A Marathon in 5 Parts

Doors, portals, shoes, sketchbooks, and more

“Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future.” — Gregory David Roberts

Happy Sunday! Would you like what’s behind door number 1 or door number 2?

Especially during a month like November, when NaNoWriMo is underway, and there are words spilling and spewing everywhere, narrowing in on a post feels a little bit like a game of Let’s Make a Deal. Should I share what’s behind door number 1 or door number 2?

One of them, you know, will reveal a goat.

One of them will probably reveal something too personal and yet so veiled as to be almost completely opaque.

I’ve been thinking about these doors, about putting up a door each week and inviting you in, giving you a key. While it sounds like the Monty Hall problem, three doors and two goats, it really isn’t. There are lots of doors. A goat isn’t always a goat. Maybe there are a 1000 doors.

Maybe what I am doing every day is writing a new door.

Doors let some things in. Doors keep some things out.

All doors are portals. Sometimes they go somewhere special. Sometimes they just lead to the other side. Portals are so much more enchanting than doors.

• If I tell you the door is a portal, will you walk through?

• If I tell you the door is a portal, will it change how you feel about opening the door?

• If I tell you the door is a portal, will you push or pull?

• If I tell you you will walk through the door and find yourself standing in exactly the same place, on the other side, will you turn the knob?

Photo by Jean Bach on Unsplash

I had a once-a-month in-person meeting this week. It’s an awkward meeting. When I got to the door, I stopped. The door works oddly. I know there is “something” about the door, and I can never remember what it is. I could see the “Push” sign that is taped on the inside, a sign facing in. Of course that means from the outside, you need to pull. But seeing that sign, even in reverse, confuses things. I still first tried a push before a pull.

I stumbled through today’s door one morning this week, unaware. I didn’t completely sort out the metaphor. I still can’t tell if I’m talking about a run or a hike or some other endurance test.

Another door would be safer. Another door might lead somewhere beautiful. Another door might get us back on track talking about journaling and keeping an illustrated journal. Don’t give up. Don’t unsubscribe. We’ll open another door next week.

Sometimes, the words that come as solace, the metaphors and analogies that spring up, aren’t solid. They are wispy, loose, inaccurate, incomplete, and maybe half-formed.

The words, like the narrator, are not always reliable.

But I like to follow the words. Sometimes it is only in the following that I sort out what was behind the moment.

At the meeting, I squirmed as I deflected a token “so what are you doing for Thanksgiving” question. (It was the only question I was asked.) I think the plan is a release the day before Thanksgiving. I am grateful. But you can’t answer the idle “so what are you doing for Thanksgiving” question with a story that has a lot to do with a hospitalization, a homecoming, and a marathon (that has nothing to do with running) right? It’s not the expected answer. They want a funny story about serving or not serving turkey. I shrugged. “Nothing. Just really low-key.” I don’t know what we are eating. We won’t have a fancy table setting or a house full of people.

I always leave thinking my life is even smaller than it is, thinking that I am doing everything wrong, thinking I simply don’t fit in anywhere. 

But then I think about the moments within the moments, the fact that I’m interested in the moments within the moments. I know that when I walked out the door to leave, pushing the door open without a second thought, I saw the hills in the distance and thought they were breathtaking. They looked as if someone had dropped them in, a layer of collage or a shape on a magnetic story board, the light making them seem somehow not real. I know that my morning drive had been full of radiant light coming through what I knew must be rain in the distance.

Maybe this is an aria. Maybe this has five parts. Maybe it has six or seven. Maybe it has eight. Maybe there are a dozen doors.

Maybe I should just write about drawing and journaling and documenting life. That’s probably why you are here. But that’s the thing, the life examined is related to the life we record in our sketchbooks and journals.

Doors are portals, except when they are just doors.

This intro letter is long enough to have been the whole post. (I removed whole sections that were, at one point, integral.) Come back tomorrow for coffee or tea and read the rest? As usual, the parts, the movements, the footholds are entwined.

