point, he lost connection with painting, even after mastering it. He had created hundreds of works dedicated to legendary hip-hop artists. He is part of that visual culture. Once, after a show, he left his paintings on the subway and took it as a sign to stop.

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We were both surviving. Helping each other where we could. Without support, without a circle, Brooklyn erases you. After COVID, art barely sold. We improvised, did whatever was necessary to stay in that city—expensive, dense, always on the edge, where everything demands something from you.

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Sam is one of my closest friends. Like Alex, Darren, Romualdas, Ruslan—there was a group of us. A brotherhood of people who had not been flattened by routine. Each one moving through their own depth, trying to express it.

Others looked like artists—vintage aesthetics, curated appearances—but even that felt closer than corporate life.

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At the same time, the city was changing. Spaces like this were disappearing. The places that held culture were being pushed out. Buildings emptied. Neighborhoods shifted. The city became more polished, more distant from the people who formed it.

When I moved in, I began transforming the space immediately. Painting walls, building a corridor gallery, expanding. At some point, the walls stopped being walls. They became surface.

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Everything filled up—petroglyphs, paintings, objects, driftwood, plants, feathers, books, stones, roots. My cat Laska lived there, along with Sam’s cat Juju. No empty space remained. Everything that could be used, was used.

I called it Portal of Balance. The name came naturally. It allowed me to construct a separate reality inside the city—a place where art and nature dominated. A place to reset. To bring in curators, collectors, people who could enter that space.

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Over time, it stopped being just a name. The space behaved like a system. It responded. It shifted. It set the rhythm. I was not directing it. I was moving within it.

Much of what filled the studio came from the street. In Brooklyn, people leave behind things that would be kept elsewhere. Paint, canvases, stretchers, equipment—everything waits outside for someone to continue its use.

One of our trips happened there—me, Romualdas, and Darren. Sam was working, tattooing clients.

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Darren rolled joints as usual. We painted. He burned aromatic herbs in a hanging metal vessel, moving the smoke with feathers. It felt simple and ritual at the same time. We joked constantly about goats—greatest of all time. Darren even created his own imaginary place—Goatlandia. If someone leaned too far into mysticism, we called them a top shaman.

We took mushrooms—three and a half grams each—placing them on pieces of paper where we had written intentions and questions. Then we entered the state.

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We sat on the floor and put on music—psychedelic rock, mantras, ambient sound, sometimes Native American chants. We looked at Romualdas’s work, then mine. The room shifted. It stopped being a room and became a state.

The paintings changed. They felt like objects carrying something we could not fully define. In daily life, they become background. You stop seeing them. In that state, they opened again.

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We had written questions earlier. Intentions.

When I took the paper and read them aloud, something broke. The questions sounded small—about style, relationships, money. They felt misplaced, as if they belonged to another level. It was almost as if the mushrooms were laughing—not at us, but at the scale of those concerns.

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Perception shifted. It no longer felt like we were observing life. It felt like life was observing us. My works appeared everywhere—transformed, fluid, alive.

Conversation no longer required effort. It continued on its own.

In that state, it became clear that there is a level where questions dissolve. Not because they are answered, but because they no longer apply.

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At some point, we noticed water spreading across the floor. A gallon container had a small hole. The water moved along the uneven wooden beams covered with petroglyphs.

We started joking that Portal of Balance was an art café where the only thing you could order was water.

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Then silence.

Someone outside shouted through the open window. It felt like part of the same flow. Darren said it was our cousins outside, joining the conversation. As if nothing needed to begin or end. Everything was already moving.

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Then he said:

decisions make themselves.

I was sitting on the floor, drinking from a crushed plastic gallon, laughing until my stomach hurt. That was the moment the image appeared—the water man. A man made of water, moving through water, returning to water. Absurd, but exact. Years later, I see how directly it connects to everything I am writing.

After that, I began to notice something in life. Certain decisions stopped feeling like choices.

They became obvious at the moment they appeared.

And that required no confirmation.