Daily Doodle # 26: Escher’s Hands
April 26, 2017
Daily Doodle # 7: Moving Hands, Wandering Minds
April 7, 2017
“One of the great pleasures of doing anything repetitive by hand, whether it’s knitting, making bread, chopping onions or sowing seeds, is that they rhythm of the action allows your mind to wander.”
— Jane Brocket, The Gentle Art of Quiltmaking
Doodling — hand-drawing repetitive lines — fits the bill!
In Praise of Idleness Drawings 87 – 95
December 31, 2016
In Praise of Idleness Drawings 80 and 81
December 29, 2016
In Praise of Idleness Drawing 28
November 22, 2016
Wordless Wednesdays: 12 Views of My Right Hand
October 8, 2014
Thinking about the Virtues of Work This Labor Day
August 31, 2014
“If there is any one thing that’s unhealthy in America, it’s that it is a whole civilization trying to get out of work — the young, especially, get caught in that. There is triple alienation when you try to avoid work: first, you’re trying to get outside energy sources/resources to do it for you; second, you no longer know what your own body can do, where your food or water comes from; third, you lose the capacity to discover the unity of mind and body via your work.”
— Gary Snyder, from The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations
I am of two minds about people (affluent people) who hire housecleaners to clean up their messes at home or laborers to mow their lawns and pull weeds. On one hand, I think people should clean up after themselves. And I hate the sense of my time being more valuable than yours, so you do the dirty work. On the other hand, if you can afford it, why not hire people so that your time is freed up to focus on the things that are most important to you. And hiring people creates jobs and extra income for entrepreneurs.
What do you think?
Old Age and Insights
July 25, 2013
As you know from my earlier posts about visiting my 94-year-old father on his Minnesota farm, my mind has been preoccupied with aging. This post shares some writings that have been on my radar.
“The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding)”
First, one of my friends and readers sent me an article by Oliver Sacks from the New York Times which he wrote on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Sacks says, “I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.” Like most of us, he wishes to “die in harness,” loving and working fruitfully through the end, but he acknowledges that “the specter of dementia or stroke looms.” I found it interesting that Sacks, this most accomplished man, spoke of some regrets, too: “I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.” I have provided a link to the complete article, which I believe is well worth reading.
“Retiring Later May Stave Off Dementia”
Then I saw an article in the Seattle Times that cited a French study whose findings indicated that working longer/retiring later could delay the onset/progression of dementia. My mother had Alzheimer’s and my father is now experiencing short-term memory loss, so I believe there is a rather high chance that eventually my mind will begin to go down the path of dementia. You would think that I would find this article heartening, but I don’t! I think this sends the message that those of us unfortunate to have dementia did not work hard enough, exercise our minds enough, eat right, or whatever, and brought this terrible disease upon ourselves. And I just don’t believe that. My attitude is more, there but for the grace of God, go I.
The Force of Character
Rather than thinking about old age as a medical condition, I respond better to a more sacramental approach — looking at the ageing and declining body as a source of insights and continuing soul expression and growth. One of the best books I’ve read that talks about the “forming of character that is actually taking place in these ‘symptoms’ of aging” is James Hillman’s The Force of Character. I first mentioned this book in this blog post. Hillman says:
- “When the body begins to sag, it is abandoning sham and hypocrisy. The body leads the way down, deepening your character.”
- About those mid-night excursions to the bathroom: “Suppose, however, that the getting up from sleep awakens you not only in the night, but to the night. . . . Awakening to the night opens a dark eye into the invisible world. It opens an acute ear to the cautions, insights, and promptings that seem to visit only at night, disturbing sleep in order to be heard.”
- “Forgetting, that marvel of the old mind, may actually be the truest form of forgiveness, and a blessing.”
- “So what is left after you have left is character, the layered image that has been shaping your potentials and your limits from the beginning.”
- “Character is refined in the laboratory of aging.”
Norwegian by Night
Finally, I will end with a great summer read, Derek B. Miller’s debut novel, Norwegian by Night. What I love most about this thriller is its 82-year-old protagonist, Sheldon Horowitz, a recent widower who moves to Norway to be near his grand-daughter. He’s a curmudgeon and has a philosophical outlook on life, although his nearest family sees him as a doddering old man. They refuse to believe he was a sharp shooter in WWII and still retains his sharp mind. His dormant skills come into play when he crosses paths with a domestic violence incident and murder in his apartment building. I think that anyone who likes those dark Scandinavian thrillers will like this book, too.
The Road Map on the Back of Our Hands
July 15, 2013
“On the very backs of our hands, just under the skin, lie veins looking ever so much like little road maps, and as we age, those charts grow more pronounced as if to jog a memory of the journey we unceasingly undertake in our decision to continue to live.”
— William Least Heat Moon, Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories from the Road
Eyes may be the windows of the soul, but hands can be equally expressive and evocative. I think that babies’ hands look like tiny sea stars. But old hands reflect the character and experience of the passing years.