The stars align when we show up every day to make the most of the opportunity that’s right in front of us**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

Every one has their particular mustard seed, something powerful to be nurtured and grown. (It’s likely that Jesus was thinking of a kind of mustard plant that was banned because it could take over a garden.)

Hugh Macleod doodles:

The most powerful force in the universe is human creativity.^

Not quite, but I get what he means. Pound for pound, humans are quite amazing.

In his book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Charlie Mackesy includes this conversation between the boy and the mole:

I’m so small, said the mole. Yes, said the boy, but you make a big difference.^^

It’s not about how big and popular and noticed we are, it’s about focusing on what we do best. We might call this our gaze.

What is it that you come back each day to “look” at intently, to ask questions of, to find out more about, to play with, to experiment and fail with, but keep doing something with, every single day?

This is your gaze … and it’s powerful if you encourage it to grow through these ways and means.

I’ve previously shared how I’d been asked by a group of artists what my art medium was; I replied, after pondering, I’m a people-artist:

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.*^

(*From The Story of Telling: The Daily Opportunity.)
(**Matthew 17: 20-21.)
(^From gapingvoid’s Good ideas don’t care where they come from.)
(^^From Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.)
(*^Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)

Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual – it becomes sanctified and holy.*
(Ryan Holiday)

There are two kinds of ritual; those that we develop from the inside-out and those that come to us from the outside-in.

The former provide us the greatest opportunities for developing the kind of routines and rituals that enlarge our worlds and those of others, to constantly stimulate the new.

Every day, I get up at the same time and move through the first moments of the day in the same way, arriving soon at my journal and pen and books and silence.

I am never lost even though the world can spin. Here the ideas are born that I take into my work with others.

A master is in control. A master has a system. A master turns the ordinary into the sacred.*

(*From Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)

Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year-old. […] When 3 and 4-year-olds draw, the thing they are drawing can change from one thing into another, surprising them.*
(Lynda Barry)

If you see a good deal remarkable in me, I see just as much remarkable in you.**
(Walt Whitman)

Every day provides an opportunities for us to change who we are and help others to change, too.

Playfulness helps us change.

The artfulness Lynda Barry observes in the drawings of three and four year olds is an expression of playfulness we have once known and perhaps lost. She reflects:

Stories show up on their own when kids draw. The drawing itself propels the story, changing it in a living way.*

Johan Huizinga writes about how our stories contain both play and seriousness until they become civilised:

Living myth knows no distinction between play and seriousness. Only when myth has become mythology, that is, literature, borne along as traditional lore by a culture which has in the meantime more or less outgrown the primitive imagination, only then will the contrast between play and seriousness apply to myth – and to its detriment.^

Barry is noticing living stories in the art and engagement of children and engages with them to try to recover this for herself:

This is the state of mind I’m after when I make comics and spending time working beside four-year-olds has helped me re-learn one of our oldest natural and spontaneous languages. Words and pictures together makes something happen that is more than good or bad drawing.*

We look at children’s drawing and wonder whether they are finished; we may even make the worst possible mistake and judge they are not very good. James Carse helps us to see what we have lost if we are but observers of art:

Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema^^ of it. If however, the observer sees the poeisis*^ in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.^*

Ultimately, we are not trying to produce something that is finished but something that allows us to continue playing and this for others, too, so they may recover their genius and help us grow in ours.

(*From Lynda Barry’s Making Comics.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(^^Poiema being a piece of art.)
(*^Poeisis being the spirit or genius of the artist.)
(^*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

I’m not doing my best and neither are you. Because we’re not optimised algorithms, we’re people.*
(Seth Godin)

In [myth] the line between the barely conceivable and the flatly impossible has not yet been drawn with any sharpness.**
(Johan Huizinga)

It’s hard to know if this is our best. We don’t know how much further we can take this, how far we can take ourselves.

What we often do know is that we can do better than we have just done and this opens up the future possibilities in an incredible way, because when we say kindly tell ourselves we can do better and try again, we find we can.

One thing we’ll have discovered on the way is that we need others to help us do better.

If we refuse others, we refuse ourselves.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Everyone is doing their best.)
(**From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)

Enough comes from the inside.*
(Ryan Holiday)

Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is beginning. Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality.**
(James Carse)

Outside of here
Outside of town
Outside of self.

Stillness is stopping
Stillness is being here
Stillness is presence.

Attention to this moment
Attention to the other
Attention to everything.

We are enough.

(*From Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)
(**From James’s Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

To have an impulse and resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell – this is how we develop spiritual strength.*
(Ryan Holiday)

gratitude, compassion and altruism broaden our perspectives and break down the barricades we erect between ourselves and others in a vain attempt to protect the frightened, greedy, insecure ego**
(Karen Armstrong)

You’d think if we had access to unlimited resources, we’d be able to make something pretty amazing happen. It often turns out that the opposite comes to pass. Seth Godin here considers the latest Dr Dolittle movie:

Why is the new Dolittle movie so bad? Savaged by critics and viewers, it had:

• One of the most bankable movie stars in the world
• A story that had previously been the basis of two hit movies
• The best CGI houses in the world
• Unlimited time and money

I think the best way to understand why it failed is to look at the reasons above.^

When we have less – perhaps another word for this is “enough” – we have to slow down some, pay more attention, value what we do have, use our imagination, work with others more collaboratively, benefit from failure, reflect more, get creative, becoming fitter through the experience.

