Once, for a very silly work "group exercise" I was asked to draw a pig.

Now, this pig was important. How you drew your pig was supposed to be indicative of how you solve problems. it was important which way the pig was facing, whether the tail was long or short, if it had ears or not.

Me, I don't know how to draw pigs. I never actually considered what a pig looked like. I mean....they were pigs. I didn't know how to summarize pigness in a line drawing. Horseness...now, horseness I had down. I could even get catness, or dogness.

But pigness?

After staring at my paper for a minute or so, I remembered The Little Prince. So I drew a box. A box in the middle of the page, with the lid open. I put air holes in the box. I labeled it PIG BOX. I drew a stamp on the box.

Everyone else was still working on their pigs, so I started adding stuff. The PIG BOX was floating down a river, as it turned out. The river was flowing from between two hills in the mountain range that was conveniently located in the background. The river flowed through a forest and the PIG BOX was floating through a meadow, that had flowers in it. And rabbits. And a rabbit hole, and a lone tree, and a squirrel hole. There was a flock of M-shaped birds off to the left.

When it was time to show off our pigs, it was pretty obvious that I had Not Followed Directions. Everyone else had pigs, big pigs and little pigs, pigs facing left, right, and center. Nobody else had a landscape, and when it came time for me to explain, I said, "Ummmm....it's a box. But it's got a pig in it! and it's floating down a river, see..."

An uncomfortable silence ensued.

I'm still fond of that memory, because that box with a pig in it is my box. you know, the one they always tell you to think outside of. My box is cardboard, and it has a blanket on the bottom and air holes along the side. And the top's open, and when I poke my head up there is a meadow floating by. But, mostly, my box is cozy and smells like cardboard.

And outside is the whole huge world, waiting for me. For my hands, in the sunshine.

This has been an On Display collab, on the topic "Thinking outside the box" has become a cliche. If you think about the box, what's inside your box that's useful?"

So, on Saturday I took the plunge.

I'd been thinking about it for four years, a project that I'd half-finished and ever come back to. I always knew i would finish it, I just didn't know how or when. I started it in 1998, in April, back in yet another time in my life where I was busy figuring out who I was after being in a place that had consumed me.

The first half of the project grounded me, reminded me that all was not lost.

The second...



I have a tendency to engrave the serious changes in my life into my skin. Like my first tattoo, this is a reminder of places where I've been, as well as places I want to go in the future. It is a symbol of Astarte, an ancient goddess of love, beauty, childbirth, and war, the forebear of the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus. It is an eight-pointed star, the compass rose symbology that I always return to, I the perpetually lost.

It's healing well, and I'm completely happy with it.

Life's pretty good right now.

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