Watercolor Play

The Older I Get, the More I Want to Disappear

 "You know, it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name. That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers. Politicians do not come to your door. You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty."

 - Jiddu Krishnamurti

 Admittedly I don't want to disappear entirely, or this blog wouldn't exist. But increasingly the point of blogging is a conversation with myself and anyone else who happens along, rather than being found and known, critiqued or quoted, by many readers.

Art Meditation

When I make art, especially when I am "just doodling," peace infuses me. I cherish the flow state. I remind myself that my journal is a playground, that I get to experiment, that crappy art is permitted, because it's the process I'm looking to engage with, not the product. I do enjoy when art I make is appealing to me or others, and yet my mental and spiritual health require this daily practice of flow, which is easiest to enter when all is permitted and nothing is judged. 

More Art

 This piece is one I began last September at an art camp. And tonight, it's complete. It's acrylic on paper, 10" x 14".

 

A Little Art

Completed a painting I began a couple years ago. Then I re-worked another painting from eight years ago. Spent the whole of Sunday making art, and it felt wonderful.

Belly Rubs

 Watching this video of a baby sugar glider getting massaged, I feel at peace.

Oh, to Bee a Flower

One Book, Many Books

 "And then, when she's finished and the book ventures out into the world, the readers take their turn, and here another kind of comingling occurs. Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book's content. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. And because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what's written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their own destinies."

                --Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

The Middle Ring

"Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance."

"Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.

Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views. “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said."

-Derek Thompson, The Anti-Social Century

The Anti-Social Century

"When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it."

-Derek Thompson, The Anti-Social Century (gift link)