life cultivating life

The name of my blog, which is also the little phrase of aspiration on my business card, comes from this passage in Frederick Franck's Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: meditation in action, which I loved - and changed -  on first sight:

In the decayed slums of New York, London, Brussels, an ugly beauty survives, a smelly backdrop to human life...The bipeds that err through this wasteland in their dry-cleaned finery avoid meeting one another's eyes for fear of unprovoked assault. There is nothing to draw here...

Then the eye recovers, blots out the glass and steel. The bipeds are humans after all, milling around in their bodies, fat bodies, thin bodies, old and young bodies. My hand starts to move: Life is drawing life again, drawing the human condition. Wherever you draw human beings, you draw the human condition, your own.