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...

  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...

  Vic and I in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan last year.  Good afternoon. I went for another walk this morning with Vic. It seems that the only way to get myself out of my chair is to go somewhere in the morning. I’ve always been a morning person in terms of energy. By lunch I start winding down, by mid-afternoon I start a steady descent into the Mariana Trench of lethargy so that by evening I’m barely a functioning adult. I’ve always been this way, even as a child. I’m a sprinter, not a distance runner. Hot out of the gate, heaving and panting after 50 yards.  So, I’m trying hard to get a morning walk into my routine before I hit that mental wall and go comatose.  I’m not in love with my options for walking around here. I don’t live far from Lake Michigan and the park system that runs the length of Chicago, but just far enough to make walking there and back the extent of my nascent exercise regimen and it’s not until the very end of that route that there’s a payoff...

  A thumbnail sketch I did of a house in our neighborhood while on a walk this morning with Vic. I have a tendency to draw slanted—as you can see. I am not going to watercolor or shade this sketch which would give it a nice 3-D look because 1) it’s wonky 2) I will redraw it tomorrow and put the front door in the middle even though that is not how it is.   But this is my first attempt at drawing something that I didn’t find on the internet, but just from walking around. So, I’m pleased, even with the wonky-ness.                                                                                      ********* I’m back after hitting a bump in my blog journey. It’s not that I don’t have enough to say. I have too much to say. I have d...

Another video lesson, another sketch Let’s take a break from navel-gazing. The sun is shining. My granddaughters are coming to see us today. This weekend we’re going with my daughter’s family to the orchid show at the arboretum. I went there a couple of years ago with my sister and brother and sister-in-law. It was like walking onto another planet, one a of color and harmony. The grey skies and cold were outside, inside the air was warm and thick with unshed rain, a jungle-dream of Life’s astounding fecundity.   Some people are offended at the idea of evolution but I think it’s a marvelous thing. I love the idea that we, as the top sentient beings on the planet, could have developed with four arms, a face full of eyes, or no eyes at all—how sad. We could be amphibians! Have wings as babies that we only shed as our proportional weight increased. Oh, evolution is not anti-God, it’s pro-creative, it’s art, it’s wonder. I tell my grandkids all the time: we’re artists, we’re meant to cr...

Another day, another sketch  I have, as you know if you’ve read previous posts, been pondering Acedia. The noon-demon of spiritual torpor. It is a kissing cousin to many of the seven deadly sins.  There. I stepped in it. I wrote the word, sins. How quaint, how embarrassing. But above all, how judgemental. Sin evokes puritanical disapproval, punishment deserved and rightfully meted out. It’s right up there with the rantings of demon possession and self-flagellation. Surely, we’re beyond such ignorance.  Yet, I would argue that without a deep understanding of sin, we forgo an understanding of wrong. And if we acknowledge no wrong on our collective or individual part, we have lost our way, because without wrong we lose right . Without sin we lose hope for transformation into something better. If millenniums of murder, greed, hatred, and disastrous tribalism are just one big misunderstanding, then we are stuck in a spiral of our own self-justification.  Kathleen Norri...

  I would like to be a cup-half-full person. I regularly sit down with myself and go over all the good things that are happening, all the good that has happened, and the good that will surely be in the future. But, it is not my first reaction. I know that with the joys, life is a series of sorrows that can’t be circumvented.  My family loved to catastroph-fy. We would hold intense debates over how to spend the insurance money should a parent die. (We were always on the edge of financial destitution. I believe we slunk out of several towns with unpaid bills in our wake.)  By the time I was in 10th grade I had been in 8 different schools in 8 different towns. I loved moving. My sister and brother would moan and fight and cry about moving, but I loved it. (One time, after the announcement of an imminent move, my sister was so traumatized she had the hiccups for days.)  For my ever-optimistic mother, relocation signaled a new start. Moving didn’t mean new start to me. ...

    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...

                                                            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...