This is a painting by Erica, published on her blog, The Realist Dreamer. The title is Colourful Nudes. I like the feeling of movement in this painting.Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The Realist Dreamer
This is a painting by Erica, published on her blog, The Realist Dreamer. The title is Colourful Nudes. I like the feeling of movement in this painting.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Crossing the Unknown Sea
In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, David Whyte writes:
Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves. It is a making and an unmaking that can ultimately never be measured by money alone. In work we can indeed, and in a moment, build or ruin our fiscal fortunes, or we can slowly and imperceptibly, over long years, destroy the inner complexion of our character. Sometimes to our despair, we know instinctively that work is never done. At its worst we are Sisyphus, pushing the boulder over the last incline only to see it fall back and away, out of our grasp, to the very bottom of the slope, to be pushed back up with the same despairing effort the following Monday morning.
At its best, work seems never-ending only because, like life, it is a pilgrimage, a journey in which we progress not only through the world but through stages of understanding (2001, p. 12).This quotation speaks to me. I find myself suddenly at this stage of life going through a transition -- a midlife crisis of sorts -- in which I am asking if the work that I am doing is the right work for me, or if it is "a sleep and a forgetting" that is distracting me from the true purpose of my life.
Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves. It is a making and an unmaking that can ultimately never be measured by money alone. In work we can indeed, and in a moment, build or ruin our fiscal fortunes, or we can slowly and imperceptibly, over long years, destroy the inner complexion of our character. Sometimes to our despair, we know instinctively that work is never done. At its worst we are Sisyphus, pushing the boulder over the last incline only to see it fall back and away, out of our grasp, to the very bottom of the slope, to be pushed back up with the same despairing effort the following Monday morning.
At its best, work seems never-ending only because, like life, it is a pilgrimage, a journey in which we progress not only through the world but through stages of understanding (2001, p. 12).This quotation speaks to me. I find myself suddenly at this stage of life going through a transition -- a midlife crisis of sorts -- in which I am asking if the work that I am doing is the right work for me, or if it is "a sleep and a forgetting" that is distracting me from the true purpose of my life.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
character sketch
Holy wow, time has passed and I have had a horrible two months of excessive unpleasant overwhelming work. No time for life. Stress and all that.
I finally made it to my writing group tonight. We did a writing exercise in which we wrote a character sketch with the aim of portraying a sense of who the character was primarily through sensory description. This what I wrote:
Kevin stood in the doorway, poised with his weight on one leg, uncommitted to enter, already, one imagines, on his way down the hall. This was as much as could be hoped for -- a moment of pause, a dry observation intoned nasally, delivered with a wicked hook disguised as humour. Then down the hall he'd go, as quiet as a big cat, taut as a bicep, moving as if he were invisible, as if his steroid-built body was hidden by the Indian cotton shirt, as if there was not an electric four inches of impenetrable air space between him and anyone else passing down the hallway.
Okay -- one paragraph. That's a start.
I finally made it to my writing group tonight. We did a writing exercise in which we wrote a character sketch with the aim of portraying a sense of who the character was primarily through sensory description. This what I wrote:
Kevin stood in the doorway, poised with his weight on one leg, uncommitted to enter, already, one imagines, on his way down the hall. This was as much as could be hoped for -- a moment of pause, a dry observation intoned nasally, delivered with a wicked hook disguised as humour. Then down the hall he'd go, as quiet as a big cat, taut as a bicep, moving as if he were invisible, as if his steroid-built body was hidden by the Indian cotton shirt, as if there was not an electric four inches of impenetrable air space between him and anyone else passing down the hallway.
Okay -- one paragraph. That's a start.
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