You climb a narrow flight of stairs bolted to the outside of the building.

Cold air. A metal rail. The smell of old grease and new disinfectant drifts down anyway. Inside, the walls are scuffed. The paint has given up in places. Nothing matches or pretends.

Inside, the building hums with a tired kind of life.

The main room is large, and holds rows of plastic chairs. Earlier, there was a church service. Loud preaching. Earnest prayers. Volunteers spooning food from a commissary kitchen that has fed more men than it can remember. The kind of kitchen where the floor never quite comes clean.

After dinner service the volunteers leave. The chairs are stacked and dragged away, replaced by rows and rows of sleeping pads. Thin. Worn. More than fifty men lie shoulder to shoulder on the floor, in the dark.

You hear coughs that scrape the lungs. Wheezing breaths. Someone crying out, half asleep, half awake, his body rebelling against him, craving.

This is not a place you’d photograph.

Teeth are broken. Smells are sour. Men are gruff and short-tempered. Some are chipper, almost too bright, clinging to repeatedly told jokes. Most are locals. Some just passing through. One looks like your high school science teacher. Another looks like a man you cross the street to avoid.

It is ugly.

Outside, the cold presses in. Across the street, a Maverik glows clean and bright. Cars pull in and out fast. Doors lock quickly. Heads turn. Men gather on the corner anyway. To smoke. To pace. To feel air on their faces.

If you drive by, you could miss the building entirely. The unremarkable facade and worn down sign. Music up. Windows closed. Another block closer to the heart of Salt Lake City.

But inside those walls, on all three stories, men are trying to leave something behind. They are trying to be stripped down. Cleaned out. Rebuilt or reborn or whatever they believe.

Someone who works here once called it a dirty sanctuary. That feels right.

Nothing about it shines. And yet, something holy is happening in that building. But not in the sermons. In the choosing. Again and again. To stay. To lie still in the night.

It is not pretty. But it is beautiful.

Before tattooing became fashionable, it was something deeper.

Ink pushed into skin by hand. Lines that had to hold. Marks with deep meaning that had to last through sun, salt, and years at sea.

To understand that world, you should know Norman Keith Collins.

Before he was Sailor Jerry he was a kid jumping freight trains out of Reno. He fell in with carnival workers, drifters, rail riders. The kinds of people who lived light and moved often.

He learned early how to trade. A small tattoo for some cigarettes. Ink for cash. Something permanent…for something temporary.

He started with stick-and-poke. A crude, painful way of driving ink into the skin by hand. Back rooms. Port cities. One tattoo at a time. But even then, Collins paid attention. He watched older men work. He asked questions, and over time learned which lines held and which bled to blur.

In his early twenties, he left the trains for Chicago to apprentice under Gib “Tatts” Thomas. It was there he learned discipline. Sanitation. Placement and composition.

When the Great Depression started closing doors, Collins joined the U.S. Navy, which meant steady pay. And a way out of the Midwest.

The Navy sent him to Honolulu.

And it was there, between Chinatown and Pearl Harbor, where Sailor Jerry was born.

Where ink met sailor culture. And where American tattooing would change forever.

Sailor Jerry’s Tattoo Parlor opened up in a neighborhood filled with bars, brothels, and transient sailors looking for a final night before shipping out.

Inside the small shop, machines hummed. Antiseptic cut through cigarette smoke and sweat. Sailors leaned forward in cracked chairs, flipping through flash designs. Eagles. Anchors. Women. Clean lines. Bold shapes. Simple colors.

Sailor Jerry studied Japanese irezumi and collected its prints. But he didn’t copy the style. He stripped it down to the studs, rebuilding it with heavy black lines. Solid colors. Simple compositions made for American sailors and hard use.

Eagles looked ready to strike. Anchors carried weight. Women stared back with sharp curves. Designs meant to survive voyages, sunburn, and years of work.

For sailors, tattoos weren’t decoration. A swallow marked 5,000 nautical miles. Two meant 10,000. Anchors promised stability. Daggers through roses held love and abandoned love in the same image. Pin-up girls served another purpose.

As time went on, Sailor Jerry’s Tattoo Parlor became a quiet temple for men headed to war and men trying to leave it behind.

And as veterans came home marked, the style spread. In port cities across America, barbershops turned into tattoo parlors. Working men sat down and picked a mark.

And ever since, trends have come and gone. But American Traditional never did. The designs stayed loud. Simple. Defiant.

Today, the same flash still lines tattoo shop walls everywhere.

The needle hums. The ink sets.

And the work holds.

