The Year of the…Owl?
A few years ago, I decided that my journals were not visually interesting enough. I could go for days, weeks, months, years, with nary a drawing or doodle, instead spewing out giant blocks of text, page after page, after page. I have been keeping a journal since I was nine, so that was a lot of pages.
Thus, I at some point I decided to draw something every day. In 2019, this took the form of a rabbit. I confess that there were several rabbitless days and the rabbits were of wildly varying quality but quality wasn’t the point. And when I say, wildly varying, I mean it.
The point was to just draw something and to do it without judgement or evaluation. I have quality-shamed myself out of so many things, striving for perfection before production. If I am going to do X then it has to be Y. The sum of that equation was usually zero.
It was an also an exercise about the power of the increment, if you do something everyday, then at then end of the all those days then you have those things assembled. I finished the year with over two hundred drawings of rabbits. Rabbits of wildly varying quality. But rabbits lots of rabbits.
Which brings us to Owls…
In 2020, I decided to draw owls. I am not really sure why I landed upon owls but I decided that every day I would draw an owl, write a haiku, and, so that I could say that I wrote something every day, write the word “something.” Hah. Ha.
And then came 2020
Like everyone else in the world, the 2020 I envisioned was so much different that the year that appeared. I was having a milestone birthday and after a rather grinding and soul-trying stretch of a few years, I was starting a new job. Things were finally starting to look up. I was filled with hope. Great, heart-swelling hope. Hope that put a spring in my step, caused me to smile unprovoked, and well…it felt like my heart was filled with border collies, bookstores, the smell of the ocean, and the sound of train whistles.
And then the news of COVID-19 came trickling into my newsfeeds. For a previous project, I had done a lot of reading about the previous Flu pandemic of 1919 and, having lived in Hong Kong, and seeing how the aftermath of SARS shaped so many things there, I had a bad feeling about COVID-19. In late January, I had to go to Alaska for work and wore a mask. On a call I said, “it is not a question of it getting bad, it is a question of how bad will it be.” My bad feeling was spot on but I confess, I had no idea how bad it could be.
The aforementioned job, that had been years in the making, stumbled, then in April, fell. Hard. It actually felt more like it was pushed. I was crushed. Not only was I utterly heartbroken but I was staring down the gaping maw of utter financial uncertainty and that feeling of job loss, no matter what the reason, is a specific kind of crushing. That beautiful buoyant hope that I started the year with had disappeared along with the job.
And so I drew another owl and I sent the image to two of my closest friends.
They texted me back, first offering me sympathy about the job, then urging me to “do something with the owls.” Up until this point, I hadn’t really shared any of the owls (see part about self-consciousness above) with anyone outside of a very small circle of friends. That tiny bit of encouragement was all that I needed. The next day I shared the image below on a social platform (that shall remain nameless). I included this caption. “At the beginning of the year, I started drawing an owl every day. Here is one of those owls.”
I confess that I was a bit dumbfounded and shy when people asked to see more of the drawings. I saw only the flaws, the great gap between what they were and what I wanted them to be. Others saw something else and there was enough expressed curiosity to compel me to share more and to keep drawing. I kept drawing even when I didn’t feel like it. I kept drawing even when I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it, I just drew something.
As we collectively crashed through despairing moment after moment, the Owls were a way for me to keep a little light of hope aflame and share it so that others might see it. This eventually translated, in the world of owls, to making hope something tangible.
I also became increasingly curious about hope. Not just as something for Owls to hand out in small packets, but for all of us. There were many moments this year where that sense of hope seemed so thin, fragile, and not likely to survive. I fear more of those moments will come yet this year, this winter, as we move into what will be a grim stretch of months.
So as we close out the year, I will be writing more about hope. What is it? How do we nurture? How do we help others do the same.
