Branching Threads, Overlaps, and Venn Diagrams

Thinking about connectedness, what I am writing, and where things fit. Latching on, again, to a Gobstopper view and embracing the holistic…the search for meaning.

Aug 04, 2024

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Knowing that these words have resonance for you means so much as I continue to weave this written lifeline and, at the same time, explore the contours of recording daily life in an illustrated journal, one week at a time.

Happy Sunday!

I went back and forth this week trying to justify a Substack subscription that felt like an investment in myself. There was a discount, and I spent hours debating, but things just don’t line up right now. I was frustrated with myself when the window closed. I went from yes to no to yes to no and back again and again. I know there was some level of baseline FOMO, some niggling worry that maybe I really am missing some simple things that would highlight not a path I keep missing but small changes that might make the path I am mapping more accessible to readers.

I think I’ve got a history of taking the long road, sometimes knowingly, sometimes because of some moral compass, sometimes because of circumstance, sometimes because I want to take photos, sometimes because I am simply lost or have forgotten where I am going, sometimes because of fear. I’ve spent a lifetime justifying the long road and encouraging a process of slowing down and enjoying the view. I can tell you a thousand reasons why the long road is worth it, but sometimes I trip and look around and wonder if the neon sign pointing the other way, with promises of a different type of path, might be worth it.

Thank you for opening this email or post today and spending a few minutes reading.

It’s been a quiet week. I wrote several letters to you, my readers, and I put them all aside. Postage went up, after all. I made a wonky non-Venn diagram to try and make sense of things. When that didn’t help, I made an alternate that, truly, makes me think of Gobstoppers with their everlasting colorful rings.

Today’s email centers on a plastic template, one I use often. It’s funny how such a simple thing can become a lens, a conduit, and an anchor as we try to make meaning of our days. What stuck this week was circles, nested and overlapping, a plastic sheet of open circles waiting to be filled.

Somehow, the answer is in that template. It’s a bit of a wandering deep-dive, but, really, that’s why I’m here. I don’t really want four rooms. I just want one, peeling wallpaper and all.

We’ve accepted the fact that I’ve had the Christmas tree up now for several years straight. Maybe we can handle a bit of loss? I do think there will be teddy bears.

Below:

Illustrated Journal pages from Weeks 30 and 31
Photos from the week
A wide-ranging essay on circles
A Venn diagram

I am considering breaking things up into separate posts throughout the week, but only the Sunday post will go to email. My hope is that this will make the Sunday post shorter but will also open things up to some of the extra writing I want to do. Nothing changes for you other than that I hope you continue to be a part of the Sunday post, continue to read, comment, and let me know how things are going for you.

Amy

Today’s post has a number of images and will be cut off in email. To view the full post in the app or in a browser, click here.

Illustrated Journal Pages from Weeks 30 and 31

A glimpse of the illustrated journal spreads, some in progress, from the last few weeks of Illustrate Your Week. (I have temporarily scaled down to an A5.)

A Green Template

There is a green circle template lying on the table in front of me. It’s a nice bright green, a fresh green, a perfect grass green. It’s translucent. It’s crisp. It makes for a colorful overlay in photos. Many times I have used it to add visual texture or to obscure parts of a journal page.

Right now, it is nicely aligned, this green template, with the corner of the table. It is straight but hanging off an inch on one side and maybe two inches on the other. A remote control sits on top, stretching across to a paper towel. A pencil sharpener is next to the remote, parallel. There is a pad of sticky notes extending from the edge of the paper towel.

There seems to be some semblance of order in this trail of stuff, a carefully laid path, bridges and connecting lines, but this is an illusion. This is a moment of randomness lining up only to dissolve, immediately, into chaos.

At a haphazard angle, I see the hand-me-down watch. I am not a watch wearer, and the watch face I’m using doesn’t make it easy to tell the time, but the watch is a nudge. The watch reminds me that without going out of my way to do so, I barely move in the day. (The watch is, in this moment, not on my wrist.)

