This and that and the other...
Some oldies (hopefully goodies) for your enjoyment.
Dear ones,
Here are a few short pieces I originally published on Medium, a platform I am planning to quit now that I am using Substack.
I’m working on my comic strip/cartoon and feeling excited and daunted. I’ve known forever that to do it would require dedication and commitment. I’m getting there though not quite believing in myself yet. The closer I come, the more I see the actual work involved, and the questions. So many questions. Actually, I’m terrified.
I am planning to share this process with you, as well as the results of the process. I have a feeling that the specificity of this project will be a more effective way to talk about and show the subtleties of process than the kinds of generalization I often fall back on.
And I’m pretty sure that the work itself, creating characters with personalities— desires, fears, cravings, foibles—who interact with each other and go through changes, will be a far more intuitive way for me to express myself than through snarky ranting or misty-eyed sighing. (Snarky ranting and misty-eyed sighing do have their place in my toolbox.)
Even though I believe that the unifying category of endeavor for all of us is being ourselves, I also see that using the internet to create a business, a project, a community, requires as much refinement of scope and purpose as possible. The internet itself is a festival of diffusion, diversion and distraction; to create anything of depth and substance demands concentration, in every sense of the word: focus, and a gathering and distilling of form and content.
I nap; therefore I am…
The unanswerable question — What is the meaning of life? — is the hand-holding sweetheart of the answerable question, the one that gets asked and answered for us if we don’t do it ourselves: What do I do now?
If we were merely minds without bodies, little theorizing, conceptualizing phantoms with no particular needs, and no particular ability to have any impact or influence on anything, I guess we could get away with only the first question. It would be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, or an eternity.
And if we were not talking, theorizing, conceptualizing, story-telling, tool-making beings, we could easily ask only the second question. That’s the only question my cat asks herself from moment to moment, and she answers it with no difficulty whatsoever.
Knowing it all or knowing nothing
I call myself an artist. ‘Artist,’ like art itself, is a highly mutable descriptor. I define it in the most comprehensive way that I can fathom: human with the awareness that every moment offers opportunity for close attention and creative action.
The term ‘artist’ helps me to stay grounded in a deep awareness that however much I feel a desire to offer encouragement and insight to my fellows, the only work I can produce that’s worth anything comes from a place within me of mystery — of faith and humility.
Every day I feel opposing urges to be a know-it-all, or a know-nothing. I dearly hope that I will continue to find the middle path of feeling, honesty, and artmaking.
It’s not a place; it’s a process
When I was a very young woman (still a teenager), travel was my most successful technique for interior realignment. Getting out of my own/known culture into places where I had few or no clues about what was going on, threw me back upon my own resources—it allowed me to experience my courage and creativity, my will to live, in a way that was harder for me to access in the shadow of the known.
Now the challenge is interior. What I want most is the courage to leave my cosy interior home for a foreign land — a land where I can function in a new way, leaving behind patterns of feeling and thinking that no longer serve me — a land where I can grow and change easily and have the rich experience that comes from letting go and embracing the unknown.
Only it’s not a place; it’s a process. When I was young, travel was an advanced course in meeting the unknown. It gave me confidence in my ability to do that. The interior unknown is far more expansive and mysterious than the greatest wonders of the world.
To explore the interior universe is to create bridges of understanding between worlds. Between the interior and exterior world, for sure, and even more significantly, the worlds within myself…my scared self, my wounded self, my Wonder Woman self, my joy-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach self. We make a great team.
Why I need YOU…
Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is the interplay between the interiority of making things, and the call of love that arouses the desire to make things and share them.
From the I Ching, hexagram 61/Inner Truth (Richard Wilhelm translation):
The character fu (‘truth’) is actually the picture of a bird’s foot over a fledgling. It suggests the idea of brooding. An egg is hollow. The light-giving power must work to quicken it from outside, but there must be a germ of life within, if life is to be awakened. Far-reaching speculations can be linked with these ideas.
Thank you, my friends, for being here now.