Tao and words
The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.
Thomas Merton
The Way of Chuang TzuThe banner photo
Looking north: Chesterman Beach, Tofino, BC. See Storm watching.-
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Travel and wisdom
It is experience that is the ultimate teacher. That is why wise people travel constantly and test themselves against the flux of circumstance.
Deng Ming-Dao
365 Tao
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If your parents didn't have any children, you're not likely to either.
Category Archives: Art | Design
The all-new MandalArt app
About four years ago, I discovered an iOS app called iMandalArt that offered a distinctive way to think about goal setting and task accomplishment. It was based on what I subsequently learned is the Lotus Blossom technique, often described as a form of brainstorming or mind mapping.
When I wrote my first blog post about the app, iMandalArt coming to an iPad near you, my perspective was largely shaped by a bunch of popular productivity apps, for example, Things. Let’s call it a seeing-the-world-through-GTD-colored-glasses outlook. I knew that iMandalArt was somehow different, but I confessed that I was pretty sure I didn’t “get it.”
Escherian puns
Five years ago (February 2009), I took a photo of two geese on a frozen pond, standing in identical poses. They were both balanced on only one leg, with their heads turned back over their left shoulders. The one-leg thing was presumably to keep the other, uplifted foot off the ice. Their heads may also have been turned in a heat-conserving tuck, but I suspect that it was synchronized preening. After all, the Vancouver Winter Olympics were only a year away, and the Geese were Canadian.
Posted in Art | Design, Pens | Ink | Paper, Photography, Technology, Words
Tagged art, Escher, photography, stylus, water, words
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Our correspondences… our intimacies
While I was doing some Spring Webcleaning a year ago, I coincidentally received a phone call from Nick Bantock about my long-moribund fan pages on his Griffin & Sabine trilogy. As I subsequently cleaned up the link rot in Where in the World are Griffin & Sabine?, I was briefly re-immersed in the tactile pleasures of the letters-in-envelopes motif that made the trilogy such a novelty.
Posted in Art | Design, Pens | Ink | Paper, Technology, Words
Tagged fountain pens, Griffin & Sabine, letters, paper, web
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The notebook as (framed) art
PenWorld is a place of pens and ink and cases, paper and notebooks and covers, pencils and markers and sketchbooks, plus the handwriting and artwork that can be created therewith. It’s probably fair to say that PenWorld’s residents, among whom I count myself, look at this assemblage of objects through both aesthetic and utilitarian lenses. Of course, true collectors generally have a different perspective — after all, a stamp collector is unlikely to salivate over a rare mint find in order to lick it and mail a letter! That scenario aside, most of us who own multiple fountain pens, for example, still look forward to inking them and using them. We may stare at them appreciatively, which is why those wooden cases for 12 or 24 pens usually have a glass top. But that top raises up so we can take them out and write with them.
Posted in Art | Design, Pens | Ink | Paper
Tagged art, Calepino, fountain pens, notebooks, paper
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