Get On the Bus

                     The reference pic for this ink and watercolor sketch I did reminded me of Bushnell and all the wonderful years we had a place there. I just acted like my mom and gave the picture a kiss .   Vic and I had a good walk this morning.  The weather the past few days has been fantastic. It’s cool, high 60s low 70s, it’s sunny, there’s a slight breeze, just perfect.   We headed west out of the front door and circled around a few blocks ending up at the corner bodega for a couple packs of tortillas before home and breakfast. Days like these make me impatient for the trike to arrive. We are so blessed. Johnny and Tina have paid for the lion’s share of getting us a 3-wheel, 2-seat bike that we can use to get around. Mostly I’m excited at the prospect of us taking trips up and down and lakefront together. Vic can no longer ride a bike and we miss being able to go out to the parks and see the wa...

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...