Category Archives: Human Nature

Veiled References

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Secrets. For good or ill, we all have them. Not much remains secret for terribly long; guilt brings out our ‘tells’ and happy secrets will always do their best to bubble to the surface because we long to share them. Secrets.

Strangely, there are times when we have no secrets, too. Not just when the latest secret, good or not so good, has been revealed, but that’s often the moment of assessment when one might consider that the slate had been wiped clean. There are times when it seems that all in life goes so smoothly and predictably and transparently that no secrets are generated. Or required.

But most of us crave a little surprise, color, mystery, adventure. At least at times, we rather thrive on the frisson of the unknown, don’t we. I love to feel safe and on track, I crave it. But behind the mask of convention or genteel propriety, there somehow lurks the slightest hint of the curious child, the rebellious iconoclast, and maybe even a tiny, tiny, tiny touch of  the mischief-maker that thinks a secret is a good substitute for the more dangerous sort of thrills that lure adrenaline junkies.

Even though I know that’s a charming little delusion. Secrets can be dangerous.

Still, there is a certain amount of the unknown that fuels my imagination and brings out a part of me that’s braver and more interesting, more dedicated to seeking both answers and new questions, than my overt and ordinary, everyday self. That, I’m pretty sure, is neither a dirty secret nor a secret of any sort at all to those who know me even a bit. But I might surprise you all one day, if it should turn out that I had secret superpowers or was secretly fabulously wealthy or was secretly brilliant. I know it’d be a surprise to me, having been so successfully kept secret from my own self all this time as well. She said, looking demurely coy.Graphite drawing: Veiled Secrets

The Darker Side of Kid Scientists

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Photo + text: Too Bad for the Bug

I know it’s generally preferred that scientists take a detached and dispassionate approach to their subjects so as not to skew their studies or experimental data, but I rather think that even entomologists should show a little respect for their subjects. But kids will be kids. Also, I happen to know from my own youth that if you let on that you find something creepy or gross, it’s pretty much guaranteed that some other child will eventually figure out how to use it to torture you. Kids are charming that way.

Tenderheartedness isn’t for Softies

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It takes strength to maintain the goodwill and generosity that creates true bonds between people—individually and corporately. But through that steadfastness is the best path to peace and wholeness, a consummation devoutly to be wished.Digital illustration: Constellation

River of Stars

A river made of silver stars with sapphire deeps below,

The sweet compassion of the heart is ceaseless in its flow—

A font of healing, kindness, care; a waterfall of grace;

A draught to slake the deepest thirst; and with it, keeping pace,

Persistent hope, watered withal, along its banks to grow,

To bloom as peace, compassion’s flow’r, where starry rivers flow.

Another Boulevardier

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The pace of our usual life, the sense that we’re always Doing Important Stuff (or at least called to be doing so) sometimes makes me think we’ve all forgotten how to just take a little aimless stroll. Perhaps it does feel like a forbidden pleasure when I know a project’s been lying there waiting for my attention. All the better, then, for its seeming truancy.Digital illustration: Along the Boulevard

I’m happy to take the medical advice against sedentary death as a validation of my going for regular meanders off the normal path, if it takes me away from my current tasks, however directionless my saunters may appear. The mere physical reset is practically guaranteed to get my brain working a little better, and that alone is never a bad thing. The bits and bytes of information that slip into my mind both consciously and subconsciously act to refresh me for the work in hand and to remind me of other things I might have missed or laid aside.

I shan’t dissemble about it, though: when I get up and move, it’s mostly because I can feed my infatuation with observation. I’m just another, albeit less smooth, flâneur slouching about the avenue in search of stories to be filed under Little Adventures. No matter if they’re mine or—more likely—entirely imagined scenarios built around the lives happening all around me, to restock this collection is to refuel myself and find purpose again in both my work and my play. Then I can stroll on back to the real task at hand, and if the street has quieted or the hall emptied by then, I’ve populated my imaginings with enough enlivening Important Stuff to keep me going until my next outing.

How They Came to Winnipeg (Mapping History)

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Digital illustration + text: The Plains I

Text: The Plains II

Text: The Plains III

The Effects of Gravity

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It’s wonderfully simple. Physics. Science. Gravity pulls us down. It’s a force that draws everything to it. Living creatures, all of us on the planet, are pulled toward the dense center of the earth just as we go along through our lives toward the time when we will reach the end, die, and be buried in the earth, drawn at last more fully toward its heart.

But along the way, it’s possible to pull against gravity, too. What happens if we choose to resist for a bit in life? How high can we rise? Any one of us rises to our highest point of all, I’ll be bound, when we choose to raise up someone else. It’s in elevating others that we ourselves are best elevated.Digital illustration: Against Gravity

Going Ahead Blindly

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Digital illustration from a photo: Blurred LinesWhat if my eyesight should fail? Could I ever have enough insight to compensate for eyesight? Others do it all the time, both those blind from birth and those who lose their eyesight. I’m visually oriented, if not obsessed. Does that mean that as a visually impaired or blind person I’d be lost? Ruined? Hopeless? Other people manage to navigate a rich, full world without ever seeing it, and to have a deep, powerful sensory life without relying on eyesight.

One of the real questions here is how I live with change. Do I roll with it, or roll over and capitulate? The other underlying query is, from what do I derive my sense of self? Is it dependent on what I can see, and what I can do with it, or does my inner vision determine much more usefully who I am and what I value, and perhaps even what of value I can still bring to the rest of the world? If others have so beautifully managed to see the great and good whether they had functional eyes or not, I like to think—I hope—that I too will successfully adjust and adapt no matter what my life brings. May it be so. May it always be so.Digital illustration from photos: Vegetal Vision

Revival

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My subject in today’s poem is identified as a woman, but mainly because the pronoun ‘her’ fit the text that was already emerging in the sonnet. In my heart, the subject is meant to honor all of my friends and acquaintances [regardless of persuasion] who have battled, or are still battling, their way up from the abysses of fear, anxiety, depression, abuse, or any form of personal darkness, whether inwardly generated or externally imposed. What you have done, and are doing, is powerful. What you can do may be more than you, or I, or anyone can possibly yet imagine. Continue your journeys upward, my friends. Sing from the branches of the Tree of Life for a change. Newness can be a beautiful thing!

From Her Grave

Arising from the heart of silent night,

the poignant voice of one whose singular

accomp’niment was always, only, her

own shadow, takes the unaccustomed flight—

Ascending, she now meets the morning sun

and hears at last a sound she’d never heard;

the brilliant singing of a splendid bird,

a song that chases shadows, ev’ry one—

And hers, along with all the shadows, flies;

now wakened, she is free to wholly shed

her residence in shade among the dead

and fly up, singing gladly, to the skies—

So freed, she dares to trust her new-fledged wing

to raise up others from their dark to sing.Digital illustration: Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life

A happy, healthy and hopeful New Year to everyone!

2014 will soon be So Yesterday!

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Digital illustration from photos: Pedaling Furiously

Here we go again, pedaling furiously into the next year. Wow! So much hustling and hurtling. So many fireworks going off in every direction! So many possibilities.

First, a little bit of a kindly sendoff for the year-that-was. A tasty dinner together with my beloved, a refreshing glass of brut champagne for an early toast, just in case we don’t care about staying up until midnight. We’re not fussy about holidays and parties and when they get celebrated, and yeah, we’re kind of old geezers about a whole lot of things, and have been since way before we were technically old, or geezers. In any event, as ordinary as we are in most ways, we’re not necessarily conventional in many of them, either, so we sip our champagne at 7:30 pm and wash down our steak and roasted potatoes with it. The apple crostata didn’t set up, so it was better served as applesauce (with the few little bits of the crust that toasted up properly) for dessert, and washed down with homemade eggnog. No big deal; the day when a crostata doesn’t crisp up fully before the filling tries to scorch is neither a new thing nor the end of the world.Photo: Meat & Potatoes are Nothing New

And the eggnog was spiked, after all.

Happy New Year’s Eve!

2014 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 22,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 8 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.