The parts

• 1 Warming up (morning)

• 2 Finding stride (a bucket list)

• 3 The run (a marathon in a circle, with illustration)

• 4 Wanting (and shoes)

• 5 The sketchbook

• Afterword (with a bus)

• Comments section (with December prompts and Week 47 Illustrate Your Week)

Thank you for reading.

Amy

“I think that music opens portals and doorways into unknown sectors that it takes courage to leap into. I always think that there’s a potential that we all have, and we can emerge, rise up to this potential, when necessary. We have to be fearless, courageous, and draw upon wisdom that we think we don’t have.” — Wayne Shorter

1. Warming Up.

I’ve been keeping to my morning practices, although they have already started to feel a bit smooshy. Of the five things I stacked in setting up a short analog morning routine, one has already slid away. I’ve relaxed some of the rules. Some mornings, I am breezing through, doing the bare minimum, racing to move on to other things that the morning wants to hold: writing, digital art, some reading.

Sometimes, being flexible with yourself is important.

One morning this week, I skipped my morning writing entirely. I knew it was going to be a challenging day. Up early, I sat with coffee and focused on tweaking the boxes for the panels I’ve been using in these posts. They were empty. It was simple work. It was tedious work. I kept drawing and erasing like I was tending a zen garden. It wasn’t a wildly productive use of time. I ended up in basically the same place I started. The boxes look almost exactly the same. But the time spent was filling. It was a slowing down, a willingness to draw, erase, and refine over and over. It was a morning meditation before driving to a meeting with a door I always try to open the wrong way.

I was thinking about how I might fill the boxes this week. I was thinking about poetry and haiku and the beautiful comic poetry and comic haiku I’ve been seeing.

All I did in that window of morning was shape and reshape the lines.

I could have just started over, drawn new boxes. But using the same lines and cleaning and reshaping them each week is oddly satisfying. I’m taking the scenic view. No shortcuts allowed. No automated perfect straightening of lines. I like the wonkiness of the digital lines, the varied weight, the uneven corners, the bit of shake that comes through in places. That shake, that bit of wobble…. it’s mine.

Four simple box outlines. They took the place of my writing, my gratitudes, my affirmations.

Sometimes the poem is in simply watching ink lines appear, disappear with a tap, and appear again.

2. Finding stride.

Finished with the boxes, I read Andrea Gibson’s bucket list, and I felt the calm of her words. Not only is it a soulful list, one beyond the constant wishing for more and more and more in tangible, look-at-my-knickknacks ways. It is a list that is free and, at the same time, not. It is a poet’s list.

I don’t do bucket lists. I can’t figure out how to solve the things that actually have to be done. There is no room for dreams.

3. The run.

With the hospitalization now entering its sixth week, I feel like my mind has run marathons, up and down hills and around trails by the ocean, through the sand and trees, touching stars and across bridges and through valleys, wolves constantly nipping at my feet, coyotes howling. But hawks have appeared in trees; ravens have insisted I see them. Hummingbirds and parrots have given color and noise.

(I can write this because the finish line is in sight. (Edited to add: And then it wasn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time.)

In these weeks, I’ve run and run and run through all the scenarios, all the possibilities, all the questions, the emotions, the choices, the hypotheticals, the what ifs and what will I dos. As with so many circuits, we are almost back at the beginning, back at home, back at the start of waiting and wondering how many days there will be in between and if anything will be different this time. We are back at the beginning as if nothing happened.

But five weeks have happened.

This convoluted sense of a marathon was my graphic novel challenge for this week. This one was a real stretch…. Looking at these each week as a “beginning” helps.

Panels. A. Cowen, 2023

The marathon has happened. It’s been the slowest of runs. I don’t even train for it properly. I don’t train. I always think I will practice, whatever that means in this context, and then I slide back into the same patterns of daily existence… hoping things that are falling down and breaking hold on for another day, hoping I can hold onto my job, wondering how we got here, wondering where the time went, wondering why we stay, knowing we can’t leave. Every time we find ourselves back at the beginning, it is with good intentions, plans to sort things out but no idea, really, how.

