Get On the Bus

                                                            My latest sketch I’m really bad at prayer. Years ago our church community would hold prayer vigils where you signed up for slots that went all through the night.  I tried. I signed up for the middle of the night slots. I signed up for morning slots, afternoon slots, evening slots. They were all equally coma-inducing in their boredom. Perhaps it’s a matter of focus. Perhaps a matter of being easily bored. Don’t know, but I really disliked it—I was going to say I hated it, but my mother drilled in me that words matter and we should reserve the word “hate” for Satan and Hitler. Hate being too big of a word for mundane things like praying for a solid hour or two.. The people who seemed really good at prayer vigils and maintaining daily prayer habits  made...

A loose sketch I did from a YouTube video on learning how to urban sketch. I like how whimsical it turned out.   Frederich Buechner wrote in Whistling in the Dark that a good marriage is like Jesus’s miracle of the water into wine: a transmutation from one thing to another thing. You can’t stay the same as you were before and have a good marriage, there has to be, among other things,  growth toward a common entanglement.  I know I know, we mustn’t marry in order to accommodate someone else’s vision of ourselves and we mustn’t marry in order to change another person into our vision of who they should be.  Agreed.   That is a recipe for disaster. I have witnessed many of these disasters befall my friends and family.  Yet, a true marriage—one that honors the individual needs and dreams of both people—does change us. And if it’s a good marriage we become more of who we are (more wine-like) with them than we would without them. I have a good marriage. I wa...

  Work in progress. My mother taught me to rug hook years ago and recently I’ve picked it up again. I simplified a favorite watercolor. Vogue fabric moved! I was looking for some 100% wool to work on a tree in my rug hooking project and Joann’s had only one cream option, and everything else was a wool blend, which I don’t want.  Micheal’s had a better selection but only online, so I wouldn’t have been able to work on my next piece of the rug for a week or two, so I thought of Vogue. They’ve always had a wonderful selection of fabrics. Indeed the sheer volume of what they have is what made me initially look for easier options.  I know where Vogue Fabrics is in Evanston. I have been there many times. I thought I had been there in the last year or two. I only googled the address to see the fastest route. But google kept giving me directions that didn’t make sense. Left on Oakteon off of Ridge. NO, Vogue in on Main Street, Evanston. I persisted. Google persisted. The dis-embo...

Vic and I the day after our engagement (1973) A jumble of loosely connected thoughts: I am reading Kathleen Norris’s, Acedia and Me.   Again .   I have marked up that book so thoroughly that it would be practically unreadable to anyone but myself.  In discussing Truth in previous posts,  I have shared a few examples of my falling short of the mark. Believe me, I could fill up a tome with such examples, but writing, much less reading, it would  be beyond tedious. My sins are annoyingly repetitious.  Kathleen writes, “Acedia will always take the path of least resistance.” I read somewhere that in order to grow we must firstly learn to distinguish right from wrong, and secondly recognize—on a very conscious level— that right will always be harder to embrace in times of trouble than wrong. The path of least resistance for me is a revolving door of defensiveness, despair, fear, and petty thoughts. Where I have grown is in recognizing these demons of Acedia. I ha...

Doodle of the cabin at Lake Summerset I’ve been on a truth journey lately, examining my ideas of Truth and seeing how they match up with what Jesus taught about the subject and how to apply it me. Truth is a slippery thing at times. It reminds me of Einstein’s theory of relativity wherein time and space bend relative to our perspective, or where we are situated historically and geographically. It is not that time is changing, it isn’t, or that sound waves are changing, or gravity is changing, but how we experience it changes according to where we are situated.  I have come to believe that the closest we will ever find to absolute truth in our daily lives will never be discovered in a set of do’s and don’t, or spiritual formulas, but rather through an example of Jesus’s life.  Anytime Jesus wanted to explain a big umbrella truth, he used stories. Stories are way harder to pin down, and I think that is exactly the point. We want so badly to pin things down. Rules, lists of spiri...

I never intended to use this blog as some kind of confessional, but I did decide that I would push away any concerns about content and just write whatever was rolling around in my brain. And “What is Truth?” is currently looping in my brain. Since the last post, where I discussed how competitive and jerky I can be, I have not been able to get one interaction in particular out of my mind. Set up: Long time friend, someone I have known since they were a teenager. Grown apart over the years but still with a lot of shared history.  They were moving away. A mutual friend said that it was a touchy situation and that they didn’t want to be approached and didn’t want to answer any questions about their plans. I never discussed the move with them, but we both enjoyed gardening and would often talk about our plants, and sometimes our kids, etc, safe topics, all the while ignoring the fact that they were soon to be across the country.  The catalyst: Months later; the move is imminent. I...

  What is Truth?                                                  This morning’s doodle “Well, the truth is . . .”  “Own your truth . .”  “That’s not how I remember it . . . Not how it went down . . .”  “You weren’t there. You don’t know the truth . . .” Or the wonderfully infamous, “You can’t handle the truth . ..” When I get into a “he said, she said” argument, I become very competitive about what is the truth of the situation. I want there to be a CCTV recording to prove I am right. I wage an aggressive campaign of Rightness.   But I have learned that the harder I press my rightness, it means that I know on some level that I am, in truth, not right. What’s driving my certainty is not certainty, but a nagging sense of being in the wrong. Even if there was a CCTV recording that played out the way I said it happened, I...

“Age is Just a Number” I don’t like those banal sayings: “You’re only as old as you think you are.” “Age is just a number.” Arggghh, me thinks the elderly do protest too much.  Yet, I’m living it. When in our twenties and thirties, we would load up the kids (those born to us and those we took in) and travel to my grandmother’s senior-living apartment in Florida. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, enjoyed our visits, enjoyed being around ‘young folk’ and bitterly complained that she was surrounded by old people. She never joined in with the myriad of activities available to her: bingo, cards, outings to town in an 15-seater old-people-mobile. She hated living with old people, with scheduled activities, and nurse check-ins. She refused to be babysat or to drink the kool-aid of Oldness.  As children, we grandkids would call her our modern grandma , as opposed to my father’s mother, who was our old-fashioned grandmother. I loved them both. My modern grandmother lived in a retir...

When Did 7:30 Become Early   kdscout@hotmail.com We’ve gotten into the habit of sleeping in to 9 or even 9:30 every morning. All my life I’ve been an early riser, even and maybe most especially on weekends and holidays. Even five years ago, sleeping into 9 would have felt off.  You might think that now that we are retired. (I hesitate to say that word, retired, because there was never anything official. We just quit doing stuff, like going to a job—VIc, driving trucks, and me, teaching, school administrating, etc. we just stopped.)  Anyhow, you might think that being retired means we stay up late. so getting up everyday at 9:30 makes some sense. A little yes but mostly no. We do regularly stay all the way up to 9:30 pm nowadays, whereas for the last decade or so, I went to bed at 8:30. (I know, I know this is a ridiculous time for an adult to go to bed each night, but me and early bedtime is another story for another time.)  So we usually go to bed at 9:30 and get up...