What is a cluster to a wall? To which do I owe my fealty? The wondrous semi-chaos that adorns, or the nigh-invisible structure that provides surface, stability, place? If you are to be a fly on the wall, I am to be a nail: penetrating surface, mostly about stability, but my nose in the ornament (even, as it were, ornament's backside).

So maybe this isn't the best topic for this moment- re-inaugurating the 'blog so to speak- but I had this dream the other night about which I keep thinking: it's simple, and it's also perhaps indicative of my computer-addled brain, but I dreamt I was using this computer-drawing program that was some weird intuitive merger of Photoshop and some 3-D thing like Maya. The idea was that I could draw anything, and when I held the ctrl button (to be honest, I can't remember if it was a Mac or PC), it immediately rendered the drawing in a simple 3-D. But the best part is, whenever I did that, it would turn my pen tool into a knife tool so I could carve off bits, and they would fall off with virtual gravity. Perfect for drawing a ruined castle, which- you can probably guess- was exactly what I was drawing.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

Again, for test purposes:
"For a start, I think, we must stop treating beauty as a thing or a quality, and see it instead as a kind of communication: Beauty is an unstable property because it is not a property at all. It is the name of a particular interaction between two beings, a self and an Other; I find an Other beautiful. This act of discovery, we shall see, has profound implications". --Wendy Stiener, Venus in Exile