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...
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Story
It took me two days to finish this sketch because I was on vacation and ran out of ink and had to wait until I got home. Here’s to good sketching partners like Di. Thank you for sitting with me while I use my imagination today and tomorrow. All my life I’ve used Story as mother, father, confidant, side kick, brother, sister, best friend, teacher, lover. People ask, “Where would you have been without books in your life?” And I think about the desolation of a childhood without Nello and Patrasche, without Scout Finch, or Bilbo. But, But, but, I would not, even then, have been stripped of Story. Story and the imagination it holds tight to its heart, is, in the words of Ursula Le Guin, “an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.” Even those we might imagine with no imagination, use Story. The gruff farmer looks over his field and imagines when the rain will come. He remembers past...
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 ...
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