Since I founded Maven in 2015 it has, at times, felt like a very solitary journey. I built Maven in an uninsulated cabin studio in the middle of the Maine woods. Back then, there were weeks when I never left the land, never spoke to another soul. I woke up. I designed. I created. I rolled a joint. I walked in the forest with my dog Shep until the sun went down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
In those early days, I felt like I had to be alone in order to tune in -- anything beyond Maven and the land it was built on was noise and I couldn't open my ears to hear it.

Almost ten years later, this insular energy has shifted and I am calling in the voices, the hands, the creativity and the joy of my artistic peers.
There is a myth about solitary genius, the artist alone in her studio, the thinker pacing through an empty room, brilliance striking like lightning in isolation. But nothing truly meaningful is made in a vacuum. Ideas need friction, hands need other hands, and the best work is often shaped in the space between people.
Collaboration is a kind of dialogue, but not just in words. It happens in gestures, in borrowed techniques, in the way one person’s strength meets another’s curiosity. I think of the weavers who pass their looms down through generations, each new set of hands refining the work. The jazz musicians who leave space for improvisation, knowing that the magic isn’t in the solo but in the way the instruments lean into each other. The dyers who build vats together, stirring deep indigo pools, trusting that the color will only grow richer with time and shared labor.

I have learned that to collaborate is to loosen my grip. To trust. To let my ideas be altered, expanded, made unfamiliar in the best possible way. It requires humility—the willingness to be wrong, to be surprised, to follow where someone else leads. And in return, it offers something rare: the chance to create what I could not have imagined alone.
May this year be a tapestry of collaboration — woven with shared ideas, unexpected partnerships, and the magic of creating together.
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