I doodled this card last year when we were in lockdown across the UK. I wanted to share it to say thank you for joining me here across the year.

However you celebrate and recuperate at this time of year, I hope it will be both meaningful and enjoyable.

Thin|Silence is a simple blog, seeking to share some encouragement each day towards exploring your wonderful uniqueness. I look forward to 2022 and the ninth year of Thin|SIlence every day.

Here’s a part of my Christmas card design for this year. I doodled it last Christmas Day when we weren’t able to meet with families and friends.

The completed design will be up tomorrow and I’m making the whole black and white design for you to colour in, if you would like to have some mindful colouring to do.

I hand-coloured the doodle this year and, I discovered, there’s a good four hours of relaxation included.

On balance, it’s where I prefer to be: somewhere in the middle. Certainty is a dead space, in which there’s no room to grow. Wavering is painful. I’m glad to be travelling between the two.*
Katherine May

We are the dawning of the universe upon itself.**
Rebecca Elson

Katherine May is describing her practice of getting up early and lighting a lamp but also a candle at her desk: one light steady, the other wavering.

She reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s identifying of two impulses: one of homing, the other of exploration. In her solitude May is identifying with these, so I thought to include John O’Donohue’s blessing for solitude and what it brings to us:

May your recognise in your life the presence,
Power and light of your soul.
…
May you have respect for your individuality and difference.^

There’s the light again, helping us to find our way, and I am reminded of three I hold close to: the light of humility, the light of gratitude, and the light of faithfulness.

Jonah Paquette teaches me that although awe can, on the one hand, arise from vastness, and be either perceptual – perhaps a sunset, or conceptual – perhaps an idea, on the other hand it can be something that transcends understanding and changes us.^^

In your solitude, may you find your guiding lights, and journeying between homing and exploration, be changed from your wonderful glory to more glory.

*From Katherine May’s Wintering;
**From Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe;
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Solitude:
^^See Jonah Paquette’s Awestruck.

The myths, when they are translated into rites, organise the field.*
Joseph Campbell

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.**

Shouldn’t we be suspicious of the desires in the hearts of some people? We suspect our own enough.

I wonder, though, whether deep down in every human heart there is a desire to for beauty.

I was arrested by the following story.

A desperate Michelle reaches out to Nick Cave:

Nick. Am Scottish. Am no very well with the alcohol. Rehab soon. 29/7. Please. Nick. I saw you in Prospect Park NY many years ago. Am so scared. I’m not well. Stagger Me! I think the world of you and The Seeds.^

Cave’s Red Hand Files blog is often a place of intimacy for the musician as he respond to messages people have written. I include his whole letter to Michelle:

Dear Michelle,

Time to give up the booze – you know it, you need to. It’s frightening now, I know, but I can only say this, life is better without it. Impossibly better. It’s difficult to understand right now, it’s frightening right now, I know, but without the drink life is better. Just remember that. You’ll see. You’ll be better. You’ll see. Life is good. You’ll see. Life is good. Life is good. Life is good. 

Prepare to be amazed. 

Love, Nick x^

Life is good.

Your life is good. My life is good.

Deep down there are the desires of our hearts to be awakened.

I include Joseph Campbell’s words because our stories are so important for being fully awake. We may think of stories as ways of trying to understand what we’re doing, but perhaps more true is that what we do is a way of trying to understand our stories.

Wherever we are, whatever we are facing, our stories are our home. They help us face our winter and already contain our expectant spring.

Writing out our stories, in some aspect or way, every day helps us to connect with what is most important when the noise and rush of a day can cover it over with activity without reflection.

*From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey;
**Psalm 37:4;
^From Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files: #160.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.*
Joseph Campbell

“Here, I made this.” … These four words carry with them generosity, intent, risk, and intimacy. The more we say them, and mean them, and deliver on them, the more art and connection we create. And we create change for a living.**
Seth Godin

We need ways of remembering every day just who we are and what we do: Joseph Campbell called it our bliss. Other words include, dream, purpose, meaning, calling, vocation, mission.

Remembering who we are and what we do may sound ridiculous, but it’s highly probable that a day will find ourselves pulled off course, feeling disconnected and going through the motions. The longer this goes on the more dangerous it becomes for us.

