Author: miguel

“It’s an amaryllis. Why not just take a photo instead of going to all of the trouble of drawing it?”

A fair enough question. It’s difficult to imagine a world without photographs, and if I could imagine one, it’s not a world I’d like to live in. So why draw? Well, drawing takes time and requires a lot of paying attention. Your doctor has probably already advised you that slowing down is good for your health. Believe her!

Around the Winter Solstice a friend gave me a brownish, spherical thing, half-buried in dirt. I knew what it was called, but why name it? I just sat and looked at it for long whiles, especially on rainy days, as if it were something that had appeared unexpectedly from another planet.

I like drawing with a pencil and colors rather than taking photos. The slowness and deliberation of drawing allows you to pay attention, to wait, to be patient, to listen. To learn.

To learn what?

First: looking is not one-sided: it’s a partnership, a dance with what you observe. Whatever you are drawing is also looking back at you. We don’t notice, yet the world observes us.

Second: I called my friend’s gift a “spherical thing.” But it’s more than a noun: it’s a verb. In other words, it’s an energy: it’s not just a being, but also a becoming.

Third: Dancing is an energy field you share with your partner. You become a flow and it becomes you.

There’s more to share, but I’m running out of characters and spaces for this post. Besides, it has stopped raining and the world on the other side of the window is beginning to turn white.

Days of cruelty and hatred, days of fear and greed, days of gunshots, insults, tears of children: frigid days of grieving families and laughing prison guards.

Our Greek ancestors would call a time like this an Age of Iron. Such ages are only mere flickers of earlier, kinder times. Humans have “grown so wicked they will worship power; might will be right to them, and reverence for the good will cease to be.” Edith Hamilton wrote these words in a time of war, in 1940, her precursor of now, our own dark times, our wars against each other.

What to do? How not to hate those who hate you?

To celebrate long winter nights, a friend gave me a brown sphere, about the size of my fist. It had papery skin and green, blade-like wings emerging from its crown. Just looking at it helped to calm my hatred, anger, and frustration. I put it in a pail of dirt on a window sill, gave it a drink of water and began to draw it. After a few days it looked like this, phallic and vulvic at the same time.

In the next few posts I’ll draw for you how it opened itself and how I listened as it whispered and unfolded its arms.

Meanwhile:

The temple bell stops
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers

—Basho (1644-1694)

This morning in our town I watched
an angel and a woman walking on Maple Street.
Unaccustomed to the fall of leaves
and to the laws of gravity the
angel stumbled and fell.

The woman watched in silence as it struggled to its feet.

A gray wind from our next storm scoured
a row of trees above us and filled
the air with a cloud of leaves, like a
flock of red and yellow butterflies.

Astonished with wonder, the angel watched
the butterflies (I mean the leaves)
in wide-eyed amazement, mouth open,
as if it had just beheld the Easter Bunny.
Then it fell over backwards on its rump.

The woman smiled, murmured something, watched
the angel gain its feet and wobble toward
a white-haired man – a fellow walker,
fellow-stranger –
under the bare branches.

Without a backward glance at the
woman, the celestial creature, with
incandescent gaze and utter trust, offered
a gift in its tiny hand and
placed it carefully in his.

“Good girl, Iris,” said the woman.

Not far away, only a few blocks
away, the dictator’s masked
gunmen prowl the streets.
They “deport” men and women,
children too, into unmarked
cars and “military vehicles.”

The stranger walks away in the
direction of the troops. The angel’s gift
floats above his hand, as precious
as all these mornings in Autumn.