One of my favorite ways to get inspired is to look through any magazine. The colorful, glossy pages are visually stimulating on their own. But they’re also home to a great deal of high-quality photos, a stimulating mix of models, product placement, copywriting, and digital editing. I’ll often cut out a photo of someone in a rather interesting pose and see how I can recontextualize the photo with a little bit of my own creativity.

The above picture started with a photo of a child looking for bugs in the grass. I didn’t find it in a magazine at your local grocery checkout. I found it in the middle of a thick manual for a training session in desperate competition for redefining the limits of boredom.

Since we were also talking about healthy relationships and how we, as teachers and educators, interact with our students, I couldn’t help but think something we’ve been told often but often forget: that children notice far more than we ever give them credit for. Even from a very young age, they have a pulse on our temperament, sometimes in a way that outpaces our own ability to recognize it.

Any place that is home to a child – be it an actual suburban home or a school in the heart of the city – will be endlessly observed and scrutinized. The child will recognize the power dynamics. The child will know who to go to when something is needed. The child will know who to avoid. The child will always, always be watching far more than credit is given for.

And it’s not something to be scared of. I’m not trying to suggest that it’s only a matter of time before Blumhouse Productions contracts the kids in your neighborhood to be the real-life production of the next Purge movie sequel. Instead, it’s an opportunity to let our actions be our words. To let ourselves be observed in a way that pushes us closer to who we really want to be.

When it comes to drawing, two things fascinate me: the eyes and the hands. It’s no mistake they are also two of the hardest things to get right. I will often find myself easily drawing a face and body, only to have it undone by some questionably-sketched hands. Or the eyes are unfit for the look I’m going for.

It’s no mistake, then, that we’re also using our eyes and hands daily: in our we perceive the world and ourselves (eyes), and our actions (hands) impact that. Sometimes we reach out; sometimes we make a fist; sometimes we keep our hands in our pockets. Sometimes we feel seen and sometimes we feel invisible.

It is a constant conversation between the hands and the eyes.

Our lives often function in that tension between the mechanical and the organic. We use transportation to get where we want to go (even if it’s the smooth gears of a pedal bike), and we rely on the steady ticking of time to massage some shape and structure into our day. We measure what we feel comfortable with so we can see how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. To see if things fit as well as we think they do.

But we also get a jolt from touching our feet to the grass. From forest bathing in the nearby woods. From embracing the circle of life, in all its ups, downs, and sideway passages.

Sometimes we want new eyes with which to see the world, only to realize they take us further away from where we want to be. Sometimes we have to trust we have all the tools we need; we just need to use them.

I am as guilty as anyone of dreaming up where I want to be – the skills I want to have, the problems I want to solve – without remembering to take that first initial step. It seems so quaint in the big picture. But the big picture can’t form without that first push out the door.

And now, back to the hands. The first things we look at when we realize the weight of our actions. The first things to cover our eyes when we’re in shame, in exhaustion, in sadness. The things to shield the light that’s too bright, the water that’s too salty. They are also, as I have found, great tools for finding some kind of piece. The physical act of doing something with our hands can help distract us from what’s not letting us go, and somehow, in all that, we are freed, if only temporarily, and sit in that moment of peace.

 

Once, on a walk down Austin’s popular South Congress street, I stumbled into a record store. It sat behind all the storefronts, a secret passage into a time and place where vinyl records are as revered as the phones we carry in our pockets. I didn’t even know where to start, mindlessly thumbing through each album cover, looking for something recognizable.

Somewhere in the Science section (is my nerd showing?), I found an album of humpback whale sounds. I probably giggled. I might have even considered buying it, even with the fact I didn’t even have a record player. It was all a joke until I turned the record over and read the back description. That’s when I was reminded that sometimes the truth is so much cooler than whatever fiction you could dream up.

According to the back of this album, humpback whales change their songs every year. In other words, they are perhaps the most prolific recording artists in world history. And because I’m sure not every year of humpback whale songs is recorded, I only half-kiddingly mourn the fact that their best works might never be recorded.

I have no intention of explaining just what this image means or represents – I honestly believe there’s so many ways to look at it. But a beautiful accident occurred when I combined the analog with the digital. After completing the drawing with only pencil, light green paper, and fine and standard point Sharpies, I uploaded it to Instagram and fidgeted with the filter and lighting settings. Because I took a picture of the drawing itself, the light wasn’t symmetrically balanced. With Instagram’s assistance, it led to the picture having the appearance of a nice, warm glow to it, as if a light beneath the water cast a silhouette on the humpback above it.

It’s a happy accident of the analog and digital that somehow perfectly captures the way I look at the whales beneath the surface: in warm, curious awe.

Recently I drew a picture of Superman for one of my students to color over. I swear I drew that signature Superman curl, but, unfortunately, it was too tight of a curl for a black Crayola marker to navigate. Additionally, I need to work on my philtrum and lip lines because it led to a picture that could easily be mistaken as SuperHitler. Good thing we don’t cover Nazi Germany this year.

P.S. My friend Brandt pointed out that there was a Nazi Superman. The name? Overman. In one of DC Comics’ many multiverses, Earth-10 (stay with me here) is controlled by the Nazi Party thanks to Nazi Germany winning WW2 with help from Overman, who was raised by Adolf Hitler. Overman is part of the Nazi version of the Justice League, the JL-Axis. There are two different artistic versions of Overman that have been used: one in which Overman is blonde and has a Nazi swastika on his chest instead of the usual ‘S’ symbol; another is the black-haired twin of Superman, with his S emblem replaced by Schutzstaffel symbol (which looks like an lightning ‘SS’). Definitely not going to explain any of this to my students. The moral of the story: a lot of weird stuff happens in the comics.