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Showing posts from April, 2022

A whimsy

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  “If you had known when you started you may not eventually get to know.” 😬 This drawing started as a practice for drawing chrysanthemums. I wanted to draw two stalks of chrysanthemums, one slightly different from the other. When I finished, at the spur of the moment I decided to draw a glass half full (or half empty haha) as a companion for the flowers. It felt right. It felt like the flowers needed the glass. But after the glass entered their world, the flowers began to look instead like they were floating in mid-air, their lack of rootedness accentuated by the weight of the glass at the bottom of the drawing. Hmm, was I wrong? I looked at this picture all evening and returned to it at night. Then I realized! It wasn’t that that flowers needed the glass as their companion. The flowers needed nothing but each other. The glass, however, needed the flowers. I drew 2 glass bottles around the stalks of the flowers, a mottled square-bottomed one and a round short-necked one. Two glass bot

At home in yourself

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  Sunday, I only spoke once to a human being - “thanks, no need plastic bag.” I may also have said “keep going” aloud to a plant fighting a mild infestation of mealy bugs. For an introvert, Sunday was paradise. Years ago I had this conversation with James about what he would do when alone - the most natural and enjoyable thing that came to mind. I rejected his immediate answer “sleep”, and he, after some thinking, replied “running”. It was an equally honest answer. When he could not solve a problem or crack a brief, when he wanted time alone, when he needed to feel better about himself, even when we were overseas on holiday - he went running. As he got older, he ran shorter distances and less, and perhaps that reflected all the stresses building up in his life. My answer then was “drawing”. It still is. Reading, writing or watching a film are second nature to me, but there is something different about drawing… Maybe because there is a visceral quality about the act of drawing - the sme

Fear

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  This photo of Toddler C was taken a couple of nights ago. She had fallen asleep in my bedroom. When she woke up an hour or so later in the unfamiliar room, she somehow got down the bed on her own and took a sleepy stumble down the dark hallway to the living room where her parents and I were chatting. She didn’t cry. She must have heard her parents’ voices and was drawn instinctively towards them - and the light. And soon, she was asleep again. This time on my new couch (comfort test passed!) It made me think that the opposite of fear is not courage, it is security. “For God gave us not a spirit of fear but of power, of love and of self-control. /ε› η‚Ίη₯žζ‰€θ΅η»™ζˆ‘δ»¬ηš„δΈζ˜―θƒ†ζ€―ηš„η΅,θ€Œζ˜―ζœ‰θƒ½εŠ›、仁爱、θ‡ͺεΎ‹ηš„η΅” A friend gave me a card with this verse in Chinese a few years ago. During that time, by sheer chance, J found out that she and I were both at the same hospital, a week apart, and with the same neurosurgeon! This coincidence was a great comfort to him then, it felt like God’s providence. Although the context for