Happy New Year
Yah! What a great idea. Let's start over...
Oh, if only we could. If only we could be reborn from moment to moment. Well, not exactly reborn, because who wants to start over completely? We learn from experience and then use that learning to do things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. Like walk and talk, sing and dance, make things, make mistakes, make commitments.
Yet there is something in the idea of starting over that is so appealing. Maybe it’s just a concept that allows us to disengage from patterns, ways of thinking, ways of acting, or not acting, that have held us back. From what, though?
I have all kinds of ways of being that hold me back from what I think I want—pure energy, pure effort, without confusion or inhibition. And as much as I struggle to work through some of that inhibition, I don’t want the kind of guiltless energy that one might achieve with drugs or psychotic disconnect. Or being part of a tribe that rewards loyalty to the clan above sanity and personal responsibility.
I want integration. I want courage. I want to feel joy in movement. I want to feel and I want to act. I want to love.
Let’s not call it ‘reborn,’ let’s just call it movement, evolution, the inevitability of change. The idea of a new year helps me. It’s a marker.
Even when you are an old person, and your remaining New Years are clearly numbered (even though you don’t know what the number is, exactly), the new year still symbolizes a chance to begin again in some way.
One of the big secrets of life that we don’t understand until we are old enough, is that in the absence of true ‘losing your mind’ which does happen to some people, life continues to be as vivid and mysterious as it ever was, no matter how old you get. You continue to be yourself, which means that your potential to change in response to the needs and influence of your life is informed by your own essential nature and your experience, as well as the effects of aging.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between boundaries and freedom—how boundaries create freedom, as long as they are flexible enough to evolve in response to conditions on the ground.
This passage from the I Ching, Hexagram #60 Limitation, always opens my mind: (Please excuse sexist pronouns. The I Ching is old!)
A lake is something limited. Water is inexhaustible. A lake can contain only a definite amount of the infinite quantity of water; this is its peculiarity.
In human life too the individual achieves significance through discrimination and the setting of limits. Therefore what concerns us here is the problem of clearly defining these discriminations, which are, so to speak, the backbone of morality. Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless.
To become strong, a man’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is.
I Ching (Book of Changes, circa 1000 B.C.)
Richard Wilhelm & Cary F. Baynes translation, 1950The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is.
I particularly love, and am mystified by, the sentence above. It suggests the dynamic relationship between form and content. Content needs form, and form has no meaning without content. My fascination is around how form and content influence each other.
I’ve been making decisions about the format for a comic. And I can see clearly how curtailing one kind of freedom allows for a different kind of freedom. Where do I want to put my attention?
There are some graphic novels that use the space of a whole page as their only restriction of form. With that as the only constraint, the creative possibilities of page design are abundant. For some projects this is exciting and desirable. To see an impressive example of this, check out My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, a masterpiece of drawing and storytelling.
For my project, though, I realize that a tight format of a specific number of boxes, all the same size, will allow me the freedom to focus, within that limitation, on my goal of using words and pictures as a language, without having to think about structure design beyond what happens within those boxes.
This is a topic I will return to, because so much of my thinking and writing is an attempt to see movement, relationship, process, rather than the noun-based static chunks of reality that appear so much more solid than they are.
My plans for this publication in 2026
When I began this blog 2.5 years ago, I said to myself and to you that I did not know what it would become, and that is still true. What it has become from my point of view is a commitment to a process. Each Sunday when I post, I don’t know what my next post will be. It develops over the week. The commitment is the form.
In the spirit of boundaries that create freedom I want to experiment with the shape and structure of this blog, perhaps having sections with different purposes. I’m not sure yet.
What I am sure of, with fear and trembling, is the addition of a cartoon feature, also once a week (midweek). This means a much bigger commitment of time, and it also means that I can benefit from the structure/boundary of commitment into doing work that I want to do, and otherwise might not do. Stay TOONED!
An Opportunity
I am offering Lamb & Lion Studio notecards for the last time, before I retire them for good. You can see what is available on my website Lamb & Lion Studio. I am pledging 50% of the net proceeds from this initiative to local food banks. This is an ongoing project for the next few weeks. I hope you will check it out!