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

Gary Provost

In Buddhist philosophy, one of the first truths is called dukkha. That dissatisfaction, loss, and suffering are woven into ordinary life.

Not that life is only pain. But that pain is an unavoidable part of it.

The second truth is that there is a cause to suffering. And it’s us: wanting things to be other than they are. Clinging to control, identity, outcome, or the hope that something will stay fixed when it cannot.

The third is that there is relief from suffering. Not by rearranging the world, but by changing our relationship to it. Since suffering is caused by us, it can be undone by us.

So grief, then, is a season within suffering. And it takes many forms.

Sudden or slow. Loud or quiet. Immediate…or delayed by years.

I’m not interested in simplifying it. But its shape is consistent. Grief lives, exactly, in the tension between control and reality.

It is the moment when what we want collides with what is.

When the mind searches for leverage where none exists. When the instinct to fix, recover, or restore meets something that cannot be undone.

Sometimes our resistance isn’t chosen. It’s reflex.

We try to control through explanation. Through activity. Through distance. Through distraction. We say we’ll deal with it later. That it will soften on its own. But grief doesn’t disappear when avoided.

It waits.

What prolongs suffering is not grief itself, then, but our attempt to control what we cannot.

The lesson for us to learn, again and again, is that grief begins to change when we loosen our grip. Not because the loss stops mattering. But because the fight with reality does.

The pain doesn’t vanish. The struggle around it does.

So grief isn’t something to solve. Just pass through. And while it reshapes us, it does not consume us forever.

Life moves again. Not as it was.

But forward nonetheless.

My favorite room in Washington, DC is small.

This is an odd thing for a city built on rooms designed to reflect power. Whether business or politics, Washington’s forte is scale. High ceilings. Long corridors. Marble floors that echo authority. Rooms meant to project permanence and importance.

But my favorite room does none of that.

It’s tucked away inside the Phillips Collection. And it’s easy to miss.

But once inside, you feel it: Four paintings and a bench. Very little else.

The room is usually empty. When someone else is there, they tend to whisper, then stop talking altogether.

The paintings are large for the room. They do not announce themselves. They wait. Dark reds. Browns. Something like purple, but not quite. The longer you sit, the less confident you become in naming what you’re seeing.

The light is controlled. Not dramatic, but just precise enough to matter. The walls feel close. Not claustrophobic. Intentional.

You sit on the bench and feel the strange sensation that the room is paying attention to you.

.

Mark Rothko did not want his paintings admired. He wanted them to be felt.

He cared obsessively about distance. About height. About how close a viewer stood. About whether a painting hovered or pressed inward. He disliked frames and bright rooms.

Rothko was once awarded a defining commission, to paint large, sweeping murals for the newly unveiled Seagram building. The room was meant to host the most powerful figures in business, politics, and culture. He started, then withdrew. He didn’t want his paintings decorating wealth. He wanted them confronting people. In quiet rooms.

That decision cost him a fortune. And I like to think he took pride in that.

His art was not romantic. It was operational and obsessive. Rothko adjusted inches. He argued with galleries over lighting. He rejected exhibitions that didn’t respect his conditions. And he controlled variables the way an engineer might.

That is what makes the room work.

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Rothko’s rise was not inevitable.

For years, his work confused people. It didn’t fit neatly into a category. It wasn’t decorative. It wasn’t illustrative or whimsical. And it didn’t reward quick consumption. It required patience from the viewer.

Which is where the Phillips Collection enters the story.

The Phillips was not built as a museum to hang now established art. It reflected its curators’ belief that taste should lead consensus, not follow it. Duncan and Marjorie Philipps were comfortable making early bets. They were seed investors of artists. Tastemakers. Willing to be wrong in public.

In the 1940s they started displaying Rothko’s work unapologetically. And they leaned into collaborating with Rothko on exacting goals for room design.

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Back in the room, the paintings are not hung like trophies. They are arranged. None dominates. The bench is placed so you cannot take them all in with one pass.

Rothko wanted you to feel surrounded, not entertained. He wanted the experience to unfold slowly, if it unfolded at all.

Some people sit for two minutes and leave. Others sit for twenty and forget what time it is.

The room makes no promises. It does not explain itself. It does not perform. It does not care whether you like it.

It simply waits.

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In a city obsessed with signaling power, the Rothko Room offers something quieter.

It’s presence. Conviction. A space designed not to impress, but to hold.

When you finally stand up, nothing resolves neatly. There is no takeaway or lesson written on the wall.

You carry the room with you instead. And that, I think, is the point.