Of Elephants and Snails: Exercising Patience
michael
When we first got to Keren and Bobby’s we found a book on the coffee table called The Fountain of Youth. It describes 5 exercises which if practiced daily lead to looking younger and feeling great. It’s filled with stories of ancient monks dancing up mountains carrying gigantic burdens, and as the exercises seemed rather simple, I suggested we incorporate them into our morning routine. This has been good. As a family we’ve never exercised together and it’s become a very wholesome part of the morning. I haven’t noticed anyone looking any younger yet, but then, it’s only been a little more than 2 months.
We’ve also been doing a drawing exercise which I’m hoping will yield some t-shirt designs as we perfect the process. We each start with a piece of paper and a common theme. A timer is set and we draw the theme’s object. When the timer goes off we pass the paper, reset the timer and draw the ground (or perhaps neighboring bodies if the object is floating in space.) Again we pass and draw the atmosphere (sky, clouds, nebulas etc.) On the last pass we color and voila! we have four drawings! We’ve learned quickly to outlaw military equipment, lasers, and explosions. My favorite theme so far was drawing each other with the last pass being a self portrait. I’d love to get your opinion on these!
We’ve started putting designs on a t-shirt website called REDBUBBLE. This site is awesome. I’ve had an account with CafePress for years and never made it public because of its labor-intensive unmanageability. REDBUBBLE is a comparative dream to operate. You absolutely HAVE to check out the vinyl stickers!
Selling t-shirts has been a pet-idea of ours from the get-go. A way to generate income while on the road that does not require continuous production. This is perhaps the materializing tail of one of the nebulous elephants Bethany alluded to in a previous post. This elephant is composed of half-formed art-based money-making schemes. Each, if implemented, might bring in a trickle of income but nothing substantial enough to sustain us until heartLOOSE gains more momentum. The other elephant wants to ditch the pie-in-the-sky dreams and find a local job.
Suffice to say, these elephants are not eager to hear each other’s opinions and spend most of their time back to back in the living room pretending the other doesn’t exist. They won’t even join in our morning exercises!
Thankfully, the more we exercise, the less their sighs and harrumphs disturb us. Soon we will be dancing up mountains with them on our shoulders, whether they like it or not! If it seems like we’re moving at a snail’s pace, rest assured that it’s a diesel powered turbo snail.