First Colors
Madi Keto, 137 YinD
Well, this does not at all capture the scenery.
On January 11th 2026, in the heat and mix of emotions, I pulled myself outside to sit with watercolors on a light wooden picnic table. In the first few minutes after arriving at my host family’s house in Don Chedi, I quickly propped my three bags against the wall and petered out into the late afternoon humidity.
I needed to do something with my hands and with my thoughts, and it needed to be something grounding and soft so I could hear how my heart was doing now that I was at the true beginning of my PC experience.
I ended up scribbling this in thick black ink across the back of my weighted paper:
“Well, this does not at all capture the scenery.
Pink, green, yellow
A small spider.
Bird on a line, just one.
Pause to flick spider off vermilion red paint.
One fly, then two.
Long, long beak, orange.
A plastic bird.
A plastic chair.
Motor sounds.
Someone masked going by on bike.
The breeze.
A need to piss.
Can I sleep?”
And that’s exactly how it felt to be dropped into a whole new way of being—an exciting dance from one thing to the next, then settling on the basic human needs: a piss and sleep.
I listed my surroundings as they called to me, with no pressure for meaning. No need to be grand. No need to make the current moment any more romantic or real than what it already was.
PST, to me, was so much more than these first few hours, but these are the feelings of being still that I come back to as I move through unfamiliar environments. I paint myself in the color of my surroundings and lean into all that it is.
Madi