Things we can all do.

(*From Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)
(**From Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: The Dolittle effect.)

I’m not good at reading [books]. The truth is I need pictures. They are like places to get to in a sea of words.*
(Charlie Mackesy)

We all drew before we could write.

Then we drew our letters before they became letters.

Pictures came before words as playfulness comes before seriousness, and the world is richer when these dance together.

Whatever you get up to in life why not “picture it up” a little?

(*From Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mile, the Fox and the Horse.)

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.*
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Yesterday I was taking part in a conversation in which one participant shared how they wanted to be more superficial;** they were wanting to scratch more at the surface of things, to open them up, to see what happened.

This thought came back to mind this morning as I read these words:

For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.^

I found myself wondering what’s so good about a broken spirit and heart, and then I wondered about how new things get into our spirits and our hearts unless they are broken open in some way.

On a personal level, what are my practices for breaking open my mind and thinking, for breaking open my heart and feeling, and for breaking open my will and doing?

Oftentimes, we are focused on the goal, the deadline. missing out the need to scratch the surface, to be open to more, to create strong openings for more to flow.

These strong openings between the mind, the heart and the will are two way, so what we “produce” when we are open to more reinforces who we are:^^

Virtue, the Stoics believed, was the highest good – the summum bonum – and should be the principle behind all our actions. Virtue is not holiness, but rather the moral and civic excellence in the course of our daily life. It’s a sense of pure rightness that emerges from our souls and is made real through the actions we take.*^

(*Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)
(**From superficies, literally above face.)
(^Psalm 51:16-17.)
(^^The two critical questions are always Who am I? and What is my contribution?)
(*^From Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)

Before the whites came […] no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the ancestors song and the stretch of country over which the song passed.*
(Flynn)

How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?**
(Lynda Barry)

Bryan Ferry singing What a Wonderful World This Would Be was in my head as I was reading and journaling this morning. I found myself grateful for all the decades of my life contain.

I don’t know much about lots of things, as Bryan Ferry and originally Sam Cooke had sung:

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me, too
What a wonderful world this would be.^

Beyond those I love, I was thinking about the other thing I love, the thing I do know that helps me get up in the morning and makes it possible to live through the day with the kind of energy I find in these words from Richard Rohr:

I love what I see. Life excites me.^^

It will be different for every one of us yet there’ll be something that excites us beyond everything else. We find it on the far side of what we know about ourselves and what we think we know full-stop.

Lynda Barry’s question reminds us that so many of us will have stopped drawing because someone judged our efforts, perhaps even ourselves pre-empting what we think someone else may think.*^

There’ll be other things we stopped doing because of what others have said or we think they disapprove of, and we have allowed these to drop into the background. I know this was true for me.

But whatever this thing is, it is our inheritance and no-one can take it from us. Drawing comes from within, our purpose or mission also comes from within.

When we know this and own it we have a compelling story to tell ourselves each day, a story in which reality is absorbed and changed.

Oh, what a wonderful day this could be.

(*Flynn, quoted in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines.)
(**From Lynda Barry’s Making Comics.)
(^From What a Wonderful World This Would Be.)
(^^From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love.)
(*^Check out peter Reynolds’ very special Ish.)

Adults are surprised when what looks like meaningless scribbles turns into something as the kid describes wha’s going on in the picture. When very young kids draw, they cause the lines that causes something to appear. It is there to be found in the same way you found the fish in the drawing […]. And the water and the moon.*
(Lynda Barry)

L’essential est invisible pour les yeux. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.**
(The Fox in The Little Prince)

So much of what we do have is invisible to us; I’m especially thinking of what lies within us.

The invisible requires time and stillness, both of which feel like hard work:

Being present demands all of us. It’s not nothing. It may be the hardest thing in the world. […] It takes real work to grasp what is invisible to just about everyone else.*

These words from Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key means everything to me when it comes my work with people discovering the amazing things in who they are and what they can do, which may have been invisible or not valued by them.

Here’s the picture Lynda Barry is referring to, drawn by two year old Madison.

When Madison says,

This is a fish in the water. And another fish. And this is the moon,^

we can see them. We couldn’t before but now we can.

It’s the same in our lives. With some time and stillness we can do some causing and make the invisible visible, the first time see what it is, the second time to express it somehow.

Playfulness and drawing can help a lot with this. I often mention Johan Huizinga‘s point that seriousness and playfulness have been separated and need to be brought back together. Barry makes a similar point about words and drawing:

Before writing and drawing were separated they were conjoined.*

We drew pictures before we could write and when we learnt to write, it was first of all by drawing shapes.

Try playfully drawing and journaling to find out more.

(*From Lynda Barry’s Making Comics.)
(**From Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key; the fox to the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.)
(^Madison, quoted in Lynda Barry’s Making Comics.)