The Kindle is there, another random angle. Already, the suggestion of nice, orderly rows, train tracks across the table, is skewed.

I look again at the green template and its promise of order, of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mondrian lines, parallel, perpendicular, clean and crisp, an allegiance to a grid.

The template is a red herring, a suggestion of order on the periphery of chaos.

As if a handful of wooden sticks had been gathered in one hand and then tossed into the air to fall for a child’s game, the path to somewhere opens into a jumble of things: a pack of sweet mint gum, two bottles of insulin, glaucoma drops, pieces to a wooden yarn ball holder, my calendar, the edges of a book on grief (that I have not opened) peeking out from below, the one cup I use at night, two empty diet soda cans, my phone, the other remote, a syringe, a circular knitting needle, and an assortment of colored pencils and fountain pens.

My view of the scattered contents on the table ends, obstructed by the iPad, which is propped in front of me where I am typing.

I have been mulling the changed morning, the difference in the quiet, the ways my own listening and awareness in the night have shifted, and now will shift again.

The coffee table is a mess of simple things. It can be straightened easily. These vestiges of evening are droppings of daily life, little clues. Mostly they are of no consequence. I wander through hours leaving trails. It seems there are always little piles of disconnected things. I marvel at people with no trails, no piles, no junk drawers, no catch-all bins and baskets.

At the same time, in some ways, the trail surprises me. It feels that I am spending most hours sitting with my phone or my iPad. I feel compact in that way (ignoring my actual size). I feel I could walk out with a simple bag of things, and yet nothing is farther from the truth.

I wonder when I will leave the house again?

I wrote thousands of words this week. I talked out loud and recorded endless streams of words, pools of words that can be shaped, that veer this way and that, train tracks that make impossible loops, cross paths, switch back and forth. The tracks are lined across the floor. They snake up and down the walls, across the sagging couch, dipping into the sunken valley between the cushions before tumbling to the floor. They move up the edges of the chairs, where they zip along the geometric pattern, full of lines and sharp angles.

The words branch and multiply. They race along every surface.

When I write, right now, I land in a certain place, a place that is curiously misty, heavy fog all around. Every word I write leaves me wandering through that place, a place where I keep stubbing my toe, over and over, on upraised roots, on pebbles, on shards of glass not yet tumbled. I can’t see my way clear to sort through the incongruity of the roots and the glass in the same breath.

Is this a forest? Is this a treehouse? Is this an ocean?

The mist is a euphemism.

The words break me every time.

Again and again, I write, determined to find a high branch, enough distance to line things up in orderly rows, enough distance to gain perspective, enough distance to write through and beyond.

But everything right now is a game of pick up sticks.

I write, and I go back to a certain day, to a span of hours. I try to move on each side of that, gaining ground, recovering hours. I am trying to piece together something.

This wet-eyed, misty, chaotic place mostly appears when I write. And you are here reading what I write.

So I need you to know that I am okay. In many ways, I am okay. I am okay-ish. I will be okay.

Everything is different again. Everything is new. My mom left, and the reality is now mine to fully face. It was another first, another day one.

The piles on the table suggest stories. Really, they are just tiny details. It wouldn’t photograph well, but I find something beautiful and intriguing in this kind of tableaux, in the semblance of order, in the dissolution to chaos, in the juxtaposition of odds and ends. I find beauty in the incongruity.

The green template keeps catching my eye.

The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. — Piet Mondrian

Circles in Assorted Sizes

The green template has an assortment of circles, thirteen, each a different size. The circles start small and increase in size as they line up along one edge. They continue to increase in size in a row down the center, and then there are three large circles on the final row.

Many times, I have wished they were all the same so that I could draw a row or grid of uniformly sized circles at a time. Many times I have wished there were even larger circles, but the lids from yogurt and storage containers work.

These days, I often just wing it, just freehand a loose circle and call it good enough.

