a prayer to rationality It's a world where I make a magical garden website with talking animals--characters based on the regulars I see in my backyard. They're eccentric, absurd, charming. I say, "I love this sort of thing. I wish more people would do websites about their animal characters in their own gardens. I'll make a tutorial on how I did the graphics for it and encourage others to do so." You say, "Well, darn, I woulda thought of that! But thank you for the inspiration and for helping to show how to make the sky and the trees right." I say, "I know you would have thought of it--children's books have been full of this sort of thing since before our grandmothers were born. What a delightfully funny bird you made! Oh, how I wish I could draw squirrel faces the way you did--fabulous! And wow--that javascript you used to do such and such is so cool. I love it!" You say, "Why thank you! I rather admire your fox and how the flowers grow when one such and such's! Here's some thoughts on squirrel faces, and here is the javascript I used to such and such--you're quite welcome to use it and I think it would be marvelous if you such and such'ed, too." I say, "Oh wow, thank you, this is great! Let me show you how I made the flowers do that...." And all these children's book gardens with eccentric and charming animal characters start popping up on the web, each helping the other to do the best they can, each bringing something uniquely their own to the site which has nothing to do with how the flowers look or how the javascript works, or the fact that the animals can all pop into the foliage with onmouseovers when they want to "hide". And the world is richer, and we have become happy friends and co-conspirators. Each site uniquely our own, each of us concentrating on the original details rather than reinventing javascript wheels. Let me tell you about the world we really live in. You create the garden and bristle when I make one of my own, hundreds of years of children's books notwithstanding. You get belligerent when I make my grass green rather than the dead brown of autumn. The story continues, but in a dark vein. Let us make a promise to ourselves to create the worlds we envision within ourselves inside the world we live in, no matter how dark the stories around us become. Let us make a pact, let us make a promise, an allegiance of sorts, even, to remember the world within and give a piece of it to the next person we meet. Let us do the right thing without becoming sappy, and deliver us from senseless waste. Amen. Fight water with fire. It may overpower you, but if you burn hot enough, it will turn to steam, and then you may both reform again, perhaps this time at peace. © Jade Leaves Designs |