It has rained at least for parts of the last eight days. The attendant celestial phenomena, thunder, lightning, rainbows…have felt something like magical, I suppose, though such phenomena are ordinary enough in the statistical sense. In any event, it was like nothing for me to draw this figure, and the text by which it is attended, though I cannot be sure what it is that is meant by either part in its isolation, or by both parts in their conjoinment.
A collection of Alex Stein’s drawings, “The Life and Art of Josan,” is available at WadeRosenPublishing.com
A love poem.
Pictures from the Guru-World.
I was thinking of the German metaphysician and educator Rudolph Steiner’s determined, chalkboard diagrams of the “levels of consciousness” which always struck me, first, as hilariously too-earnest and, second, as pure, if entirely inadvertant, art.
It is strange pleasure to turn jelly-fish to any account whatever, let alone poetry. Like making art out of soup cans, perhaps. Or a banquet out of stones.
It is a curious thing how art can make beauty of everything except self-deception.
There is a nursery rhyme that was passing through my head the whole while I was working out this drawing: 
In “The Life and Art of Josan” (Wade Rosen Publishing) there is a drawing in which a dragon is hovering above a makeshift raft and the text reads: “Oh! You thought it was the raft upon which you would be crossing? Ho, no! When the time comes for you to cross, the Dragon will take you himself, upon his back.” In order to change, one must be ready to accept real loss. But, how can one make oneself ready for real loss?
Life is nothing, after all, but that water through which the spirit-fish swims.
