Get On the Bus

Shelby Foote on the left and Walker Percy on the right.  I read Proust in college, but it has taken reading the letters of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy to make me want to go back and read him again.  Certainly a complicated man, homosexual, liberal yet anti-socialsim, anti-Catholic–though raised Catholic–an atheist, yet very complimentary of the Christians who were willing to speak up for the poor and middle-class and go against the Church’s power. He was against the absolishment of the clergy as he felt that there were many good and honest monks/priests, and that there were as many “scoundrel” secular people as religious ones.  A novelist, essayist and literary critic. As I said a complicated man. When his father insisted that he get a job, he obtained a volunteer position at the famous french library, the Bibliotheque Mazarine. Immediately after, he took sick leave and never worked there (or anywhere for that matter) a day of his life, although he continued on their ro...

Amsterdam. Recent watercolor.  The Desert Fathers and Mothers, according to Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me defined sin as “bad thoughts.” They said that sin, at its source, was a matter of the mind, of skewed thinking. From these bad thoughts came bad actions.  Somewhere along the line bad actions began to edge out bad thoughts in importance. “Well, everyone has bad thoughts,” we say, “you can’t control them, so just concentrate on the actions. Besides, bad thought alone, don’t hurt anyone” And while it is true from a victim’s standpoint, (I would much rather you think bad thoughts about me then physically assault me,) neglecting the inner source of the drive to assault me (bad thoughts of greed, impatience, competition, control, etc) fails to address the human condition at its core, thus cutting off the thinker in this scenario from the only path of rescue. The church as it grew in power both politically and socially, turned the Desert Fathers’s and Mother’s focus from our ...

    Vic and I in a mythical Paris restaurant run by the great chef of the family, Christy.  I have been reading the Gospel of John. I basically switch between Matthew and John, but John is my true love. It often seems to me that the other three’s agenda (Matthew, Mark and Luke) is largely to legitimize Jesus as the Messiah and to lay out his most basic teachings,  I do not mean to trivialize the teachings by saying they are basic as they are the nuts and bolts of true spirituality. They are so basic (foundational), so hard, so transformative all at the same time that we will need our entire lives to turn into the kind of people who can claim any kind of adherence. Think of it like when C. S. Lewis titled his apologetics, Mere Christianity , even as it simultaneously covers the bare minimum of what is required of us while plumbing the deepest yearnings and pitfalls of our fallen state. But John—perhaps because it was written later when supposedly people were familiar ...

  Vic and I visit Germany in an alternate universe.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair. - Walker Percy, The Moviegoer Ahhh, Walker Percy. Makes me want to sit down and read his entire canon again. To be in despair, he seems to be saying, is to deny yourself the possibilities all around you. The antidote to despair is to allow yourself to poke around your cosmic and everyday neighborhood, searching always searching. The alternative is to focus obsessively on the cause of our despair. It is our parents, our neighbors, our fickle friends, church, book group, co-workers, children, where we live, our government, our mar...

  Most recent Ink and Watercolor. I like to think of this as a vision of Vic and I sitting companionably on a  bench as we hike/visit the Alps.  Good morning.  Working through Kathleen Norris again. As a young wife setting up house on her grandmother’s farm in the “desert” of South Dakota, her interest is peaked when she visits a monastery 90 miles north to hear a  author speak. Afterwards, she had a list of questions and wrote them in a letter to one of the monks she had met. He answered as best he could and sent her a dense book on theology. When that didn’t do the trick he advised her to read the letters of Flannery O’Connor.  In O’Connor Norris found a kindred soul: a serious writer striving to incorporate faith into the human experience. Norris struggled with the twin desires to write and to explore faith—a combination she had come to see as impossible while in college—and while not antagonistic to her grandmother’s little church down the road, she cou...

I re-sketched the thumbnail from the other day and added ink and watercolor. I am proud of this piece because it is the first one that I did totally on my own: finding a building I wanted to draw, working through the perspectives, and layering colors, etc with no outside guidance. It’s a beautiful home one block away and I never noticed it in 30+ years! It’s tucked into a little dead end street next to the school, and I just never walked that way or if I did, never stopped to really look.  Day four of morning walking. Vic and I headed out at 8 o’clock this morning for our walk. I way overdressed and on the way home Vic carried my coat. I could have carried it myself, but Vic wanted to do it, so I gave in and gave it to him. He is a very very thoughtful man. I think it really bugs him that his role as protector and provider has gotten smaller. So, anything he can do, he’s pretty persistent in doing. He worries if I drive after dark, so even if he’s comfortable in his chair or busy w...