David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.
I have always envied people who can draw. That a person can use pencil, pen, paper, and colors to replicate the world—or invent new ones—seems magical to me. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a trade I’d love to make.
Not that I mind writing. I’m grateful that I can translate my thoughts into words that others can comprehend. But I often work with topics that are abstract and, frankly, hard to put into words. It is easier (and often more fun) to try to illustrate them. My drawing skills, though—or lack of them—limit me to stick figures, like these:
Over the years, my “Smiley Soul” (cloud with face) and “Mr. Stick Man” have become well known to people in my classes. I’ve even managed to insert them into some of my books: my willingness to demonstrate my lack of talent in this area knows no bounds! I have to admit, though, that I’ve become fond of them. For those willing to stretch their imaginations, they’ve even served their purpose in communicating the ideas for which they have been pressed into service.
In fact, their very simplicity holds a certain charm. It can even be an asset. No one is going to linger over my illustrations in appreciation and wonder at their artistic merit (“Note that clever turn of line, that delicate shading!”). They are going to get the point I wish to make and then move on.
In fact, as a fan of the science cartoonist Randell Monroe and his webcomic XKCD, I’m aware of just how amazingly funny and communicative stick figures can be! (Though I always feel that, even though made with the same economy of lines and lack of dimension, his stick figures are more artistic than mine; they’re certainly more successful!) If you’re not familiar with him or with XKCD, I hope my mentioning them will lead you to Google them and from that, to much joy and laughter, though you may have to be a science nerd to fully appreciate some of his humor.
Useful as stick figures can be, mine included, they still lack dimension. They represent a minimalist approach that can be appropriate and even desirable for some purposes. But they don’t represent a way to look at life. (Note the clever segue here to the point I wish to make in this essay…)
Stick figures belong on a page (especially in the skilled hands of someone like Munroe), but they create problems if they become a lens through which we look at life. They lack more than one dimension. Not that we see other people as actual stick figures populating our world, at least I hope we don’t! But we can, and do, often see people in one-dimensional ways that fail to perceive the complexity and depths in each of us.
Right now, our country and our world are suffering from an unwillingness or an inability to see each other in our fullness. We see each other as labels, as names, as stereotypes that reduce us to caricatures of who we are and deny us dimensionality. What else is this but seeing each other as stick figures?
The challenge here is that reducing a person to one dimension also reduces the possibilities of finding areas of connection. By making someone else a stick figure in our imagination, we make ourselves a stick figure, too. We close our eyes to just how many-sided and multi-dimensional we all are.
A friend of mine tells a story of being evacuated from his home during one of the recent wildfires here in the West. A progressive liberal by inclination, he lives in a rural area filled with people who are anything but: “MAGA-land,” as he puts it. Yet, when he and his family were allowed to come home, he discovered that his Trump-supporting neighbors, who had refused to evacuate, had guarded and protected his house and land, had cared for animals he’d been forced to leave behind. He was no stick-figure called a “liberal” to them; he was their neighbor.
The future is going to depend on our ability to cooperate and help each other, to discover how to be neighbors. This means being willing and capable of seeing each other past the labels which we might attach to each other. It means recognizing that none of us are stick figures.
Unlike my drawings.