And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone … .*

Whatever it is we want to contribute
or produce through our lives,
The likelihood is that it will benefit when wrapped in routine.

Though we will not find a shop on the high street,
Nor some online store, providing ready-made routines and rituals
We can shape our own
through trial and error,
Whilst always stimulating and stirring its life through adaptation.

We learn from others –
I’m beginning to read Mason Currey’s book on how history’s famous
shaped their daily routines –
About what to include and what to avoid,
Helping us to create our own
within our particular restrictions and limitations.**

*Matthew 14:23;
**I wish I had more time, but I have until around 9.30am each day to read and journal, and blog and doodle, before turning my attention to my four days of university work spread over five days.

The shape of each soul is different. An individual is a carefully fashioned, unique world. The shape of the flaw that each person carries is also different. The flaw is the special shape of personal limitation; angled at a unique awkwardness to the world, it makes our difficulty and challenge in the world different from that of others.*
John O’Donohue

Look at the person sitting to the right of you. And if there’s no person on the right, look at the person sitting to the left. That person and you differ at over a million locations in you DNA.**
Lee Silver

Why can’t you fit in?
Why can’t you be like everyone else?

Perhaps we need to take a closer look at that difference we carry,
The awkwardness,
The odd-angleness we feel.
See where it leads,
What it hooks up to.

Mason Currey introduced me to pie-artist Wayne Thiebaud
whose breakthrough in painting happened when he began painting food:

I could not from then on leave that subject matter alone, and it was because the drawing and the painting was coming together in this very interesting way.^

Here is the discovery of what my friend Alex McManus
and writer-artist Elle Luna call
must:
The stuff our lives are whispering to us about,
Only they’re drowned out by the shouts to fit in,
To be like everyone else.

Currey then, is right to ask us:

isn’t this what we’re all seeking as painters or writers or musicians or other makers-of-things – to strike a vein of work that we can’t leave alone, and where we can shed our inhibitions and find “charm and freedom” in the work?^^

The thing you are looking for lies with you,
Just waiting for a story to be unwrapped from.

When you trust yourself enough to discover and integrate your strangeness, you bestow a gift on yourself.*

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Quoted in Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
^Wayne Thiebaud, quoted in Mason Currey’s Subtle Manoeuvres blog: Wayne Thiebaud on finding “charm and freedom” in your work;
^^Mason Currey’s Subtle Manoeuvres blog: Wayne Thiebaud on finding “charm and freedom” in your work.

Children know something most people have forgotten. Children possess fascination with their everyday existence that is very special and would be very helpful to adults if they could lear to understand and respect it.*
Keith Haring

But we are also a species continually blinkered — sometimes touchingly, sometimes tragically — by our own delusions about the totality around us. Our greatest limitation is not that of imagination but that of perspective – our lens is too easily contracted by the fleeting urgencies of the present, too easily blurred by the hopes and fears of our human lives.**
Maria Popova

It’s the hardest thing in the world:
Not to become blinkered,
To remain open for as long as possible
to as much and as many as possible,
The reward being the opening of more of the possibility
each life contains.

*Keith Haring Journals;
**The Marginalian: Achieving Perspective: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell and the Poetry of the Cosmic Perspective (David Byrne Reads Pattiann Rogers).

Belief in one’s self is only a mirror of belief in other people and every person.*
Keith Haring

When you discover something new about yourself, you become more grounded and free. It is delightful when you find out more of your hidden light, when the radiance inside you glimmers through in new unexpected colours.**
John O’Donohue

I have told the story quite a few times.
Back in 2005, I was part of a group
identifying talents,
With the hope of growing these into strengths.
Chip Anderson, who was guiding us,
Gave each of us a pair of glasses at the end of the day,
Asking us to use these over the following days for looking at ourselves,
And also to look around at others.
The message was clear,
And I have never forgotten it:
In discovering our own talents and abilities,
We will also ever see people in a different way.
In this, my life and my work were changed,
Eventually giving up what I had been doing for decades
to be able to pursue helping people find their treasure.

