• Thoughts

    Just a Pebble in a Pond

    St. Thérèse taught the value of the “Little Way”—a path to holiness that lay in performing all our daily tasks and duties in a spirit of love and in the presence of God. Dorothy embraced this teaching. She believed that…

  • Thoughts

    Something Stronger Within

    How do we go about finding meaning in existence? Are we ever explicitly taught to do so? Where would one go for such teaching? Perhaps long ago, the answer would have been some form of institutional school, but that no…

  • Thoughts

    Competition? Cooperation?

    The artist who acts as if he could have conceived his art by himself, sealed off from other artists, is stupid—he merely tries to conform to the idiotic romantic image of the artists as primeval energy, as a demiurge. The continual…

  • Thoughts

    The Touch of the Unknown

    I don’t know that a year can go by without me vowing, again, to read all the poems in The Giant Book of Poetry (edited by William H. Roetzheim) that I bought in 2011, when I decided to embark upon…

  • Thoughts

    We Are Not Crazy

    Our disconnection from nature and our disavowal of interior depth—of soul—from animals, plants, and landscapes occurs all the time in all of us. But there is more depth than we have come to believe, than we have been taught. Connection…

  • Thoughts

    Get In the Boat

    I didn’t mean to post my sailboat drawing here at The Ruff Draft. I have another, slightly more clandestine (I like that word) blog called Ruff Edge Design that I think of as the place for my art attempts and…

  • Thoughts

    Where Does One Begin?

    Now, it is no longer a child who is going to tell this story and that is regrettable. It is a man. Worse yet, it is the university professor I have become. I will have to guard myself very carefully…

  • Thoughts

    Expand

    I sometimes think of myself as a word collector or a knowledge collector. Either of those is a label I can live with, and after attaching one to my breast, I want to delve a bit. Do I collect knowledge…

  • Thoughts

    How Real is Your World?

    The subconscious mind has no ability to question, reason or consciously comprehend and can be programmed to override basic instinct. … Our brains are amazing, yet they can be lazy if we are not mindful of driving them. Mind control…

  • Thoughts

    White, Grey, Black

    “I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?” “No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly…