My perceptions of reality are focused on cultivation of loving engagements. That has its downsides: self-destructive people try to coerce me into solving their problems for them. Fortunately, for the most part the experiences are sublime.

Unfortunately, the terror generated by self-destructive personalities appears to captivate the world’s imagination.

I have cultivated a number of practices to try to encourage people to focus on the good. Explaining the physical basis of spirituality, philosophy, Christian exegesis, ministry to gun violence, dance, and hypnotherapy are all instances. None has been compelling. The response to my encouragements tends to be, “Thanks for projecting love into the world. Let me know when you’ve succeeded in lighting the darkness.”

What has been missing is the demonstration of a loving relationship. For decades, I have been telling people that “I am a half a thing.” If, as a projection of the divine masculine, I express Love, my correspondent would manifest Life. That is daunting – the world is undergoing an anthropogenic extinction. While many beautiful and wealthy women have offered to take care of me, they have all walked away from the weight of healing that wrong.

It is in dance that I come closest to cultivating that commitment in women, but the conceptual bandwidth is limited. The communion of dance is limited to the expressive potential of bodies. Healing Creation involves spiritual abstractions. No woman has ever had the temerity to demand, “I’d like to understand what you are doing when you are dancing by yourself.”

This void in my heart has been subject to diagnosis, of course. As I explain at love-returns.org, John’s Revelation describes the resolution. But John offers the male perspective. To understand the feminine grace necessary to the transition, I turned to the Sacred Mother who waits in a spiritual desert on the moon.

But how to communicate those insights? There is no proof, only manifestation.

The only discipline that I have not explored is art. So, I have been learning to draw. The inspiration is a lecture series out at The Great Courses (“How to Draw for Beginners”). After two months and twenty lectures, the course moved into value (defining shape through shading).

I present here the first work that I might consider actual art. It was from a photo. What surprised me was the playful enjoyment of learning to use pencils to capture variations in smoothness and texture, as well as value.

I have three other pieces to share over the next week. After that, I have committed myself to a huge leap in ambition that is going to take a month or more to execute.