I Want to Be Gentle

But sometimes I'm a vengeful god

Hello, Gardeners of Words, Pictures, and Plants!

How do you deal with pests?

oh, great devourer,
scampering on my windshield,
justice or mercy?

Oversole

The Transcendentalists believe in 
a Universal Over-Soul.
Miss Taggart taught me that in my sophomore year of 
high school.
I would lay awake in bed at night
and wonder what it would be like 
to lose all sense of myself. 
I was trying so hard to get a grip on who I was then,
that the idea of losing my individuality to a cloud of everything
gave me the same sense of impending doom that 
I felt in my stomach whenever Dad came home from work 
and I had failed to live up to my potential. 
Now that I’ve lived some life and 
seen some shit,
I see the heavenly appeal of letting myself melt away like
a pack of wax crayons on a cookie sheet in the oven.
But I don’t believe in an oversoul.
I do believe in souls 
and in soles too.
Maybe there is a Universal Over-Sole 
that keeps us from walking in worn-out shoes after we die.
That would be something.
I bet Emerson never saw the oversole coming.
He’s pissed off somewhere because he’s still himself
but with nicer shoes.

Artist Note

A while ago, I took a picture of a bug that I knew I wanted to draw:

I often take reference pictures for future poems or comics. I showed this image on Notes last week, and

E.R. Flynn

and

Lisa Kuznak

informed me that it's a horrible little creature that destroys gardens. Their comments directly inspired today's haiku.

Emmerson, Thoreau, and the rest of the Transcendentalists continue to have an unshakable grip on my imagination. The three biggest influences on my spirituality are Transcendentalism, Buddhism, and the Mormonism I grew up with. While I have rejected Mormonism as a religion, I find some of the theology too beautiful and weird to give up. I jettisoned the significant amount of toxic teachings and doctrines many years ago. But I continue to seek communion with the divine and a way to bring the sacred into my everyday life. I also don’t take anything too seriously.

Publishing Note

I’m having some technical issues with my Flipboard account due to the way I set it up all those years ago. I may end up creating a new account and porting over the posts from the old account. If that happens, as seems likely, I will share the news links here.

I’m getting close to being ready to make a fun publishing announcement for a project that will launch in June. I just need to nail down a few more things.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason