quiet part loud

When life is all tall ships and sketching and adventure, it's definitely worth sharing. When your eyes are full of the beauty of the world and your heart is convinced of its value, you want to express the joy of it. Right? The hills are alive with the sounds of music, and you're out there spinning and singing.

And perhaps when things are hard, you might share your story in order to receive support or feel less alone with the burden.

But what about the every day part of life?

We vary so much in those quiet details. I sit at my desk, laugh with colleagues on conference calls, sort out software requirements, review pull requests. I walk the dog, cook dinner, touch my nose to my cat's nose as she drowses in her bed atop the dresser, go through practice drills on the ukulele, and then try to work off the day's excess calories by shooting VR orcs with arrows.

It's not bad, that other stuff. But where is the story in it?

When I look back on those days, they have disappeared from my mind like so many puffs of smoke.

Back in 2010 I completed a project called "The Month in Comics". Every day that month I made a one-page comic. Usually the comic communicated one thought or joke. The project was challenging because (1) comics exercise both drawing skills and storytelling skills, neither of which come easily to me, and (2) I was working a day job that left me drained and not in a great headspace for creativity. Some days, I hit a hard block and despaired long and hard at having nothing to say.

By the end of the month I could find a story in pretty much anything. The more you make stories, the more stories there are to make. As I passed through the world, commuting to work and working and buying groceries and cooking dinner, everything became the stuff of stories.

Every one of those days, I remember.

One of the focal points of the Urban Sketchers movement is that art can happen anywhere there is a person. Beauty is all around us waiting to be seen, in shapes and shadows and human activities, not just in the world's celebrated beauty spots but anywhere we are. For many years I was in the habit of pulling out a sketchbook in any spare moment and catching whatever was there to be caught. The weathered leather boots of a fellow bus commuter were as interesting as an Eiffel Tower or Mount Fuji.

Both The Month in Comics project and Urban Sketchers involvement have been, at their core, about actively attending to the world and parsing it into personal meaning.

Every place I've sketched, I remember.

So where are my stories now?

I'm working on getting them here. To my blog. I don't really have a readership anymore, not since the days of hand-crafted HTML and web rings. I have posted only once in a blue moon in these last few years. Is there anybody out there?

In any case, the work matters and placing it in a public space makes it real.

Here is my space for stories.