I tend to sketch a lot, and ideas usually start with a tiny doodle that you have no idea what the significance is at the time. That’s why it’s important to just doodle a lot and sketch a lot.*
Nick Park

I love this thought from Nick Park:
Doodling is just a very inexpensive and accessible gift you can
give to yourself and to others that you can
play with a lot.

Merry Christmas to you:
Have fun.

*From a Wallace and Gromit Exhibition.

All spoken words need to be born out of silence and constantly return to it.*
Henri Nouwen

It always comes back to silence for me.  Taking myself to silence.  Inviting others to silence.  Frequently.  Quiet our busy minds.  Set aside our relentless chatter. Just be quiet.  And then do something.  And then get quiet again.**
Bob Stilger

My favourite carol is probably Silent Night,
Sometimes begun with the alternative words Still the Night:
Silence and stillness, I value these most of all at Christmas;
It doesn’t have to be for long, but a little while
to be and to focus – these things I need.

The thinner the silence the better,
Meaning quietness charged with
whispers from somewhere else:
The aim of Thin|Silence is to offer a few words to reflect upon
before the rush of the day begins,
To be played with as you will, and
to see what happens.

I’ve also added a random thin|Silence selection (below) from the past eleven years.

*Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Direction;
**Bob Stilger, from Brandy Agerbeck and Kelly Bird’s (editors) Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.

RANDOM THIN|SILENCE

May you recognise in your life the presence,
power and light of your soul …
May you have respect for your individuality and difference.*
John O’Donohue

Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Some people, hoping to avoid responsibility, insist that they don’t have great power. That’s a choice, but it might undermine what we’re capable of. [Also worth a thought: with great responsibility often comes great power.]**
Seth Godin

Scientist and poet Rebecca Elson declares with delight:
We live now in the epoch of self-recognition.
We are the dawning of the universe upon itself.^
Through our species, the universe has become aware of itself,
As far as we know, a phenomenon unrepeated across the vastness of space;
What a privilege,
And what shall we do with this?

When we look closer, we see the infinite lack of repetition in
human personality and creativity, each life
with something different to bring, and
though we are often distracted by the ordinary and mundane, which
hides the wonder of our and each other’s being from us,
There are ways and means that we can employ to
reset –
Some of the best still proving to be
stillness, slowness, solitude, silence, story, and,
Just to show they don’t all begin with “s,”
Curiosity, reflection, journaling.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Solitude;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The Spiderman inversion;
^Rebecca Elson’s The Responsibility to Awe.

A rite is an embodied mystery, something awesome
shaped into daily practise and usefulness –
I’m thinking about you.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information … If it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, gives us new hope, and compels us to live more fully, it is a valid myth.*
Karen Armstrong

*Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth.

Action isn’t a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive.*
Joanna Macy

Like. poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.*
Karen Armstrong

If your action weighs you down,
If it’s something external to who you are,
Then perhaps it’s not yours but
someone else’s
(perhaps they are carrying someone else’s, too) –
Everyone has a different kind of action,
It comes from deep within,
It is your bliss, as Joseph Campbell named it;
It seizes you – heart, soul, mind, and strength –
Changing you as well as the world around.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals;
**Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth.

The shadow is that part of you that you won’t allow to show through, that includes good – I mean potent – as well as dangerous and disastrous aspects of your potential … You should find a way to realise your shadow in life somehow.*
Joseph Campbell

The truth is there’s no metric for what matters, no way to measure meaning.**
Bernadette Jiwa

We tend to measure what can be measured,
Which shifts our focus to what we can measure and
away from what we cannot,
But what about these things we can’t calculate –
How what we are doing resonates with what we find meaningful,
How our soul is growing, how our Ego is declining
and our True Self is developing,
How our being rather than doing is fairing –
How goes our self-reflection?

Measuring can be very helpful, but
it may cover over how
what we are measuring doesn’t matter to us
as much as we think it does.

*Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
**Bernadette Jiwa’s Briefly blog: The Measure of Us.

Just like me, you’re the constant observer, the solitary witness to the whole of your life.*
AleXander McManus

And so love becomes the most gentle and most powerful agent for the fielding and forming of reality. In love the lenses fall away. In love one forms all formings. In love one becomes generate in the aleph. In love one arrives home at last.**
Jean Houston

I’ve been observing my life for more than
sixty six years, and perhaps I’m beginning
to get the hang of it,
Especially appreciating how
I need others to help me.

As the Johari Window reminds me,
there are things about me that
others can see but I cannot,
As well as some things that neither I nor
others can see.^

Here is the continuing journey for all our lives,
One formed through love and for love –
Remaining open to the observations of others, rather than
defensive or denying; we need others to make this journey,
And they need us.

*AleXander McManus’ FutureU.
**Jean Houston’s The Possible Human;
^The four quadrants of the Johari Window are: Things only we know about ourselves, things that both we and other know about us, things that only others know, and things that neither we nor others know. These are not fixed.

Before each of us can have a voice of our own, we must enter a silence we can enter only together. It’s a silence without walls. By stepping back to be the listener who has nothing to say we discover the just as there is no language that is exclusively our own, there is no silence that is not a shared silence.*
James Carse

Two people try to speak at the same time,
Two others sit together in silence –
Both scenarios appear wrong to us –
We know that one has to be silent while the another speaks,
And then they swap places –
we know this should work better.

James Carse, though, invites us into
the deeper listening and silence of the infinite game
of life:
The listener with nothing to say – to assert, to demand – is moving from Ego to Self,
Just as language arises from Human sharing, so does silence –
When I am silent to myself, I am also silent to you,
Someone’s true voice can only arise from listening in shared spaces,
Silence doesn’t hide behind walls, but is open, inclusive.

Silence is not absence from but a deep form of relationship.

*James Carse’s Breakfast At the Victory.

Listen then with soul-hearing now, for that is the mission of the story.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

To live in Kairos time, we need to shift the focus from what we do with our time to how we experience each moment – what you might call mindful productivity.**
Anne-Laure Le Cunff

The Ancients thought there were three
levels or paths of listening:
For the mundane and everyday,
For learning and art,
For guidance and for wisdom;
We can listen or we can be a listener –
There’s a difference,
As I’m learning, the latter requiring
presence, engagement, and attunement.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments.