In My Room - Remembering Brian Wilson
My interpretation functions as a reflection by an older man looking back on a full life of experience, while the original from Wilson’s channels the experience of an adolescent. Mine channels the reflections of an older version of a similar adolescent looking back at a life fully lived. As Wilson’s lyrics in the opus masterpiece Smile observe, the child is the father of the man.
Listen to Your Sleeping Dreams
The lesson from my story is, listen to your dreams! What parts of you might you have left behind, things that make your heart sing? It could be anything. If you feel a kind of nagging emptiness in living that you can’t quite define, the clues you need may be in your dreams if you can learn to listen.
Featured Art: My Yellow Guitar by Ray Hart
Original oil painting by Ray Hart.
I’m lucky enough to have a couple of his original pieces, plus a couple more prints. I love his work and talent and want to share that. His use of bold colors, his textures, his compositions, they’re all beautiful and evocative. I get no payment or kickbacks from this post.
Dilemmas
I’m struggling with all these things as I think about what to write about. I want to explore art and creativity and community and human growth and wellbeing here. I believe that the way to overcome violence and cruelty lies in building community and promoting human growth and interrelatedness., attunement to oneself and to others. But if that all comes across as evasion and pabulum, what good is that? These are my dilemmas. I’m just trying to figure it out.
AI Love?
We live in an age where technology is diverting us from human connection and psychological growth and health. The epidemics of loneliness, despair, suicide, and flight to violence and authoritarianism of the modern age can only be accelerated, not resolved, by the erasure of the human and the complexities of building positive, authentic relationships.
The Mysteries
A dear friend sent me this book, The Mysteries, as a gift. It’s a fable and illustrated storybook for adults created as a collaboration between Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, and caricaturist John Kascht. It’s so cool and beautifully illustrated in textured black and white art that perfectly both tells the story and leaves lots of room for the adult imagination to fill in the emotions and gaps of the tale.
Is This Thing On?
I needed to create an introductory blog post to justify the existence of this place. So if you’ve read this far, thank you. Welcome! The truth is I’m here to share a little of the wondrous exploration of the beauty of life and living. There’s plenty of ugliness, as we all know. Maybe I’ll talk about some of that too at some point, but I’m fundamentally a very fortunate man filled with gratitude, and I expect that’s going to come through in anything I put up on this site.