This week I am away with family in a place with no phone reception or mains electricity, so I have set this and the next post up for you in my absence and will get back to the next written essay on my return.
All my life I have filled note books and loose leaves of paper with drawings, doodles, plans, lists, notes and diagrams. Some years, written notes prevail; others years, drawings. Between 2019-2020, Venn diagrams were a constant, helpful way of feeling and thinking through difficult experiences and recurrent ideas. I like them as they include both graphic and written elements, which makes them a strong tool for a visually-minded person like me. For a while I made the Venn ‘day-a-grams’ daily, using a basic outline which I drew and photocopied, then coloured with watercolours or inks, and wrote on with my regular pen. I came across them in my only remaining scrap book the other day, and was struck by the way in which they often distilled how I felt, so much so, that I am transported right back to that short, intense time living aboard the ‘dream boat’ I designed and had built, Wassail. Today I’ll share a few with you. Perhaps you will feel the urge to sketch a few for yourself. Let me know how you get on with them, if you do.
I’ll share some more another time. Warm greetings from elsewhere.
On drawing and seeing.
A joke to tickle my good old bushcraft buddies Joe and Theresa.
Apparent reality…
Strange gravity. I have met quite a few cult leader types in my life1, so this is a fond ‘sketch from life’ while on the train, rather than a dispassionate description.
How I looked at rebuilding a relationship that had taken a knock.
This one is a little hard to read. So here’s the subtitles:
Sometimes / you gotta / get through / the day / by / whatever / means2
This week’s good things:
Firstly, the film maker Jonny Randall has written a compassionate and resonant piece for Dark Mountain this week, Preparing the Ground. It was what I needed to read today, while I still struggle to shake well-earned exhaustion.
John Burnside is a Scottish writer, an award winning poet, novelist and memoirist and probably the only Taoist in my country whose I could name. He was on BBC Radio 3 in 2012 talking about Tao with Joan Bakewell, who, sadly, was a very poor questioner. Nevertheless, I was gobsmacked to even hear someone from an ordinary background talking openly about the path I held dear. I wrote an email to John, thanking him for the interview and more generally, for his novels, which I had been devouring at the time. He was kind enough to reply. Last week
posted a poem of his at the end of her newsletter, and it sent me back to Burnside’s wonderful work. Thanks, Sharon, it’s time for me to finally start bothering my local library again. Here is a section that moved me deeply, from the very end of an excellent poem of his, Settlements. Do go and read it all at the Scottish Poetry website, here.-it’s bright as the notion of home: not something held or given but the painful gravity that comes of being settled on the earth redeemable inventive inexact and capable of holding what we love in common making good with work and celebration charged to go out unprepared into the world
and have very deliberately avoided becoming one, despite the ease with which some people wish to give away their autonomy….
It ain’t poetry, but if this is you today, I send a cheery wave and hope you succeed. Chin up. Write it down, maybe in a Venn.
He’s a stunning poet; back in my Scottish publishing days he was a real beacon. Him and Robin Robertson. I have all the poetry collections of both men.
The Venn day-a-grams got me thinking -- maybe one could also explore this within relationships, to see how people perceived each other? It might result in some surprises, of course...