Serving two masters

Spider at sunrise

I began posting to this blog in March, 2010. I was in Scotland at the time, a long way away from my home here in Greece.   I was there to help my sister to get our mother settled into a care home; she had had a fall from her bed in the house she had hitherto lived in alone since soon after my father died in 1993. The injuries she sustained necessitated that thereafter mother would need trained professional support for the rest of her life.

When, with my partner Lisi, I left Greece I had no clear idea of how long I would be in Scotland but imagined it would be perhaps three weeks; a month at the longest. In fact, occasioned by mother's further accidents at the care home and her subsequent admission to hospital, I was to remain in Scotland for the better part of three months by the end of which my mother had died.

Three months of being in limbo, largely between hospital visits, allowed plenty of time for thinking and writing; during 2010 I made eighty posts; in 2011 I posted seventy-three times.

At the beginning of 2012 I joined a drawing course, held locally and run by a retired from London professional artist. From then on the drawing / painting bug, latent apparently within me for years, bit and is yet tenaciously holding on. To keep a record of my artwork I began a second blog, “Engaging Right” to which I have posted most of the drawings I have made since its establishment. Inevitably “Sensateman” suffered.  In 2012 I posted to it only 37 times; to “Engaging Right” I posted 53 drawings.   Last year I managed 34 posts to “Sensateman” against 72 to “Engaging Right”. This year, almost at the end of April, this is my first post here; “Engaging Right” has had 37 posts this year.

It is a situation I intend to change. I very much enjoy expressing myself in both words and pictures.

Mathew (6:24) maintained, “no man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. “ but his masters in that context were his God and mammon, I am confident drawing and writing are far less opposed ideas.

I am inspired to again begin to blog here after stumbling across a post by a blogger I used to enjoy following. He did not blog particularly regularly but his essays were always a joy to read; well worth waiting for. Last year he posted once in January and again in February. This year he has posted twice in January since when there has been nothing. I wait in hope but am most grateful to him for shaking me out of my torpor and encourage me henceforth to discipline myself to make further occasional excursions into words.