Get On the Bus

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...