wisdom – Page 2 – Sidewalk Face

Art, Striving to Be Better, wisdom

What Difference Does It Make?

March 13, 2022March 13, 2022by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl11 Comments

What Difference Does It Make? Does your mind ever ask you this?

Do you look down at your art and hear this phrase ping ponging through the corridors of thought?

Poor little piece of art, are you really asking it to solve the world’s problems in order to justify its existence?

Are you asking it to solve all of your problems to justify its existence?

That is not what it is for!

What a heavy load to put on a humble impulse.

Would you ask an egg to support a skyscraper?

The Difference is this: did you jump off a balcony? Did you break all your plates? Did you ruin a friendship? No? That’s the difference. Life is hard and art is necessary to make it bearable.

A little pleasure, a little hope, a little alchemy to transform the ugly to beauty.

An outcome does not have to be concrete and permanent. It can merely be the lack of defeat.

Striving to Be Better, wisdom

Stop Apologizing for Your Age

December 22, 2021December 22, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl17 Comments

I’ve noticed something that really bugs me, wonderfully accomplished humans are introduced as the feature guest on a podcast and they inevitably say they feel old after the host recounts several decades of achievement.

Is this the sorry outcome after years of doing exactly what you hoped to do when you were young?

Imagine a young person thinking to themself, I want to write books, I want to fall in love and raise children, I want to have a multi-million-dollar business, I want to garden, I want to walk in the woods many times, I want to have a few cool outfits, I want to laugh with my friends. Through a combination of good luck and intention this young person lives two or three decades and gets some of that stuff done. Then they feel bad they aren’t young anymore.

So, at the beginning we feel insecure and anxious about what we have not yet been able to experience and accomplish and at the end we feel insecure and anxious about how much we have experienced and accomplished.

This is just stupid.

We are all getting older. It’s not a choice for anybody. There is no shame in it. Let’s never apologize for it again.

It’s better for everyone, sets a positive example, if we can appreciate where we are on the wheel. I am proud of all the walks around the block, the hundreds of thousands of hours of musical reverie I’ve indulged in, the millions of pages I’ve turned in books and in life. You can’t buy it at a store, you pay for it with time.

Art, Sidewalk Faces, wisdom

The Wrinkles/Concussion Conundrum

December 1, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl3 Comments

If you don’t want wrinkles, you need to strike while the iron is hot. If you want to give someone a concussion, strike at any time.

What the heck does this mean? I don’t even remember writing it. I came here to write something else and this was waiting for me.

Maybe I can make it work?…….Okay, I’ve got something. I think it means that things can always go two ways. One of those ways necessitates preparation. The other way just needs raw emotion.

I’ve been offering my sidewalk faces as limited-edition prints. This is something I have wanted to do for a really long time, as in years long time. It’s amazing how long it can take to do things that you really want to do. It can take so long you could question if you really want to do it. For example, say that you really want to wear freshly ironed, straight as a pin linen pants. You see yourself in these gorgeous pants looking like a million bucks, like you haven’t a care in the world on your remote Caribbean island writing poetry and hosting fabulous friends while wafting about in your timeless linen pants forcing those visiting friends to huddle together in wonder at your effortless effervescence. But seeing it and being it and are not the same. That vision is not about spending your time ironing and yet those pants have to be ironed. They don’t get wrinkle free on their own. We often want the fruits of labor we can’t stand to make.

But I have made the labor. I have ironed the wrinkles out of my prints and now I can offer them to you. And because of that I don’t want to throw the iron at anybody’s head, most especially my own. Hurray! Check out my gorgeous new offerings here (and also in the Limited Editions menu).

Thank you!