effort, attitude
control the controllables
focus, energy

Wear the mask.

What else can you do?

It might protect you.

It might protect them.

What else can you do?

What else can you control?

What else can you do that will show other that you care?

Wear the mask.

find some common ground
bitter and hopeless struggle
otherwise life is

From the essay, Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser.

I came across the writings of this artist only after he died.

In point number 1 of his essay, Ten Things, Glaser wrote;

This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realized that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

While the target audience is professional artists, I find this sentence, with some minor tweaking so that it reads That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with another person, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle applies to everyone.

I feel know what he means.

all born with genius
inner voice listening stops
lose our paths access

There are icons in life.

Images and such that are iconic.

The word gets used way too often and too often applied inappropriately.

An aspect of iconic for me is something is such a part of life that it is difficult to imagine someone came up with the idea or design in the first place.

How else might a typewriter keyboard been designed but the way it is right now under my finger tips.

Didn’t Moses bring the 1st keyboard down from the mountain top?

For me, an example of an iconic design is the classic I ❤ NY.

I am so used to it, I always thought it existed.

Never gave it a second thought.

Turns out it was designed back in 1975 as part of an effort to help revive the city of New York when the city went through a chapter 13.

Turns out it was designed … YES I USED THE WORDS DESIGNED … by a graphic artist named Milton Glaser.

He did the work for the campaign PRO BONO.

Can the amount of earnings Mr. Glaser gave up even be calculated?

But you cannot judge success at the moment of creation can you.

An article in The Guardian about Mr. Glaser says of the logo, “the type and the heart symbol work together, so successful. It also went with a strong sense of humanity and ethics.“

Sorry to say that the article I read about this was Mr. Glaser’s obituary.

Mr. Glaser was quoted as saying, “We are all born with genius,” he said. “It’s like our fairy godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry.”

I love this.

It’s a perfect warning for today.

Don’t stop listening to our inner voices.

Those voices who aren’t reminding us that we need to climb Mt. Everest, but those voices that remind us to get up, go to work, pay the bills, and do other feats of ordinary greatness.

Do not stop listening and do not lose access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry on a daily basis.

I am sorry it was Mr. Glaser’s passing that brought it my attention.

Grateful that it did.

Grateful also for the last line in his Obit.

“None of us really has the ability to understand our path,” Mr. Glaser said, “until it’s over.”

dust from Sahara
in me eyes and on my tongue
wide world dust still dust

According to a report from NASA, the NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible image of the large light brown plume of Saharan dust over the North Atlantic Ocean. The image showed that the dust from Africa’s west coast extended almost to the Lesser Antilles in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean. The image showed that the dust had spread over 2,000 miles across the Atlantic.

Normally, hundreds of millions of tons of dust are picked up from the deserts of Africa and blown across the Atlantic Ocean each year. That dust helps build beaches in the Caribbean and fertilizes soils in the Amazon. It can also affect air quality in North and South America.

This weekend the dust cloud reached North Georgia.

With a view to the horizon the dust is very easy to see.

You can feel it in the air, this dust from the Sahara.

It gets in your eyes and makes them water.

It gets on your tongue and you can taste it.

It gets in your nose and makes you sneeze.

It comes from 2000 miles away.

And it reminds me of numberless games of softball in countless parks on chalky fields.

Do they play softball in the desert?