Archive for December, 2009
The garden of forking paths
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Season’s greetings, and all that stuff!
I haven’t been blogging, because I’ve been suffering from something akin to the Swine Flu. Whatever it is, it’s nasty. But I’m steadily recovering.
On the plus side, all that time in bed gave me a chance to read, including a book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges wherein I found the following statement:
“Your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities.”
So it got me thinking, that maybe there is some avenue of time spinning off into another universe where, at the Copenhagen agreement, world leaders thought of their common humanity and put their petty and competitive concerns aside toward the good of mankind.
Maybe there is another where the people who took to the streets to demand an end to the greed and bullying of the big nations were not simply subject to tear gas and the batons of the police, and fodder for news entertainment, but instead their concerns were recognized and heard by the leaders inside and given serious thought, and they were celebrated for exercising the hard-won democratic right to peacefully protest.
Maybe there is a path to an alternate universe unraveling right now, wherein we grasp the gravity of our situation and do everything we can, using the best resources we have, to create a sustainable future.
I just wish one of those temporal paths were the one that we are on…
At least we can think of the multifarious possible futures and outcomes that we can still affect, and the options we do have.
Copenhagen, continued
Monday, December 21st, 2009
I’ve recently returned from a quick bus trip up to Copenhagen to visit friends and have a look at the goings on during the climate change conference. While the summit may not have turned out the way many were hoping, it’s usually a step in the right direction just to have so many world leaders in the same place talking about important issues.
For all the non-world-leaders like me, there were concerts, exhibitions, lectures, speeches, films, and of course protests…
I’ve made a flickr album of my photos from the trip, too~
2010 calendar preview
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
I couldn’t decide on a font, so I did everything by hand.
(This is also handy for me, because if I write anything on the calendar it will look as though it were printed; the handwriting will match.)
This is a newer version of May:
It’s full of significant dates in Native American history, and holidays/ceremonies. A lot of these don’t seem to have specific dates, so they’re listed at the beginning of the month.
Copenhagen
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
My internet connection is a bit fickle, so I’ll keep this brief…here’s one image from my first day here in Copenhagen. I’ve never seen the city so alive and full of people from all corners of the earth.
But for now, I’m off to bed!
He’s buff
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
This is supposed to be for the “moon when the calves grow hair.” Notice, however, that this is not by any means a calf. Also, is it just me, or does something about his head make him look ever so slightly like a triceratops? Minus the nose horn, of course. But still… Anyway this is all I came up with for today, so that’s what y’all get. No complainin’ now.
Australian King Parrot
Monday, December 7th, 2009
Using watercolor and prismacolors. The pencils make such a nice saturated red.
Is it really december?
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
I’m back! Here’s a little sketch from home. (I was too busy dozing in front of that woodstove with that cat on my lap to get much done in the last few weeks, but now I’m back at it.)
Also while I was in the US I sent out a bunch of samples, and yesterday got my first encouraging reply postcard back from an American publisher!