In your light
I learn how to love.
In your beauty,
how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

We are all, to some extent, crazy. If you come to know any human being well enough, you eventually gain access to the basement where the traumas and wounds and deprivations are stored; rummage in there for a while, and you begin to understand the neuroses and fixations that shape his or her personality. The successful, reasonably happy people I've known are nuts in a way that works for them. Those who struggle and suffer fail to turn their preoccupations to some meaningful use. Next week, the American Psychiatric Association release the latest version of its bible of mental illnesses, the DSM-5, which catalogs about 300 categories of crazy. Critics of all kinds have lined up to assail this dictionary of disorders as subjective and lacking in scientific validity--assembled primarily to justify the prescribing of pills of dubious value.

About 50 percent of the population, the APA admits, will have one of its listed disorders at some point in their lives. Shy, like Emily Dickinson? You have "avoidant personality disorder." Obsessed with abstractions and numbers? You have "autistic spectrum disorder," like Isaac Newton. Suffer form "narcissistic personality disorder," with some hypersexuality thrown in? You must be a politician. To be skeptical of these neat categories isn't to deny that minds get broken, stuck, or lost, and need help finding their way out of misery. But psychotherapy remains an art, not a science; there is no bright line between nuts or not. If you're an old lady who lives amid piles of newspapers and personal treasures, you have "hoarding disorder." If you're a CEO who exploits sweatshop labor to pile up countless billions, you're on the cover of Forbes.

--William Faulk (editor-in-chief) in The Week, May 24, 2013 issue.

To practice any art,
no matter how well or badly,
is a way to make your soul grow.
So do it.
--Kurt Vonnegut

I've been mulling over the significance of this effort. Perhaps if we did all draw our idea of this man, over time, the Muslims would become less sensitive about the issue. Or perhaps they will be more sensitive, because we are actively disrespecting their faith. In the Old Testament, Christians too were bidden to make no "graven images" (Exodus 20:4).

I for one have no idea what he looked like, and so if I did attempt the sketch it would be of a caricatured bearded Muslim. Perhaps a halo or some such symbol of his spiritual importance would ease the insult. I don't know. But I do offer to you that this is the day to create your visual representation of the great prophet Muhammed, in protest of censorship, with respect for the man and his path, and in humble appreciation of the complexity of our international and intercultural reality.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was an event held on May 20, 2010 in support of free speech and freedom of artistic expression of those threatened by violence for drawing representations of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. It began as a protest against censorship of an American television show, South Park, "201" by its distributor, Comedy Central, in response to death threats against some of those responsible for two segments broadcast in April 2010. Observance of the day began with a drawing posted on the Internet on April 20, 2010, accompanied by text suggesting that "everybody" create a drawing representing Muhammad, on May 20, 2010, as a protest against efforts to limit freedom of speech. (from Wikipedia 5/20/12)

‎I am always doing that which I cannot do,
in order that I may learn how to do it.
--Pablo Picasso

Pretty fantastic video here with a tune that makes me want to dance around. Unexpectedly love it.