THINGS I AM STRUGGLING WITH

1. I am struggling with acceptance of difficult positions and beliefs of other people, struggling to rid myself of the intolerance I accuse other people of (see previous entry).

2. I am struggling with the geography of our lives. You and I are in two different cities, and sometimes I wish we didn't need to be.

3. I am struggling to let go of the stressful parts of this art thing -- remembering that I want to be MAKING ART, not MAKING MONEY. I am struggling with convincing myself that this is going to make the quality of my work much richer, and this in time will draw the attention I want, rather than fawning for attention at a time when I might not need it.

3a. Relatedly, I am struggling with this phase:



I am struggling with the quality of the art work itself, and feeling glum about it sometimes.



4. Specifically I am struggling with clarity and a certain image-conciseness that illustration must have in order to work. I am struggling with achieving this visual literacy while maintaining an aesthetic that I want to see. The ideas I have in my head are not necessarily images but rather feelings and inklings, and it's not until I begin to piece together the bones in the real world that the image reveals itself, and right now I am struggling with that process, with making it into a workable path.

4. I am struggling with the patience all of this requires.

But I think the most likely reason of all was that his heart was two sizes too small.

I heard an item on NPR this morning about "new" atheism, one that evangelizes for its cause, focusing on hatred and contempt, casting all religion as dangerous and ignorance.

They interviewed a man who'd posted a photograph of a communion host impaled on a rusty nail on his blog. He laughed, saying, "People got very angry. I don't know why."

I thought, yet you do. Because it Means Something. Otherwise you would not have done it in the first place.

I was surprised how deeply upsetting the story was to me. It quite literally gave me a sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn't shake for the rest of the day. I understand wary questions and even cynicism, but I don't understand circumventing the natural act of discussion by objecting in such a mean-spirited way.

It seems to me that at a most basic level, religion emphasizes the importance of symbols and ritual on the soul. The importance of CULTIVATING the soul. The focus on the spirit, as well as the mind and body. So what I take home from this story is: it's weird that people don't want others to do that. I know religion gets big and messy and fundamentalists really ruin it for everyone, but I have poked around quite a bit and have yet to find a religion with central tenants of nastiness and cruelty to others.

And atheist fundamentalism is still fundamentalism.

And within that I suppose there is also the problem of respect for others. I would not dream of tearing the pages from the Sikh holy book, just as I would not dream of trampling my neighbor's flower garden. It worries me that other people don't see things that way, regardless of opinion on higher powers.

It's the intolerance I find so distasteful, and I realized this morning that I was thinking to myself, I am intolerant of intolerance, which I realized is completely unsound. How does that make me different, in a big cosmic sense, than the people inventing Blasphemy Day? I don't think it does. And if I am going to claim to be at peace with everything in this world -- really at peace -- then I'm going to have to come to terms with this somehow.

Which is why I am here, in this image, as both the accepting loving heart and the frozen heart of the intolerant bigot. Because until I can work this out -- this intolerance problem -- I'm just as bad.

Re-translation

1: Being hurts.

2: We want pain.

3: To hurt less, want less.

4: To want less, watch what you want,
then you can want what you want,
so you can say what you want,
to do what you want,
to become what you want,
and then go where you want,
see what you want,
and finally think what you want.

If you do all this, you will know what you want, and then you will be free.

A little sketch to accompany this beautiful passage from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones," compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki.



"Or, imagine the five colored circles of the peacock tail to be your five senses in illimitable space. Now let their beauty melt within. Similarly, at any point in space or on a wall -- until the point dissolves. Then your wish for another comes true."

Yesterday I went with Melinda to watch swifts.



Per the website's cheerful insistence, we parked at Montgomery Park and walked three blocks along 27th to get to a lovely view of the school from the curb. But even before we could see the chimney we could hear the swifts, twittering away. When we looked up we were absolutely spellbound.



The sky was teeming with birds. It was memorizing. Swifts and swallows are the otters of the sky -- there is an frenetic exuberance to their path that comes from the diet of elusive bugs, but turns out looking like great fun. It lifts the spirits. The nearby hill featured about 50 or so people camped out with jackets and blankets applauding when the birds formed accidental formations. Children in the field turned into birds.



We gasped when a dangerous looking larger bird came darting in to sit protectively on the chimney and cheered when the mass of tiny birds chased him off. And all at once, the birds formed a spiral column and flew into the chimney.



I have never seen anything like it in my life. It looked like tiny pieces of black paper were being sucked in by a giant vacuum. Thousands of birds vying for space inside the chimney. After about a hundred made it inside the mass would regroup, circle around, form the column again, and it began again. To be sucked inside by fatigue and rapid blindness from the night. How do they do it? How do they keep from bumping into one another? How do they make it into the chimney so effortlessly?

I understand the chimney is kept on the school grounds exclusively for the purpose of this remarkable event. If I had money I would donate to help keep it there. Instead I suppose next year I could volunteer to man the Audubon Society table or mind the sandwich board at Montgomery Park. I could sweep bird droppings from the bottom of the flue. Something. I'll think of something.

I've had a dreamy couple of days.

LINKS WITHHELD

I need to share this with you, because it's creepy. And I don't know what else to do with it. And I can't stop thinking about it.

An acquaintance from high school has been surfacing on facebook lately promoting her blog and twitter feeds. Her blog, it is about blogging, but it's worse than that. It's not an insightful muse on the medium in particular, indeed there are no in depth thoughts of any kind to be found as far as I can tell. It's "instructions" on how to write a blog. How to manage a twitter feed, ten things you never knew you never knew about linkedin.

Everyone has been using these media as long as she has, and they are evolving as quickly as she can read the FAQs and lurk around on the sites. An email from Twitter itself just four days ago stated: "as Twitter has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the service." So I'm not sure how it is that she has magical knowledge beyond what I'd have access to if I gave it some thought. And I hesitate to get sage I've been there done that type knowledge in a brand new blog from a robotic technocrat.

The best part: all of this information is coming from a person who, on her facebook profile, makes sentences instead of keywords under the various "interests" categories.

Ownership, entrepreneurialship, making money. I shouldn't beef with people who are genuinely interested in the topic, but I can't help but wonder how the hell she can afford to do all this, unless she is being paid to blog (which I suspect, since those gigs generate fairly poor quality content). She isn't connecting with others, she is connecting with pixels and gadgets and things that people have to buy into, or buy. Things that people like me don't have time for. Or don't have money for.

I don't mean to pick on this person specifically, (although she has made it very easy to do,) it's the larger issue at hand.

Listen: it is stupid to pay for a domain name and have tons of banners pointing to ME ME ME when what you want to do, truthfully, is blog. Which is to say: you have thoughts you want to type out. Maybe people will read it, maybe they won't. It seems to be that people who are "successful" at this -- people who have been doing it for a long time, with a lot of content, who have a nice readable page -- just blog. They don't particularly want anything to come of it, they just do it. The readership and comments and warm feelings come later.

Because you don't need money to blog. You can get a quite serviceable blog for nothing at all, there are countless platforms to do so, and if you need help in this area we can chat about it becuase I have bounced around quite a few of them. Or ask the bloggers you read. Or something.

I keep coming back to this idea of genuine living vs. robot people, and this is such a perfect example.