You are so fixated on what you see that you can’t see past it.*
(Ben Hardy)

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what is saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can this, but thousands can think for one who can see.**
(John Ruskin)

To strain to see beyond what we presently can see, to understand more than we presently understand, these are great and worthy quests capable of changing lives, not only your own but also those of others. This has become my own experience.

Today’s Thin|Silence is the 2,500th proffering. At the back-end of 2013, I’d been wondering how I might be able to share some of what I was reading and journaling, something I’d begun fifteen years earlier.

I thought to begin a blog but needed more of a challenge to this. As I had been reading Hugh Macleod’s three books on his own blogging and doodling,^ I wondered about blogging and doodling (I’d never doodled) every day of 2014.

Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.^^

The challenge turned into a journey and, with only a few intentional interruptions for holidays, I’ve blogged every day since, and it feels as though it has taken on mythological proportions inasmuch as posing my two central questions: Who is my True Self? and What is my contribution?

The two questions must be held together. Without the first, we are unable to bring our best contribution; without the second, we are unable to find our True Self:

Seeing well is not natural. It is in act of humility. It means getting your own self – your own needs and wishes – out of the way, so that you can see the thing your are looking at as itself, and not just a mirror of your own interests. Seeing well is a skill you learn from others who see reality clearly […].*^

Seeking to grow beyond what I presently see and understand feeds into my work with others, especially in dreamwhispering, but also in doodling, and it is also in the gift in Thin|Silence, my encouragement to keep going, keep seeing, keep understanding, keep growing. May you find your way of ceaseless growth:

It is […] a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past.^*

(*From Ben Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)
(**John Ruskin, quoted in David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(^These books are Ignore Everybody, Freedom is Blogging in Your UnderWear, and Evil Plans.)
(^^From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.)
(*^From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(^*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)