This circle template is something I use often, circles being a container shape that I started using in my journal a few years ago, inspired in part by another artist who was drawing with me at the time and often used circles to lay out her journal pages.

I did 100 days of circles that year.

But this morning, I’m looking at that template and the varying sizes, and I’m trying to understand where I fit, where the words fit, where the various topics fit.

I have been thinking about the things I write and want to write and need to write. I have been thinking about what holds me together and about breaking things up differently.

I have been thinking about a new space to track some of the concrete things related to this new terrain, a space for the mapping and personal writing.

I am not sure what makes sense anymore. I look at that template, and I see all these little circular cubbies to fill. Filling those spaces is one of the joys for me of working with a variety of themes, with the roundness and fullness and sometimes hollowness of life. There are edges, little containers that can individually house light or dark, quiet or thunder, gratitude or hurt.

I can fill a space with whimsy, and in another I can draw bricks or write the crumbling of a wall or of a house or of a life. I can draw a bird in one and in another a scone or a hand or the mascot from the Olympics. I can write of fear and anxiety, of loneliness and isolation, and still laugh at a story or a headline or a figure of speech.

The circles are an overlay. Sometimes I use the edges. Sometimes I let things spill over between them, fire lapping with water, rainbows bleeding into fog.

The template works either way. It creates spaces that are an invitation. It gives contours and edges. All of the circles on the template ultimately line up. They all fit within the larger space.

We contain multitudes.

“In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well.” ― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

This and That

I am not one to be penned in. Maybe that is my downfall as a writer (that and a lack of imagination).

How do I summarize who I am and what I am doing?

Right now, I am obsessed with survival. I am overwhelmed with hurt and fear and emptiness and anxiety and regret. I am mapping loss and circling grief, a word I am realizing I am sidestepping. It is one of several words I am keeping at a distance, words I do not yet know how to claim, how to translate, how to define. These are words I need to write through, contours I need to draw, letters I need to fill with thread, trace with fingers, eyes closed.

I need to mobilize, and yet my limbs are suddenly concrete. I can’t move, and when I write, I fall into the forest or the ocean or some place where my eyes blur.

This space, this weekly letter, is part of the solution. But, fair warning, I’m not sure I can just pick one of the circles on the template and write and share in that space. I never could. It’s just that now one of the circles threatens to overbalance the whole. The new circle has opened up a space that is wide and deep.

Every time I write, I end up circling loss.

I need to be writing about some of the nitty gritty things. I need to be writing about some of the things I wish I had known, the lists I wasn’t able to find, the lists that are granular and actionable beyond all the things I found online. I need to document. I need to draw all the teddy bears, all the knickknacks, all the things I need to get rid of and can’t….until I draw them.

Some of what I need to do is really concrete. I stand in rooms and look around with no clear sense of how to begin. Some of what I need to do is not poetic. My need to write about the importance of the cell phone after someone dies… is not going to be poetic. But it may help someone.

This is how I make sense of things.

Venn Diagrams

I spent a lot of time this week thinking about the disparate threads, about all those circles on the template and how it works (in the illustrated journal) for me to just throw things side by side. But from the standpoint of writing a successful blog (or newsletter), it’s not necessarily a sound strategy.

I might argue that when we shine light at the grid, whether the containers are circles or squares, there are shadows at play, there are reflections and echoes, there are bridges that come into view, there are silhouettes, there are patterns that form in and between, and that everything, really, is connected.

This is what I believe. This is who I am as a writer and an artist. This is who I was thirty years ago. This is who I am today.

But it makes a 2-sentence summary of who I am and why someone would read me difficult. You may be someone who enjoys a Gobstopper. But my guess is that most people won’t stick through weeks of grief on the off-chance that there will be a guided post on keeping an illustrated journal (which is the book I thought I was writing when I first started writing here). My guess is that if you like the meandering poetry and word play, you may have little interest in the list of books I made about grieving. My guess is that those who might find themselves on a journey of loss may have zero interest in diary comics or self-portraits.

