I hope you’re having a beautiful day. ♡

I confess there was another reason for halting the daily photos for under1000skies. I struggle with panic disorder and agoraphobia. Since we began three years ago, I have yet to go to the city and personally hand an artist pack to any homeless person. I am good at organization and get many things done online but until I was able to do the work I was asking my volunteers to do I felt like a fraud. I believe this is what I need to do next — the next-right thing. I need to find a way to become personally face-to-face involved. When I learned about the ministroke and damage to emotion and language centers of my brain, I believed that having a label and a physical reason and starting point for everything that’s wrong with my brain was a cure in and of itself.. I believed naming it and knowing it’s source would make it lose it’s power over me. This seemed to work for a while but I’m back to the same implosion of space, finding it difficult to push beyond boundaries again. I thought I should tell you this because you’ve been generous with your support, and with providing beautiful quotes and photographs, and this only added to my guilt of being unable to do what is the absolute heart of this service: to meet these artists, these men and women who are currently between homes, to speak to them and ask them personally what they find beautiful, and to tell them about my dream of connecting creative souls like them around the world through photography and the Internet. Until I can do that I’m just propping up other peoples’ good work — or at least that’s how it feels to me. Thank you for listening. 💕.

Niki Flow

♡. under1000skies
We are photographers,
writers, artists & advocates
serving and connecting
homeless creatives.