Contemplating continual change is a poignant experience. It can feel sad or scary…I want time to slow down. The speed at which it moves just takes my breath away…
Feeling sad or anxious is natural when we reflect on the passage of time and the fading of all our experiences…In that very fear, in that very melancholy, is our compassionate heart, our immeasurable wisdom, our connection to all other living beings on this planet…
Pema Chodron, ‘How We Live Is How We Die”
…fear and anxiety are not the same at all. One is an appropriate response to a real situation which I can accept and learn to work through just as I work through semi-blindness. But the other, anxiety, is an immobilizing yield to things that go bump in the night, a surrender to namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence.
Audre Lorde, “The Cancer Journals”
So this fall I met cancer, as it were, from a considered position, but it still knocked me for a hell of a loop, having to deal with the pain and the fear and the death I thought I had come to terms with once before. I did not recognize then how many faces those terms had, nor how many forces were aligned within our daily structures against them, nor how often I would have to redefine the terms because other experiences kept presenting themselves. The acceptance of death as a fact, rather than the desire to die, can empower my energies with a forcefulness and vigor not always possible when one eye is out unconsciously for eternity.
Audre Lorde, “The Cancer Journals”
The method I chose for Inktober was not working for me! I run into this problem every year, it seems, getting caught up in looking at other people’s posts on social media and feeling inadequate, stodgy and uncreative, and losing the motivation to participate.
The solution I came to last year was to remind myself of the goal: to build the habit of drawing more often. That’s it.
This time, I also thought about the things that made me fall in love with the Zentangle method when I first discovered it in 2015:
After feeling bad long enough, it occurred to me that, since I chose how to participate in the first place, why could I not change course when I wasn’t getting to the calm place of enjoying pen on paper?
A random number generator gave me a set of 31 numbers between 1 and 179 — 179 being the number of official Zentangle patterns on the list curated by Linda Farmer of tanglepatterns.com, a fantastic site I’ve loved since 2015.
I use the random numbers to pick a pattern each day. If the corresponding pattern doesn’t have a link to a stepout on the tanglepatterns site, I move one position up or down on the list to a pattern that does. Ten minutes later, I was drawing and grinning again, my angsty insecurities forgotten. As it should be.
Tiles to come! I hope Inktober is going well for you, and if not, that you find a better path to your desired destination.
Listening to this song over and over and believing I’ll figure my way through.
When there’s no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice. Americans, even when they pay pious lip service to Judeo-Christian rules of moral behavior, tend to regard moral behavior as a personal decision… This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion. A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion — that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll — may be based on no information at all. At worst, unchecked by either judgment or moral tradition, personal opinion may reflect nothing but ignorance, jealousy, and fear…
…When applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow.
Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Diminished Thing” in No Time to Spare
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
Oliver Sacks, “My Own Life”
Do we ever tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, so help me God,’ as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don’t even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn’t this why we can’t help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven’t been?
Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs
You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.
Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score”
I’ll never pass your purity tests.
Rebel XIII 
You must be logged in to post a comment.