Rediscovering the Road Not Taken …

Yes, beware these books if you have limited funds and should casually stroll by them on the display table at the bookstore! They tricked me, beguiled me with colorful cover and understated title. They hooked me as I sat in a chair at Barnes & Nobles, intending only to peruse them and perhaps gain some insight without shelling out any actual cash. I had gone to the bookstore with my $10 gift card in hand, only looking for a bit of popular fiction to pass the day. I failed to see the danger in time and I soon found myself walking to my car with $45 worth of books I couldn’t afford, and didn’t intend to buy! I’m not sure if there were subliminal messages carefully hidden among the pages of this book, or if the essence of some rare hallucinogenic jungle flower was mixed with the ink, but here I sit on Christmas Day reading through the pages of these fascinating books.

So, if you like comics, art or have any interest in visual storytelling -heck, if you even have any creative or curious bones in your body- stay far away from these books! One whiff of the impressive coverage of comic history, form and function in these masterful books and you too will soon be parted from your cash.

Students, art instructors, animators, people looking to buy gifts for budding artists and comic book aficionados -none can resist the lure of these books!

The less life we have left, the more we live.

As each day is chipped from the rock of our existence our physical life is reduced. Yet this daily sculpting can also serve to give us shape and purpose. Each blow creates an edge that sharpens and defines our true selves.

For some, the process will be one of many small taps of the mallet, with carefully placed blows, delivered over a lifetime. For others a hasty or angry blow early on may damage the stone and thereby affect all the work that comes later.

Regardless of how we approach our life’s work, or whether or not we have had much choice in how certain blows were delivered, when our lives have passed we will all leave behind these memorials large and small, delicate or ponderous, carefully crafted or cracked and haphazardly constructed.

One thing seems certain to me. No matter where we are in our lives, or how the stone has been carved thus far, the end result can be improved when we become consciously aware of the work we have done -and still might do. It is never too late to step back and review our work honestly, see where we may have damaged it and think of ways to avoid those mistakes in the future. If the damage is great, or we are uncertain how to continue, then we may need to seek help from someone with more experience -a master craftsman if you will.

Decide what you want your life to have been about before it’s over, take an honest look at where you are now and plan a course that will take you to where you want to go.

I am a rock.

With jagged and sharpened edges I defy the sand.

It is a sea surrounding me. Always it pushes, scratches, whispers …
I do not know what it wants - nor does it matter. It is only a seething mass of sameness. I rise above it. I am a rock. I am unique. I endure.

The sand assaults me. It drowns me in its crushing embrace, then, suddenly, it exposes me. It rides the howling wind and crashes futilely against my adamantine surfaces. It is all in vain. My defenses are unshaken. I cannot be vanquished.

Secure in my strength I sleep, and I dream.

Eons pass.

I awake, and I am alone. How did this happen? Once the horizon was filled with other rocks jutting defiantly at the sky. I did not speak to them, but I knew they were there. It gave me comfort. Now, there is only sand, and smooth rock colored lumps, where they stood.

I am afraid. My craggy prominence’s have become gentle burls. My massive bulwark smoothed away by the strokes of billions of tiny laborers whose voices relentlessly insinuate themselves in my awareness. They have reduced me. I am lost.

I struggle between dreams of myself as rock and dreams of myself as sand. The work continues inexorably.

Stripped of my defenses, wondrous understanding dawns within me. What I once thought a clone army, is a dazzling panoply of unique colors, textures and shapes. Rich bits and pieces, of myself and the others, who once formed the rocks of barren plains.

I feared I would lose myself. Instead, I have found myself. I have not been defeated by an enemy, I have been rescued by friends. This is my community, my offspring, my family.

I am the sand.