I am thinking about why someone might open this email or post each week.

The Venn diagram is one of those concepts that seems obvious and simple, logical and immediately practical in terms of visualization, and yet when I try to make one, things get confusing.

The Venn diagram below is hyperbolic and not really intended to make sense as a Venn diagram, but it does a reasonable job of illustrating the problem. I didn’t even include fountain pens and ink and fun things like sketchbooks, rainbow pencils, and watercolor.

This is not a cleaned up diagram, but it was an interesting exercise. It was clarifying. There are lots of things that could be added.

As a Venn diagram, this was an exercise in futility. There are dozens of ways to approach the circles, to think about what overlaps and what makes sense.

But something about this is also mesmerizing.

And yet there are other ways to align things.

The random colors may be an eyesore, but there is something compelling here, too.

I know you. I am sure I’m not the only one who sees this and thinks of Gobstoppers.

After finishing today’s post, I was looking at the diagram above and thinking about some of the things I left out. I opened the file and added a circle that encompassed some of the circles on the right. I moved things around to fit in the line denoting “the search for meaning.”

And then I saw that, really, that’s the unifying thread. That’s what holds everything together. A simple shift, the broadening of that circle, and everything becomes part of the whole. This Venn diagram is infinitely scalable.

Venn diagram of the search for meaning — A Venn that makes sense. An expandable Venn. A. Cowen 2024.

If we remove all the noise, I think there are four or five core buckets:

Illustrated journaling (process, examples, how-to, and prompts)
The other art (which includes portraits, series, mediums, digital art, diary comics, sketchnotes, and more)
Personal writing (life writing and creative habit; this is where I exist)
Navigating loss and grief (new; I had been thinking about writing in the space that comes just before this point, but we leapfrogged, and I am now here)
Technical discussions and strategies for organizing, tracking, productivity, and writing (this was something I planned to start in the spring—not something that fits my current space but something I am always nerdily doing and exploring; this is not about poetry.) — When I have time again for this, it will be separate.

In terms of the summaries, when I went back and looked at what I say about this substack and about myself right now, it seems I already had the general idea in place.

Photos from the Week

This is going to get hard. Keep me honest.

A window view looking out at trees — Morning view. A. Cowen 2024

Cribbage board and cards — A final game of cribbage. A. Cowen 2024

A circle of koi on the sidewalk; artist unknown. A. Cowen 2024

A lemon — This photo goes with this post. A. Cowen 2024

Weekly Bits and Pieces

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

Thank you to a new paid subscriber this week.

Thank you, especially, to those who left comments last week. Every comment is a little pinch, a little reminder that people still see me — and that they look for me not through me.

After a few days of sitting all folded up and holding my breath, I am ready to start moving again. Slow is fine. I need an action plan, so I am thinking about that.

The roof happens Monday. I could really use your good thoughts. I am terrified they will open up the roof to find the house will not hold. I am terrified someone will fall through. I can’t even begin to express the depths of this anxiety. I’m not sure how I will manage listening for two days, really. The scaffolding went up Friday, and the sounds of them drilling into the house (what?) sent me into a panic. They didn’t even ring the doorbell. They came. They scaffolded. They left. I read and reread the warnings about “mechanic’s liens.” I am holding my breath. Think a good thought this week. I really need this to not be a can of worms. That it was not leaking….has to tip the scales in my favor that this is in time.

I do know these are ordinary things and things people do and are supposed to do all along, not after things fall down and when there is no money. I know all that. I know this is not a Herculean ordeal. But I also know that everything feels precarious.

And I trust no one.

Tell me what three things you can do this week to help yourself balance and to tackle things that need to be done.

Go make your own Venn diagram and tuck it into your journal.

Oh, and if you don’t already subscribe to Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in the Dark, check it out. This is not the subscription I mentioned in the beginning, but I am deeply curious about the upcoming writing intensive.