Over the years, I've accumulated hundreds of drawings. These range from vague doodles to preliminary sketches for paintings. Sometimes, I take these stacks of drawings off their shelf and spread them all around my floor to look at them. Above is a window into what that looks like.
Today I feel as scattered as these drawings. Waiting for my day's news work to arrive by email, getting ready for a crypto event tonight, my thoughts are all over the place and I don't quite know where to put my energy. So I'm reflecting on the timeless, trying to observe the sacred in the everyday. Trying to glimpse the deeper patterns over which the world is draped.
The sacred sings in everything, but there's a trick to hearing its song. I'm not saying that I know what this trick is. Sometimes I accidentally stumble upon it, only to lose it again for no obvious reason. Maybe it has to do with presence; with fixing awareness to the unfolding present moment. Maybe it is instead a matter of luck.
Either way, I try to pay attention to the song of the sacred to the extent that I'm able to. And what I find there weighs heavily into my decisions. This hasn't always resulted in the best decisions. And yet I persist, in folly as often as not.
On days like this, I miss my rock doves. Named Enki and Enlil after the old gods, these little birds once lived in the attic with me but they died years ago. They were extremely stupid, like miniature pigeons, but I didn't love them for their intelligence. I used to let them out of their cage and chase them around to make sure they got enough exercise. And the song they sung was the gentlest of cooing.
Recalling Enki and Enlil, I feel only appreciation that they were in my life at a time when I was fully preoccupied with the hardships of cluster headaches and poverty. I'd buy these little birds small bags of millet with change scavenged from roadside gutters. When friends came over, I'd show them the birds and they were always impressed. It was a challenging time, but having doves helped.
These days, I have no birds and I barely draw at all anymore. For many years, I drew every day, wherever I was. I'd sketch people on the bus and sit at coffee shops until they closed, working on whatever picture needed to manifest. This made me a passable artist, but I'm so out of practice now that I doubt I could even paint a live portrait anymore.
I don't regret this, but it's the kind of thing I like to acknowledge. In truth, I'm probably happier as a writer than I was as a painter. The work is comparably engaging and the money is better. Plus, my writing reaches a far wider audience than my paintings ever did, so my contribution to culture feels more substantive. If there's a larger purpose involved here, maybe it has something to do with that.
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