A Body of Work, Shared

Hello friends,

I’ve never been especially interested in safe work.

Most of what I’ve learned about creativity came from saying yes before I knew how something would hold; entering unfamiliar rooms, working across difference, and staying long enough for uncertainty to stop being threatening and start becoming useful. Risk has never been the opposite of care for me. It’s often been the price of doing something honest.

That posture has shaped everything I’ve built, especially my long-term work with Voice of Maasai. Years of collaboration, return, and shared authorship trained me more than any single project ever could. This writing exists because of that practice.

Today, I’m sharing a small body of work that grew out of it. I’ve published three essays together, now live on my presonal portfolio site. They examine creative practice from the inside—where efficiency breaks down, where improvisation carries responsibility, and where meaning accumulates through time rather than momentum. Launching them together mattered to me. They’re meant to be read in conversation, out of sequence, or returned to later. This isn’t a feed. It’s a place to linger.

It took time to understand where some of this writing belonged. Years of journal notes, travel observations, and unfinished reflections didn’t want to resolve cleanly into a book, but they didn’t want to disappear either. Treating these essays as lived perspectives—work shaped by experience rather than conclusion—felt like the most honest way to let them exist.

Alongside the essays, I’ve made room for other forms of the work—poems, visual projects, and field notes—pieces that move differently but come from the same questions. Some arrive as fragments, some as reflection, some as image or sound. All of them are part of the same practice.

The site itself has been rebuilt to hold that reality. Not as a rebrand, but as a clearing—a place where essays, poems, and longer projects can coexist without being rushed into coherence too soon.

This work is moving toward my memoir, but the book isn’t the point yet. It’s one form this thinking will take. For now, I’m interested in staying with the work as it unfolds.

This is slow publication. Not because the work is precious, but because it’s alive. I write when there’s something worth staying with, when the question keeps returning, or the risk still feels unresolved.

If you’ve followed this work as a reader, supported it as a donor, collaborated alongside it, or simply stayed curious over time—thank you. Your attention and trust have always mattered more to me than momentum for its own sake.

You can read the essays and explore the rest of the work here:www.jesseyjansen.com

With gratitude and serengetidipity,

Jessey

P.S. If you’ve supported the Voice of Maasai work over the years—through belief, resources, or shared risk—this writing is part of that continuation. Long-term creative practice is rarely visible in the moment, but it’s always relational. Thank you for helping create the conditions where this kind of work can keep unfolding.