The solution isn’t magic but ritual, or practice or habit: unapologetically making the time to imaginatively reconnect every day heart, soul, mind and body with the you capable of endless growth and development, and then taking something of this out with you to give to someone, bringing change to them, but also to you.

Have fun.

*Joseph Campbell, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: The Bliss Station;
**From Seth Godin’s The Practice.

It turns out that acute angles, rough edges and the imperfect matches of diversity actually make things work better. Especially when we’re dealing with humans.*
Seth Godin

Against the claim of perfection we can assert our own individuality, which gives distinctive character to the work we do.**
Richard Sennett

Those who seek perfection know how difficult it is to let go of what they are working on.

The important thing is to shift attention from the outside to the inside, to pay attention to the endless possibility of improvement that is open to us as infinite persons. Getting stuck in a piece of external work can put the brakes on this: a lose-lose.

R. described how her life felt cobbled together, using the term in a negative way. I liked the phrase and suggested that she explore it in a positive way. R. noticed all there was to improve on her inside and it worked: she has been on some astonishing adventures since.

Keep going on the inside to keep going on the outside.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Cobbled together;
**From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.

Markets often persuade us that we don’t have enough. Communities remind us that we do.*
Seth Godin

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.**
Marcel Proust

Oftentimes, we find ourselves at odds with each other, and, in the West at least, it only looks like this societal shift will increase.

What we need are travellers:

We should not seek to overcome one another but discover through each other; Jan Steward puts what we are missing simply:

We are each other’s sources.^

James Carse outlines the quality of this travel:

Genuine travel has no destination. Travellers do no go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else … It is not distance that makes travel possible, but travel makes distance possible.^^

This aligns with the need to open our minds, open our hearts, and open our wills.

To help us on our way, I’ll leave it to Carse to bless our endeavours:

look everywhere for difference … see the earth as source … celebrate the genius in others … [be] not prepared against but for surprise^^.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: All the stuff;
Marcel Proust, quoted in James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
^Jan Steward, from Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning by Heart;
^^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.

Is the life I’m living the same as the life that wants to live in me?*
Parker Palmer

Our False Self is precisely our individual singularity in both its “Aren’t I wonderful!” or “Aren’t I terrible!” forms. Both are their own kind of ego trip, and both take the tiny little self far too seriously.**
Richard Rohr

The Johari window illustrates how there are things that neither we nor others know about us.

Here is our continent of discovery.

One way of moving into our exploration is through service: identifying our bespoke contribution and, through imagination, making this available to more.

Seth Godin writes about this:

But art doesn’t seek to create comfort. It creates change. And change requires tension. … The practice, then, is to not only cause temporary discomfort for those who you lead, serve, and teach, but to embrace your own discomfort as you venture into territories unknown.^

Those we seek to serve may be the first to notice what we do not know about ourselves. In the collaborative world that service opens, sharing this back to us is also service.

Let us identify our talents and imagine new ways and new places for using them. It will be uncomfortable, but it will also be soul-shaping.

*Parker Palmer, quoted in Sunil Raheja’s Dancing with Wisdom;
**From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond;
^From Seth Godin’s The Practice.

The True Self has knocked on both the hard bottom and high ceiling of reality and has less and less need for more verbal certitudes or answers that always fit. It has found its certainty elsewhere and now lives inside a YES that is so big that it can absorb most of the little noes.**

There is much about today that is unknown to me.

On the other hand there is much about myself and my approach that I do know.

The closer we are to our True Self, the greater the possibility of bringing the power of our imagination to bear on the pressures of reality.

It’s a daily way to bring the infinite into the finite.

*From Sunil Raheja’s Dancing with Wisdom;
**From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.

It seems to me the kite
Has all the fun,
The view,
The weightlessness,
The wind,
Ecstatic shudders,
Tail streaming out,
The urging higher,
The exhilarating dives,
And me down here
Left holding the string.*
Rebecca Elson

To be an artist is to be on the hook, to take your turn, to do the things that might not work, to see connection, to embrace generosity first, to change somehow, to be human.**
Seth Godin

Some thoughts emerging from putting these two pieces together:

Be the kite and the one holding the string: you are anchored and you are free.

The thing you must do is the hook which allows you to explore and soar, this to the joy of others.

Hooked isn’t “tied down.” Tied down is how it feels if we are not prepared to launch.

*From Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility for Awe: The Kite;
**From Seth Godin’s What to Do when it’s Your Turn.