Month: October 2021

Two from A City Called Life: Getting Somewhere! and The Opponent.

From A City Called Life Series : Getting Somewhere?

From A City Called Life: The Opponent

The “opponent”, yes . . . .. . that annoying person whom you can never quite see, the one who foils all your attempts to get just what you want in the Chess Game of Life !

The Tree in a Holy Fog

The Tree in a Holy Fog, From the Tree as Symbol series:

“The Tree” in this series, represents the individual person or our society in general.


THE TREE IN A HOLY FOG. What does that mean? Why a holy fog? To you, it can mean whatever you would like it to mean ! I’ll tell you how it came about and some of its meanings to me. This tree is is one of my series, The Tree as Spiritual Symbol, and it has been the most popular one!

I made this one after a workshop in which people were invited to draw themselves as a tree, in a setting in which they felt they were right now . The results were as interesting as the people themselves! Later, I kept on drawing more versions of my own tree.

Why a holy fog? There are different kinds of fog.

This fog is not a fog which we are able, or not able, to see physically with our eyes.

It stands for not knowing and also the uncertainty in which we always live, but even more acutely so these days.

“Uncertainty” is mostly used about something specific, when we really want to know something exactly and we can’t. Something which we think should be calculable, like how long this pandemic will last, how long will I live etc? It’s a state of limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing state, a future outcome, or more than one possible outcome. In science, uncertainty is a useful concept!

“Not Knowing”, is a Zen phrase. According to Suzuki Roshi, “Not-knowing does not mean you don’t know. It doesn’t require us to forget everything we have known or to suspend all interpretations of a situation. Not-knowing means not being limited by what we know, holding what we know lightly so that we are ready for it to be different. Maybe things are this way. But maybe they are not.”

We cannot really ever know Infinite Reality, whether we think of that in religious, or scientific terms, or both, because we ourselves are NOT Infinite. But still we have to act.

In these Covid times, many of us, in our isolation and overwhelmed with decisions to make, find ourselves, off and on, in our own small local fog of needing to just tune out from the situation, by music, TV, the web, media, reading . . .whatever! And that is good . . . for limited periods. No one can exist in stress forever and these things reduce stress. But we cannot let ourselves be paralyzed by the pandemic.

In this picture, you may notice that the fog immediately around the Tree is lighter than further off. I didn’t design it that way; it just happened! Perhaps that shows that it is possible to keep a circle of “light” around you, even in stormy times. In a real fog, we do see what is immediately around us, even if we can’t see very far!

The fog is a holy one, because, as William Blake, Thomas Merton and others have said, “Everything that lives is holy”. The word “holy” has roots in ancient words meaning “whole, entire, complete, uninjured” and “sacred”, and we are part of a Whole beyond our imagination.

I invite you, too, to take out your pencils, and draw yourself as a tree, in this pandemic, or in any of your situations! Just for yourself. Lots of trees, if you like. It can be fun, even healing. A tree is easy to draw: it just has a trunk, some branches, and, most importantly ROOTS, even tho, as in this picture, the roots are not always visible above ground. But they are there!

Stay rooted!