The question of story is one I wrestle with. I’m not the only one who ran a marathon. Some would say there was no marathon for me, that it isn’t my story at all.

Some are wrong.

4. Wanting.

As the days dragged on, I found myself wasting time trying to figure out what I could buy. Mentally fatigued, I wanted a treat, but If I was going to treat myself, what would it be. There are too many things I want. New key caps. New wool leggings. A flow rope.

My question these days is always, will it make a difference? Will it make me feel different? These are my questions, even for small things. Usually, the honest answer is probably not.

I didn’t buy anything. I don’t need anything. But sometimes that desire to self-treat is almost overwhelming.

I’ve been running a marathon, and I don’t like to run. I don’t find it fun or relaxing. My feet hurt barely a mile in.

I spent a lot of time noticing nurses and their shoes in the early days. It was funny to see Hokas on so many feet. I’ve been wearing the same pair of tennis shoes for the last two years, a pair of black ASICS I bought on a deal for under fifty dollars. I wear them everywhere. It was interesting seeing Hokas in bright, tropical colors padding in and out of the room. I kept looking at the bottom, wondering if it feels like walking across the blue spongy surface at the playground.

There was a Wall Street Journal story on Hokas in the last few weeks, too. I don’t subscribe, so I wasn’t able to read more than the headline and blurb, but it was a funny moment of synchronicity.

“Hokas are the chunky sneakers of choice for runners. And nurses. And waiters. And teens. And grandpas. How did shoes that were huge, weird and French conquer America’s hearts, wallets and feet?” — Ben Cohen, “The Ugly Shoes Now Worth Billions of Dollars” (Wall Street Journal)

I definitely don’t want to buy shoes. They stand here just as an example of things I no longer fully understand.

When I find that I want things, the best approach is often to double down on my awareness of what I have, of what is enough. This is a time to level up the gratitude practice. One favorite cup. A box of cinnamon tea. My dress (covered by a fleece jacket or a vest because what I like most is the layered swish at the bottom over my leggings). Favorite cowls my mother has made through the years. Fingerless mitts. The ability to call my mom. Fountain pens. A favorite pencil given to me when…. high school? A scrap of white eraser. Plenty of ink.

Will a new ink in a favorite color that looks almost the same as all the others really change my outlook? Probably not.

There is the sense, always, that the thing we don’t have will make us feel better. But when the thing is simply “another” thing, the aftermath is often hollow, anticlimactic, unfulfilling.

5. The sketchbook.

I decided I was frustrated with my sketchbook. For several years in a row, I have used a specific sketchbook. I only need a new one every few months, but as I’ve continued to tighten and try to use what I have, I’m now using a cheap spiral bound book that came in a scrapbooking kit probably twenty years ago. There are a few of these on the shelves. It was a logical choice. When I decided to use it for my illustrated journal after finishing my last sketchbook, I thought it would be fine. The pages are reasonably thick, and fountain pen ink doesn’t bleed through. It’s not quite as big as I like, but it’s a square format. Every once in a while, spiral bound isn’t a bad diversion.

But, suddenly, last weekend, I was frustrated with the sketchbook. I was frustrated with my spread at the end of the week. I had been there every day, but it looked like I wasn’t really there. It was misguided but easy to hold the sketchbook accountable. Once that idea took up space in my head, it was hard to shake. That night, I inked some lyrics around the portrait I had drawn in our Sunday drawing group. The ink spread and feathered, salt in a wound.

Is the sketchbook really to blame? Of course not.

There’s been this marathon thing. I ran nowhere, other than in circles. But I’m tired. And even though the race is basically over, and I know we can catch our breath, every marathon changes things.

I didn’t give in. I didn’t switch sketchbooks. I do have one more of my go-to illustrated journal sketchbooks on my shelf, waiting. I might switch for December. Or maybe I’ll hold off for the new year. It looks like there are close to “just enough” pages to finish out the year.

Afterward.

