Lisa Congdon

I'm a sucker for when art + typography + wise words meet. Here, pieces made by artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon on life as the binge we're all indulging in, patience, and the refusal to be silenced. Please check out her site for her profile and many illustrations.

No impasse, jose.

We don't always get what we want, but I'm through feeling hopeless and just trying, trying, trying. I'm standing up, dusting the sand off my skirt, and just choosing to live with joy & thankfulness. Yea, sorrow and despair, take that and go walking. Scoot.

Status: Away

Been in KL for more than 2 months now. I think I'm entering that phase where I so badly miss my friends (my default coffee-dinner-travel buddies, my 0.5 twin, my #solidtotheus team) and boyfriend. My heart aches for Quezon City. I miss our no frills home cooked meals, my aunts and nephew, being around. And then there are the Metro Manila activities: the theater and music one gets to enjoy, which is never lacking in Manila.

Universe, please be kind. It's November, too.

Salcedo Art Market 2012

Nostalgia for my Metro Manila.
Event held February of this year at the Salcedo Park in Makati.

Find a friend

I think this is from artist Dang Sering's group

Colorful mosaic art, that girl with umbrella, that hibiscus

Like Chinatown in the rain,
I'll take this home if I had the means to.

Sketching the Wolfgang concert at the Met, Urban Sketchers

Prints, HK Disney Museum

A more girlish looking Cinderella

Rougher rendition of Ariel and Ursula

Get a yes and work for it.

In real life, you decide you want something and you work yourself into the ground trying to get it. You ask for what you want, you get told no, and you ask some more.

Meg Keene 

Heartbreaks

Dear E.p.,

Because I remembered not to long ago, I was on that path, too. I just want to tell you:

There's no way to get around it but to face it. That is, deal with it by submerging yourself waist-deep in its murky waters, where I do pray you will find the grace to move amidst the discomfort, to get up while crying when you fall further in ditches unseen, to push through even when your bruises and scratches seem to pile one on top of another.

It will get ugly, miserable, painful.

It will never be fair.

It will not make sense.

And it will feel like the pain  won't end and whatever hope you see is but a tiny glimmer far, far away in the horizon.

I know, I know it may seem fiction at this point, but the good news is, the ugliness, the misery, the pain-- they do end. That little ray of hope peeping out? It is real, as real as the hopelessness you feel today. And you just don't know but by facing the murky water, by wallowing in the ugliness, by moving, you're inching your way there slowly.

What I've learned from this network of sisterhood I found myself connected to when I was swimming in that uncomfortable ocean: that it is possible to handle things with grace. That amidst the discomfort and the impulse to just give in to the easy, it is possible to cling on to that tiny shred of dignity and emerge with your self intact; that it's no piece of cake, but it's always worth it when you choose yourself over the boy. He's just passing through, Ep, but meanwhile, you will always have you.

I love you, Ep, and if I can keep you from all this discomfort, I will, but it's your journey -- and no journey is ever wasted, whether it's the first class kind or the most heartbreaking hitch of your life.

You will get through this, I promise. Just remember that along with letting things get ugly are conscious decisions you have to make for yourself, in the name of self-love. That, too, is real, you know.


Love,
Me

These are the days of spring when the sky is filled
with the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire,
and there is nothing that does not wish to be born;
days when the fate of the present is a breezy fullness,
when the world's great gift for fiction gilds even
the dirt we walk on, and we feel we could live forever
while knowing of course that we can't. Such is our plight.
The master of weather and everything else, if he wants,
can bring forth a dark of a different kind, one hidden
by darkness so deep it cannot be seen. No one escapes.
Not even the man who believed he was chosen to do so,
for when the dark came down he cried out, "Father, Father,
why have you forsaken me?" To which no answer came. 

(4), "Poem after the Last Seven Words," Mark Strand

To view the complete poem, click here.

Never completely lost

Doing what you love can help with this. Doing what you love allows you to remember so well, to feel so closely how you have loved, that you can forget the space between yourself and the words you draw with. Forget the distance between you and everything, everyone, else. Love becomes transmutable. Freud knew this. Writing can be an effective replacement mechanism—and in its solitude, there is antidote for the deepest loneliness.

Lucy McKeon, "Meeting Joan Didion," the Paris Review

...how this essay made me miss writing, earnest writing, about the world and about life. I remember last year (and early this year) and how in the darkest of ruts, this blog was like an anchor.

October

Because Manang Pagong asked, here's my mantra for the month:

Steven Bonner, via jellylondon

Or, more like "(Work and) Achieve,"

Steven Bonner, via jellylondon

"Marathon lang yan," is what I need to remind the self. And so we must keep the pace for the long distance run going.