Drawings Archives | Blogging Sam

Why Aren’t You a Dewdrop?

By Sam
on Apr 30, 2019
in Books, Drawings, Meditation/Self Care

Look into the eyes of your beloved and ask deeply, “Who are you, my love, who has come to me and taken my suffering as your suffering, my happiness as your happiness, my life and death as your life and death? Who are you whose self has become my self? Why aren’t you a dewdrop, a butterfly, a bird, a pine tree?” Ask with your whole body and mind. Later, you will have to ask the person who causes you the most suffering the same questions: “Who are you who brings me such pain, who makes me feel so much anger and hatred?” To understand, you have to become one with your beloved, and also one with your so-called enemy. You have to worry about what they worry about, suffer their suffering, appreciate what they appreciate. You and the object of your love cannot be two. They are as much you as you are yourself.

Continue until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Practice until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of the Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your store consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.

-Thich Nhat Hanh
“Teachings on Love”

So We Will Not Drown in the Sea of Suffering

By Sam
on Mar 04, 2019
in Books, Drawings, Meditation/Self Care

“Mindfulness is the energy that allows us to look deeply at our body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness and see clearly what our real needs are, so we will not drown in the sea of suffering.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh
“Teachings on Love”

Migraine Season

By Sam
on May 07, 2018
in Drawings, Migraines

“3 AM” – 18″ x 24″, oil pastels, watercolor on paper (2016)

It must be migraine season. After three months without one, I’ve now had two in this first week of May. When it rains, it pours. This one got me at 2:30 AM.

The weather may actually be the culprit. We’ve had some rainy days lately. If there’s any consistent pattern of a migraine trigger for me, it’s changes in weather. Specifically, it’s the change from low pressure rainy periods to high pressure clear weather periods. After the rain clears and the sky is clear or has clouds that are thin and miles high, that seems to be a prime time for my head to cave in. A high pressure system did move in sometime during the night.

Before waking up at 2:30 AM, I had a dream that there was a light shining in my left eye. The odd thing was that I could only see that light when I closed my eye. When I opened it, the light wasn’t there. I puzzled over this in the dream. Then I woke up to “see” that I had an aura going on. I say “see” in quotes because the aura is there whether I open or close my eyes. Is that really “seeing?” The mildly unnerving aspect of waking up at night with an aura is that it makes me question whether my eyes are really open or not. Am I even awake or am I still dreaming?

When I notice an aura in my “vision,” I take migraine medicine as soon as possible. But at 2:30 in the morning, I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle of swallowing those big capsules. They aren’t as bad as the big chalky pills I used to take. (You can read about how I nearly choked to death on one of those while at work: “Super Bowl Sunday/Death by Migraine.”) I just didn’t have the energy to get out of bed to get the capsules. The baby woke up at that time too. My wife changed him and got him back to sleep. I had difficulty getting back to sleep and contemplated getting up to make coffee. But what would I do downstairs alone in the middle of the night? So I just stayed in bed slowly morphing into a zombie and eventually falling asleep.

At this point in the day, I’m doing okay. I’ve had two cups of coffee (so far). I’ve had eggs and toast for breakfast. I feel a bit worn out. My head doesn’t hurt all that bad. I’ve been able to get some work done and write this blog post. Looks like I’ll live.

As for the artwork above, it was created after having a middle-of-the-night migraine a few years ago. That piece was accepted into an exhibit at Atlantic Healthcare Systems last year. I was honored that the piece was used on the exhibit flyers. You can view the exhibit catalog here.

More of my migraine art can be found at http://www.doodlesam.com/blog/migraine-art/. Here are a few pieces that I drew after nighttime migraines.