Easy come; easy go....
Easier said than done.
I’ve been thinking about death lately. In the context of life. There is something I’m trying to understand or come to terms with. In a relatively stable environment where your chances of making it into old age are better than average, death is an open secret. For people in war zones where killing and dying is everywhere it’s not any kind of secret.
For me, it’s still sort of a secret, even though I’m old. When you reach a certain age, the presence of death, not death itself necessarily, but the knowledge of death, is in your face. It’s in your body. You have to spend/waste a lot of energy pretending it doesn’t exist. What I’m seeing and feeling is not so much the fact of my own death; it’s the fact of everyone’s death—of impermanence, change, flow. That is what I’m trying to understand, accept, and even love…
Raising children is all about helping them grow up to be people living in the world. It’s about expansion, becoming. The next generation! If you live long enough and your children live long enough, you start to see that they too are on a journey with a beginning, middle, and end. I’m not saying that the end is just an end. It’s probably a beginning too, in the great flow. But for us, for what we are, it is the end of something. A body, a time frame, a context.
We are all part of a chain of being; not The Great Chain of Being, which was an idea of creature hierarchy in which humans were at the top of the list (just below God and the angels).
The chain we are part of is a chain of time and mystery. What I’m wondering is, if we found it easier to accept our own impermanence, our brief moment under the sun, would there would be so much struggle for power and dominance?
Cognitive Dissonance is us…
Every day I wonder how I am supposed to harmonize, in my psyche, the daily headlines, what is happening in the world—terrifying, insane, depressing—with the constant exhortation from my culture to use money to improve my life in myriad ways, all based on the idea (or swindle) that this is possible—that I myself can be fit, calm, effective, and rich with just a few little hacks here and there. It’s like some TV show or movie that shows life as we don’t know it—shows life as a nice safe environment where all we have to think about is personal satisfaction and growth.
That’s the outward-looking cognitive dissonance. What I’m really trying to harmonize is my interior cognitive dissonance, the part of me that throws up scary headlines that make me want to hide under the bed, and the part of me that relaxes enough to follow my vision through to making and doing.
The harmony, when I can find it, is in facing myself. Facing the poignant reality of self as an actor in time. That’s it, folks. That’s all we have, that’s all we get… the moment, and maybe the next moment and so on. We are having an experience.
The harmony is that no matter how upsetting I find humanity’s confusion, and my own, all I can do is bring my energy to the cosmic potluck, and see what happens. I get the most bang for my energy’s buck when I can humble myself to being present in the moment. That’s where I find creative power.
And now to the cartoons.
Ed 'n' Art
Ed and Art are part of the Daisi & JANE cast. This project really started with them, and then expanded beyond them. They are the still center, having little to do with the plot (the plot I don’t know yet) that involves the other characters. They are the comic relief, and when relating to each other, they are an aside, a little world within the larger world of the comic.
To show this graphically I plan to draw strips with just the two of them in a more cartoony style than when they are interacting with the other characters. We’ll see how that goes.
These strips are old drafts, from when I was trying to use a unified horizontal space. I did some recent drawing on top of them. They are still drafts, obviously.
Going forward I may share cartoons on a different day from other writing. Or not. I don’t know yet. This platform offers me the opportunity to have 'sections' in a publication so that if someone were interested only in the cartoons they could subscribe to that section only, or vice versa. Any thoughts on that?
So glad you published today on a Sunday because you are better than church! 💪😍
I like having the combo of the cartoons and philosophy. It's all of you. They complement each other's aspects. A healthy balance of what we present to the world and what we tend to internalize; our external and internal lives. Share them together. Each give definition to the other.