There are things I haven’t done. Clean the toilet. Clean up the pile of dead ants in the stairwell. I’m still walking past the “it’s not a leaf” in the basement, eyes averted. Mostly, everything is the same.

In the early days of this marathon, a doctor talked about the jejunum. I misheard those “j’s” as “d’s.” For several days, I thought everyone was saying “duodenum,” but it sounded more like “de-dU-num.” I thought I had just been mispronouncing it my entire life. I was privately embarrassed. I kept puzzling over how I could have said the word so wrongly for so long.

I’ve learned a lot of words in these weeks. There are lots of acronyms. I remember odd things. I hate that these words all squeeze out the space where actual memories might be, should be.

I never said I wanted to run.

The marathon itself ends up being something we simply know we have done. It’s almost unfathomable to look back and know that it’s been five weeks…. that we’ve come all this way back to the beginning as if it never happened.

Five weeks is approximately a tenth of the year. This one single marathon was a significant wedge of pie of a year.

When you think of your year in weeks, everything takes on a different scale. When you think of your year in moments, it is expansive. It seems, maybe not infinite, but vast.

Weeks can help us gather some of the moments into units. We can record them in our journals and sketchbooks. We can feel like we are tapping the sticky note on the gate that marks the crossing to a new week. We aren’t just sliding through the days at full speed.

We are looking and seeing. That is always what I hope for us in our illustrated journals.

My pages from these weeks are a bit abbreviated. My notes are encoded, brief, terse. Just the facts. These haven’t been the most satisfying weeks in my journal, but I am glad to have recorded even the tiniest bits.

I was behind a bus one day this week with an ad for Skechers. The back of the bus was covered in large open mouths that were each biting into a shoe. I snapped a photo so I could draw something from this bus in my journal. Curious about the ad, unsure what I was supposed to take from the pairing of mouths and shoes, I looked it up. “Bite into lip-smacking neon Unos.”

Bus ad. A. Cowen, 2023

I did draw something from that bus on my pages for Week 46.

“While art can be a reflection of the mystical source of consciousness, it also has the ability to draw the audience into the realm of the mystical through the use of symbols. The door is one of those symbols, representing the transitional space between ordinary reality and the deeper realms of the subconscious.” — “The Symbolism of the Doors in The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern”

Made It?

It’s long. I know. I’m sorry.

This week brings Thanksgiving for many. I hope you have a peaceful week. I hope you are noticing and claiming your gratitudes. Remind someone you care. Go for a walk. Draw a tree, or a duck, or the pardoned turkeys and their names. Write a poem you love into your journal.

I am grateful for you as a reader. I am grateful for those of you helping support my writing, podcast, and art with your subscriptions. I am grateful for those who comment here and on the illustrated journal art I share at Instagram.

🎯 There are December prompts available.

🎯 The Week 47 prompts for Illustrate Your Week are posted.

🎯 There are gratitude posts (1, 2, 3).

I always appreciate your comments and knowing what speaks to you and where we find common ground.

• Rolling Stones if you looked at that bus and went there. Lip-smacking if you understood the ad.

• A favorite door or door story. There are so many good doors.

• One song for November. (Let’s see what list comes from this.)

• A word for the week ahead.

Thank you for reading the Illustrated Life substack. Please consider subscribing to receive the weekly email. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader! Please comment and restock or share with someone who might enjoy my particular blend of wordplay and art.

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Doors … books come to mind: The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix E. Harrow) and an older one from a series we didn’t finish, 100 Cupboards (N.D. Wilson). Think about all the doors in Monsters, Inc. There are doors in The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern). There is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Not a door, but a portal. Semantics.

After (reluctantly) removing introductory sections about music and structure, I did an idle search on the stages of a marathon. (Again, I don’t run.) The article I landed on didn’t give me five stages, but it had these wonderful bits of wisdom:

“I often hear people talk about a marathon as two races. That you should ‘run the first half with your head, the second half with your heart.’”

“In some marathons, the dark times seem to go on forever, and in others, they never arrive at all.”