One of the most important parts of drawing, in my limited experience, is not drawing. The creative process benefits as much from a certain lassitude of the critical process as it does from putting pen, brush or pencil to paper.

My drawings are clipped to an art board and in summer, when the wood heater isn't burning, the board leans up against the heater where I can see it from the couch. I may think a drawing is nearing completion and the drawing will be sitting there looking more or less finished and then suddenly, a day or two later, I'll see either something that needs more work or a shadow or squiggle will suggest another direction I can take it. This is happening with The Night Cat. In the textured background was a shadow which suggested a sort of hill and when I looked harder it seemed to fit in and enrich what was already there. Therefore today, yet another rainy day, I've spent making that shadow view into something significant. While I was working it was obvious other areas needed more definition; darkening or lightening, more detail here, less detail there. I'm really starting to like it now. The downside is it happens with already completed work. It will be hanging there (work that I've liked well enough to frame) and then I'll see either a glaring error or something extra I've could have done with it.

Sometimes I think, no, I know, the awake mind needs to be quiet so that I can hear the creative mind. Monkey mind, that chattering jittering anxious self-condemning mind has the top spot in my little cranium. There is very little time when it isn't yammering away like a thousand air bubbles in a bottle of cheap fruit flavoured soda. Sometimes it's still during attempts at meditation, sometimes during yoga, always just before sleep when I'm so not there that I'm not productively aware of it. How to make use of the creative silence while still being with it enough to make use of what floats to the surface.

Recently read about an artist, sorry I don't know who - I was going through a whole list of artists and looking at their work - who used a technique of staring at a picture for 30 seconds and then meditating upon it for 30 minutes. Good grief, what discipline! I can hardly rein in my mind long enough to continually focus on 20 breaths without swanning off to some five and dime store of superficial thoughts. Read somewhere else (yoga magazine?) where some study found that 42% of our waking life is spent daydreaming but rather than the daydreaming being of happy thoughts and happy places it tended to make us sad and depressed. I'm there!

And one other thing occurs to me. Watched an Oprah show a while back in which the subject of overeating was the subject. Rather than focus on a diet the learned guest spoke of how compulsive eating (or in my case compulsive Mah Jong or Spider Solitaire playing) was a way to avoid having to confront some aspect of ourselves. Hear Hear! I don't think I've got some deep dark kernel of unexamined trauma that I need to examine but the game playing is a sort of drug which keeps the mind from thinking. It dulls me. Why I desire that I don't know. Why is there a need to escape from reality? My reality is quite good; companionship, love, food, shelter, an entrance to the entire world through books and the 'net - why then? Is it a form of simple procrastination so that I don't have to do anything serious? To live up to the great blessing of being alive. I mean, how miraculous is that simple fact? Life. Being alive. All the billions who have gone before me, Living breathing. Then their life stops. And their breathing stops. Stops. That's it. The End. FINIS! Now it's my turn. No wonder I get so cranky with myself; guilt compounding guilt. What a privilege to be alive and I waste time (and I'm 55 years old, damn it!) playing stupid computer games.

Enough rant. I've drawn. It's been a good day. And I think I forgive myself for not being perfect and creating non-stop for all my waking hours.