When I started building this website, I thought I had a very clear idea of what it would become.
I was wrong.
Or maybe not wrong exactly — just too attached to the first version of the idea. What I’ve learned is that creative work rarely arrives in a neat, fully formed way. Usually it’s messier than that. You follow one thing, abandon another, panic a little, start over, then suddenly realise you’ve accidentally made something better than the original plan.
That only really happened once I started collaborating with other people.
The site is named after the ulmo tree — those dramatic white blooms that appear in southern Chile every summer and pull the bees in immediately. Naming the journal after it felt local, rooted, personal. But the actual process of building the site had very little of that quiet poetic energy. Most of it was confusion, trial and error, and me staring at the backend after resizing one image somehow sent half the homepage sideways.
Thankfully, I wasn’t doing it alone.
With help from Anuk Medios and Estudio Chilco — my small coven of creativity — the whole thing slowly started taking shape. Good collaboration doesn’t make the process less chaotic; it just makes the chaos more fun. Someone has an idea, someone else improves it, someone talks you out of deleting the entire thing at midnight.
My perfectionism nearly killed the project more than once.
I kept the site in maintenance mode for over a year because I couldn’t make peace with publishing work that felt unfinished. Even now, rereading old posts makes me want to rewrite half of them. But eventually I realised that waiting until everything feels perfect is just another way of hiding.
You improve by making things. Publicly. Imperfectly.
This is actually my second website. I abandoned the first because I’d outgrown it, which at the time felt dramatic and mildly catastrophic. Now I think it was necessary. Starting over gave me clarity I didn’t have before.
That’s probably the biggest lesson in all of this: creativity is rarely elegant while you’re inside it. Mostly it feels uncertain, inconsistent, occasionally ridiculous. But if you keep going — and if you’re lucky enough to find good people to build with — something eventually clicks into place.
Not perfectly. Just honestly.