Category: Uncategorized

My Love Affair with the Circle

Pardon the existential pun, but I don’t know where my love affair with the circle started. Some of my visual artworks are linear landscapes. Even those are created through simple cycles of breath. An in/out circular process that lets my mind and heart loop as I set down each colorful horizontal line.

My college thesis was an amalgamation of circular poetry and images, a philosophical work that dared to challenge the primacy of academic prose and rationality in favor of softer and rounder ambiguities. The work narrowly passed for credit and only under the cover of a forgiving oral defense.

I was just beginning to find visual languages to get closer to my own philosophical renderings. Ubuntu, togetherness, completion — some concepts can’t be made well without circular shapes.

I was grappling with dichotomies at the time, deep in study with Judith Butler’s writing and enthralled with Canadian and French feminists lacunae and silences. Ying/yang and infiniti symbols gave me a way to account for flows of power. Visually, I could better illustrate such polarities inside their discursive bonds, binds, and flips.

Three-dimensional globes appeared as I began to study particular domains and discourses. Leadership, culture, art, nature — intersecting orbs and bubbles adhered to one another in unusual combinations. I began to visualize the language domains in a diverse room or the way city cultures overlap and intrude on each other.

Deleuze’s rhizomatics helped me apply asymmetry, movement, and change to my visual models. Suddenly, a circle shape became a tunnel and a tuber. Sadly, also a tumor. Circlular movements shouldn’t be mistaken for cuddly kindness. Circles famously exclude, too.

Theories of teamwork, community, and advocacy are well-served by rounded edges, thinking in loopings, and widening the circle to unique voices and contributions. Embrace of the earth, folds in time, my own rhythmic bobbing — each come with centering qualities to locate my place in each moment and make a stone’s ripple in our time.

Tidying Up

I wish for everyone a neglected blog. A pillow pile of old posts for the times when tattered life needs tending. Sentences sewn together again. Old fabric mixed with new finds. Unpicking certain threads.

This blog dropped off at the end of the Washington Writer’s Retreat, after a good run on topics like creative practice, global cultures, and the secular Buddhist practice of dana, or balanced exchange.

That writing was preceded by a few years of travelogs, including a creative road trip across the United States, visits in Melbourne, Brussels, and Johannesburg, where Louise and I met and have been earning miles ever since.

I still carefully carry with me the handwritten journals of youth, now more fascinating for their materiality and privacy. Unlike the internet, they can be burned.

I trained in graphic design in high school, luckily landing in a small print shop run by a larger-than-life leader. The smell of ink and photographic chemicals wafts among graphic memories, a time when life’s tragic romance walked in the front door. Wedding and baby announcements. My own graduation news. Also funerals and flyers for lost dogs.

Sadly, I designed more than a few business cards for start-ups destined to fail. Incomplete ideas, personal hubris, time-wasting exercises recommended by supportive friends. Also, very tender reasons like having a scrap of stock with one’s name on it when everything else had been torn away.

Pinning down colors was crucial. Flipping through fonts revealed notes of class and status. Name specifics, title details, followed by the minor marketing messages. So big in the mind, so small in the visual space. As an object, the business card is created to be so valueless as to be given freely. And it is laden with identities and latent opportunities.

I can’t help it, I kept nearly all of them handed to me over the years. Well out-of-date and entirely eclipsed by technology. Tiny portraits of past professions. People as they appear in paperwork, along with the resumes and websites too. Works in progress.

The combined skills of writing and design have served me well professionally. More recent executive and management work appears in slides, speeches, and proposals. Data visualization has become a lifelong passion and frustration, along with stories that reveal the very complex values beneath all manner of facts and finance.

Three syllabi and slide sets due for updating soon. Site visits and photos so memorable they bear mention. Social media memes scattered across a collectible universe. Also that time I invented a phrase and it got grand prize on an old radio show.

“Ohma lo neary”

A phrase to replace of ‘sorry’ in response to loss or grief

Time travels, too, back to moments before my own musings. The who and whose that made my mental landscapes. The places only my soul has been before.

And, more. Here’s to wild, untended, and not yet ended spaces.

Peace and Prosperity Hold Hands

Dichotomies are designed to exhaust the human mind

Mental ping pong all day long

Endless bandying, demanding bandwidth and the emotional chores of either/or

Alive in the land of both/and

Sky and see and us

I claim a first right of refusal

To invest in meaning before it is divided by madness

Equity in more than a simple share

Who we were and what was there

A priori that fateful pair of lovers and the scary hiss, an abysmal switch made on us

Bountiful gardens tended well benefit from bound intelligences

Human heart and mind together


Hell on earth is wrought by naming thought above others

Eve gave us birth and the earth is our Mother

Every season ahead to remember and recover