Follow the Captain

Sixty-four animals. Twenty-one-and-1/3 mysteries. Hand-painted, one at a time, until the whole first deck was standing in front of me and I realized I'd built something.

I'm Jezzatron. This is the arc(k) I'm building, and you're welcome aboard.

Think of it like an ark building school. Where it's not really a physical boat, but an inner vessel - fit for all the elements. The old story has Noah as the only builder who mattered. I don't buy that. I think we are all "noahs" - building a safe and secure inner boat for anything life throws at us....I picture a whole school of us, learning the same craft, comparing notes, some of us better at the hull and some of us better at knowing which animals to bring. I'm still in class. I paint animals because they teach me things I can't get to any other way, and then I hand what I learn to whoever's standing near me.

That's turned into hundreds of conversations now. Someone tells me what's going on in their life, an animal shows up that fits it, and something shifts. Not because I'm special. Because the animals are good at their job.

My people march to their own drums. I've got neighbors who know the work, family who've watched it grow, friends who've camped with me in the woods and asked what the hell I'm actually building.

Portland this summer looked like this: an old friend, a tent, renegade dance parties out in the trees, float parties down the river, sunsets on the Pacific that stopped both of us mid-sentence. We talked about love and how easy it is to mess it up. About losing the innocence of not knowing better yet, and what it takes to turn back toward each other after you do know better. About trying to build a life that fits when the world wasn't really built for people like us.

That's the real material. The animals just give it a shape.

I don't teach from a mountaintop. I teach from what happened to me last Tuesday.

When I talk about Puffin, it's because I know what it's like to keep circling the same cliff for years before I finally trusted the water enough to dive.

When I talk about Finch, it's because I've had to relearn how to sing in my own key after spending too long matching everyone else's.

When I talk about Magpie, it's because I've caught myself collecting shiny things — ideas, identities, other people's approval — and had to ask which ones were actually mine to keep.

I lived it first. The pattern came after.

Fair warning: I'm always working. Or playing. Same thing, most days. One of the things ark building school actually teaches you is how to pay attention — so a chipmunk on a beach log, a duck on a river, a crow doing crow things all end up qualifying as fieldwork.

Waves Two and Three are already introducing themselves. I'm just waiting for them to tell me their names.

I'm painting these animals for myself first. That's the only way I know how to make them true. But every one of them turns out to be for someone else too — that's just how it works.

This is a life built on purpose: adventure, boundlessness, knowing myself a little better with every pattern, getting more resilient with every wave that knocks me down. I'm writing a mythic story out of the things I actually love — animals, paint, parties, deep conversations at the edge of the ocean. An epic life, built in public, one animal at a time.

All 192 animals across all three decks land in 2027. The first 64 are already here.

Come find out which one's yours.