*Keith Haring Journals;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.*
Carlos Casteneda

We are confronted with an unattractive direction that we have to take. For weeks or months we have to travel through limbo; the comfort and security of our familiar belonging lies far behind us. Where we will belong next has yet to become clear.**
John O’Donohue

Limbo is a place we must journey through.
Rather than the suspension of purpose and movement we might imagine it to be,
It is actually the unfamiliar,
An unexperience,
Until we allow to be what it is,
A real place our path with a heart is leading us through
for some transformation to occur,
But it is not a place for us to abide.

*Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

If you’ve got something that benefits from use, from practice and community, use it and share it.*
Seth Godin

The best reason to pain is that there is no reason to paint.**
Keith Haring

Keith Haring encourages us not to be precious
about our art –
whatever this be –
I think this is partly why he was so prolific in his too short a life.
Not only producing for the big sponsors,
But also for small ventures,
Generous,
Often gifting his artistry,
Especially to children.

*Seth Godin’s blog: The practice effect;
**Keith Haring Journals.

The awakening of individuality is a continual unfolding of our presence.
John O’Donohue

It’s a cause of relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, full independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.**
Oliver Burkeman

I write these posts because I believe you have so much to bring,
And I want to encourage you to bring it.

I also write the posts to encourage myself,
I know that if I don’t give my ideas some tangible form
I am not being present but absent,
And when I notice this I get cranky.
See O’Donohue and Godin,
They know, they understand:

It often takes a lot of struggle and committed attention and generosity, even sacrifice, to create beauty.*

Mortals must do what they are here to create or they will become cranky.^

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
^Seth Godin’s Tales of the Revolution.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. … Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.*
Carlos Casteneda

If your plan, your idea or your art doesn’t involve any significant hurdles in moving forward, it’s probably not worth that much. If it were easy, everyone would do it. The tactic is to seek a path where you see and understand the significant hurdles that kept others away. And then dance with them. They’re not a problem, they’re a feature.**
Seth Godin

Don’t believe your path with a heart will be easy,
Or pleasurable.
Significant,
Meaningful,
Transformational
will become more important.

May you know your heart
and understand it,
so that you may follow wherever it leads.

*Carlos Castenda’s The Teachings of Don Juan;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Significant hurdles.

It’s about understanding not only the works, but the world we live in and the times we live in and being a kind of mirror of that. I think it happens really naturally and inevitably if your are honest with yourself and your times.*
Keith Haring

What year is in your imagination?**
Lynda Barry

Wanted:
More people willing to be as open as possible
for as long as possible
towards as many things and as many people as possible.

It’s so hard,
Taking up so much energy –
Literally burning calories of energy –
And even if we could do it perfectly –
And we can’t –
Our life isn’t long enough to be open to everything.

But, when we try, something is happening inside of us
and we are changing.
See John O’Donohue:

As always in the world of the mind, recognition is a huge transformative force.^

Here is the pressure of reality needing to be met with the power of imagination,
Something I often find myself contemplating.

Imagination need reality,
Reality needs imagination.

Being open to reality,
To what it is,
Grows,
Improves,
Our imaginations –

Does your imagination know what year it is?** –

The more open we are, the more we have to work with:
More people and more ideas and more places and more things.

As Alan Jacob worries:

the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.^^

Perhaps we’ll never be able to imagine what we really want to
if we remain where we are,
In our smaller worlds,
When we live in such a
big
Big
BIG
world.

*Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals;
**Lynda Barry’s What It Is;
^John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^^Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread With the Dead.

The Celts understood that all beginning risks the unknown; a blessing was intended to be a shelter of light around the pilgrim and the place.*
John O’Donohue

You’re still here,
Imagination somewhat battered but basically
intact,
Now reaching deeper to connect with your special abilities, and,
Raising yourself up,
You continue to pursue your first avowed intent.

And so,
Being the alchemist you are,
May good and beauty come from that which has been bad for you,
Or difficult,
Or painful.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.