Once in a while when you think you see somebody that looks like somebody you knew 30 years ago, it does something to your day, maybe even that sense of remembering who you actually are, the person you are made certain decisions toward becoming, in spite of mistakes, you loved them all.

From being green in an iron lung, to being a vegetarian with a tendency toward Macro, as most youth, beyond hopeful, beyond optimistic, overestimating purpose, while some say be a doctor or a lawyer, others said how talented you are, you lived on a kind of threshold. The painters argued over whether your cartoons were art, whether you should be drawing from nature, eventually a teacher would balance it all out when he said about your sketchbook, “It shows how you think.”

Likewise, decades later, when realizing how angry you were at your father, for not only divorcing your mother, but for remarrying. The therapist rang a bell when he said, “He was not emotionally responsible.” Imagining that phrase, the gears were turning, the brain shifting and a reason flowed and grew into understanding why so many mistakes eclipsed purpose. But not imagination, not drawing, even from memory, the self is all you need, your mind is guaranteed, but it takes years if not a lifetime to know what the gurus mean when they say to control your mind. Or Jesus when he said, “. . . as you believe, so shall it be.”

You can walk the same summer day’s path thinking about annoying things or you can be counting your blessings, don’t you know. When you have the insight you are on the path to self knowledge, ha. But then what is knowledge? Know your self. How little we know. Facts and figures, skills and practice—talent, now there is a conundrum. What good is talent if you do nothing with it. Some consider success the end to the means. But the business of art is not making art, learning what your teacher is really saying, because the best teaching is by example. You know this if your mother did not make you do things. You cannot force people to do things. Mothers teach by example.

Desire makes the world turn, and it causes so much pain. Learn to love without desire, ha, then there is no song, there is no moonlit night when a field becomes a sky of stars for the fog of fireflies blinking in courtship. Yes, find my love by light.

So when you see that face in the market pondering the shelf of soups, or the rack of breads, and somehow it dawns on you that the store is full of lovers, all those faces, in their own worlds, all milling around almost impervious to each other, what have you noticed?