The Moon Studio

The Moon Studio
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
— Thomas Merton
A place to make things with your hands, be around other humans, and have somewhere to put what you’ve been carrying.
Maybe you’ve been craving more meaning, creativity, play, and real human connection in your life, but you’re not quite sure where to find them. You miss having something that feels interesting and alive—something that isn’t another responsibility, another thing to accomplish, or another person who needs something from you.
Maybe you’re a mom who spends much of the day tending to everyone else’s needs, emotions, schedules, questions, meals, messes, and moods. By the time there’s finally space for you, you may not have the energy to figure out what you need, much less process everything you’ve been carrying.
Or maybe motherhood has nothing to do with it. You simply want more creativity and meaningful community in your life, but traditional social gatherings don’t quite do it for you. You’d rather sit beside someone making something than walk into a room and make small talk. You want to know people in a way that feels natural, without having to manufacture intimacy or perform vulnerability.
And maybe you want a place that feels meaningful without having to belong to a particular religious, spiritual, or philosophical community.
The Moon Studio was created for that space.
It’s a small creative gathering where we come together to make art, follow our curiosity, and connect—with ourselves, with other people, and perhaps with something larger than ourselves, however each of us understands that. There’s no shared belief system required, no artistic experience necessary, and you don’t need to arrive ready to talk about your feelings.
✂️ Sometimes You Need to Make Something
“Creativity IS emotional regulation. Not a luxury or a hobby. When you express something. Even a single line or a color or an unfinished thought. Your nervous system releases pressure. Expression is what prevents implosion. It's regulation disguised as art.”
-Grace Gulley
We carry so much through ordinary life: grief and boredom, anger and tenderness, longing, overstimulation, unanswered questions, decisions we’re tired of thinking about, and parts of ourselves we haven’t had much time to listen to.
There are wonderful places for words. Therapy can be wonderful. Journaling can be wonderful. Talking with a friend can be wonderful. But sometimes you are simply tired of talking and thinking about yourself. Maybe you don’t have the time, money, or energy for regular therapy. Maybe therapy hasn’t felt particularly helpful for you. Maybe you don’t need another hour of intense emotional processing—you just need somewhere for all of that inner material to go.
That’s one of the things I love about art.
You can tear something apart, cover something up, layer colors over one another, or find a strange image in an old magazine that you inexplicably love. You can put two things beside each other that make no logical sense and discover that, somehow, they make emotional sense.
Art gives us another language. You don’t have to explain everything you’re carrying in order to express it, and you don’t have to turn your experience into a coherent story before you’re allowed to explore it. Sometimes our hands can go somewhere our thinking minds haven’t figured out how to reach yet.
And sometimes making something is simply really, really fun.
That matters too.
🌙 Meaning Without the Belief System
For some of us, finding meaningful community can be surprisingly difficult, especially if we don’t quite fit into a particular religious or spiritual space.
Maybe you’re in the middle of a faith transition and don’t know exactly where you belong anymore. Maybe you’ve stepped away from a religious community but discovered that you still miss some of what came with it: gathering regularly, marking the passage of time, contemplating meaningful questions, experiencing beauty, and belonging to something beyond the walls of your own home.
Maybe you’re spiritual in your own way. Maybe you’re religious, agnostic, atheist, questioning, uncertain, or happily uninterested in defining yourself at all. Maybe you’ve looked for community and found that so many spaces come with an entire worldview attached—one more set of assumptions about God, energy, consciousness, healing, or how the universe works that you’re expected to share.
At The Moon Studio, you don’t have to believe anything in particular to belong.
We use the changing Moon as a symbolic creative rhythm rather than a doctrine. Each gathering begins by noticing where we are in the lunar cycle and briefly exploring an archetype associated with that part of the Moon’s journey. When we gather near a seasonal turning point, we may explore the season instead.
There’s no assumption that the Moon controls your emotions, manifests your desires, determines your future, or means anything supernatural at all. We simply use its changing rhythm as a reminder that human lives move through cycles too. There are times of beginning and building, fullness and change, release and rest, followed eventually by another beginning.
You get to decide what any of that means to you.
🎨 What We Actually Do
Most of our time together is spent making art. We’ll work primarily with collage and mixed media—images, paper, words, colors, textures, drawing, fabric, found materials, and whatever else finds its way onto the table.
If you like having a little direction, each gathering’s lunar archetype or seasonal theme can become your starting point. You can notice what it brings up, which part of it catches your attention, and where your curiosity wants to go. I call this Following the Moon.
Or you can Follow a Trailhead by beginning with something that already has energy for you: a feeling, body sensation, longing, conflict, decision, dream, fear, relationship, recurring thought, or part of yourself you’ve been noticing lately.
And if you don’t want to think about any of that, you can simply Follow the Art. Browse through the materials and notice what attracts you, surprises you, intrigues you, or even repels you. Pick something, then something else, and allow one choice to lead to another without deciding in advance what you’re making.
You don’t have to know what your artwork means, and you certainly don’t have to make something profound. You’re allowed to simply enjoy making it.
🌙 Community for People Who Don’t Necessarily Want to “Socialize”
The Moon Studio isn’t only about art. It’s also an experiment in a different kind of belonging.
Some of us connect much more naturally alongside other people than we do sitting across from one another trying to create connection on demand. There’s something lovely about a table scattered with scissors, scraps of paper, half-finished collages, drinks, and people quietly absorbed in their own little worlds. Conversation can arise naturally while our hands are busy, and silence doesn’t have to mean anything is wrong.
Someone might share something tender while another person spends most of the evening happily cutting flowers out of magazines. You’re welcome to talk and connect, but you’re equally welcome to settle into your own creative process and enjoy being quietly in the company of other people.
Meaningful connection doesn’t always require intense conversation. Sometimes it grows simply from returning to the same table, making things beside one another, and gradually becoming familiar.
🌿 This Isn’t Group Therapy
The Moon Studio is informed by a deep respect for the inner world, but it is a creative community gathering, not psychotherapy or group therapy.
There will be opportunities to reflect on what emerged in your artwork, but you are always in charge of how deeply you want to explore. You might journal privately, share something with the group, say, “I have absolutely no idea what this means, but I love it,” or decide that you don’t want to interpret your piece at all.
When people do share, we practice witnessing rather than analyzing or interpreting their artwork for them. Your artwork belongs to you, and so does whatever meaning you find—or don’t find—in it.
🌙 Who Is The Moon Studio For?
The Moon Studio is for mothers and non-mothers, younger and older adults, introverts and extroverts, lifelong artists and people who haven’t touched an art supply since elementary school.
It’s especially for those of us who have found ourselves thinking, I need to make things with my hands. I need people, but I don’t necessarily need more socializing. I need somewhere to put everything I’m carrying. I need more play and beauty in my life. I want something meaningful, but I don’t want someone else to tell me what I have to believe.
If you’ve been missing a place like that, maybe you’ve found it.
✨ Come As You Are
You don’t need to be artistic, emotionally prepared, or particularly interesting that evening. You don’t need to know anyone before you arrive, and you certainly don’t need to have anything figured out.
Come because you spend most of your life taking care of other people and would like an evening that asks very little of you. Come because you’re rebuilding some part of your life or figuring out what you believe now. Come because you’ve been lonely, because you miss making things, because you need more beauty in your week, or simply because cutting up magazines and gluing beautiful things onto paper sounds delightful.
Bring whatever you’re carrying. You don’t have to talk about it.
We’ll put some art supplies on the table and see what happens.
🌙 The Moon Studio
Usually the first Monday evening of each month
Moon-day makes it easy to remember.
75–90 minutes