when everything that got you here is only somewhat useful for the next step

In memory of The Time this windshield bird poop looked JUST like a baby owl trudging up a slope, ski mitts wielding poles

Suffering humiliation, turns out, rarely leads to insight. There are multiple painful steps to insight, which requires introspection into the humiliation you’re probably desperate to escape. MUCH faster to expel the humiliation onto someone—anyone—more vulnerable

I still have first-person memories from childhood feeling irritable that I was so small. I couldn’t wait to be bigger, so there was always something to anticipate. As an adult I do love emotional growth, but imagine if it was as concrete as getting an inch taller each year?

This is a photograph of my great uncle, Jim Ida, in 1942. The photograph was taken by Dorothea Lange as part of her documentation of the Japanese American incarceration. He is sitting with his family’s bags, waiting to be taken to an internment camp. (Tanforan, I believe.) He was 17.

Thinking about the trancelike flow of sketching while on the phone with a friend.

(drawn on Paper, that iPad app)

critical to remember — a cat turning their back on you is a great show of trust

watch for tiny portals out in the world, hiding in plain sight

I drew this a while back. Looking at it now, I think about how a bonsai’s gnarled shape reflects every insult it endured to live so long. A flower twisting in the wind, though, can thrive via floppiness