You’ve probably noticed the small tribe of eyes scattered around here.

They didn’t start here.

The first one showed up in the margins of a notebook from high school—freshman, maybe sophomore year. American Lit. We were reading Ralph Waldo Emerson… or at least I was supposed to be. Somewhere between the notes and whatever I thought I understood at the time, I drew a small eye in the margin.

It wasn’t original. It looked a lot like one from an illustration tied to Emerson. More of a borrow than a creation.

It was one of many doodles, but for some reason that one stuck.

Emerson writes about becoming a transparent eyeball—not removing yourself from what you see, but recognizing how much of it is shaped by you. Quieting that just enough to see what’s actually there.

That idea didn’t stay in the text.

It stuck. Not all at once, not in any clear or deliberate way—but like something carried in and left behind. A seed dropped by the wind that found a place to take hold.

The first eye in the margin was part of that.

At some point, it stopped being just one.

They showed up again, and then again. Different notebooks, different years. Same simple form, but no longer a one-off. More like a pattern—something that kept returning when I was trying to see something more clearly, or not quite done thinking it through.

Over time, that idea kept growing.

Seeing clearly isn’t about stepping back. It’s about leaning in — paying attention, close attention—while you’re in the middle of something. It’s looking, but also touching, turning things over, reworking them, getting them wrong and trying again.

The point isn’t distance.

It’s clarity.

And clarity comes from being aware of how you’re shaping what you see while you’re in it.

Somewhere along the way, they grew into that.

Not in form. Still simple. Still a little undefined.

But they’re no longer just watching.

They have a way of working themselves into whatever I’m doing—whether it's helpful or not.

Still observing, just not from the sidelines anymore.

It’s a little strange to look back and realize that something drawn by a fifteen-year-old version of me stuck around long enough to matter.

At the time, it didn’t mean anything.

Or maybe it did—just not in a way I understood yet.

It makes sense that they would leave the margins eventually.

They’ve been there for years, growing in the background—shaping how I work through things, how I pay attention, how I try to understand what’s in front of me.

Whatever CBH68 is becoming, it’s built out of those moments—watching, making, thinking, and trying to understand what’s actually in front of me.

So now they’re out in the open.

Still doing the same thing.

Just with a little more room to keep working things out.