I remember when three pen-and-ink drawings (in a week?!) would have felt impossible. To make, let alone to share. Because, as I have known from early days, “I cannot draw.” I have learned to do a bad job, though, and that was the gateway to ease. Surprisingly simple.

I keep a handwritten journal. Sometimes it starts looking too full of words. This is how I know it’s time to draw.

For this week’s triptych, I knew the medium the moment I spared it a thought. I understood I’d find three related moments, and draw them. I didn’t know how I would find them, or how they’d be related, or how I would draw a moment. These things really do just come, if you let them.

I can’t describe the moments. That’s how I knew them.

I can tell the outward circumstance for each. I traveled to a landscape that is difficult for me, to celebrate a dear friend. Another friend offered me a summer-morning garden story. A group of women invited me to sing a healing circle with them, and after that I saw the moon.

There is nothing in those sentences that even hints at the presence in those long moments. There was nothing dramatic. I was only attending. The act of which—sometimes—invites the numinous.

That can’t be the whole story. It’s not the only (not even the strongest?) commonality. There was also companionship: intentional and given as a gift. And flow—or maybe I mean something more like spaciousness. A relationship to time that held those things at its center.

I have learned this before, and almost certainly articulated it better. But learning is not a process of acquisition—or not only that. There’s an element that is the repetition: I am always beginning again. Starting here...