Read First

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with  the original photo. The best way to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

This letter has been finished since the first week in September, but the return to school has put a lull in the finishing touches I wanted to put on it prior to sending it off.

Finishing touches = COLOR HIGHLIGHT & SKETCH SHARPENING. The important stuff.

Last night, while beginning a new letter in response to these most recent e-mails, I wrote briefly about the WABI-SABI aesthetic in the context of technological detoxes, or sabbaths as they've come to be call. Wabi-sabi = in short, the Japanese art of flawed beauty, simplicity, nature's profundity. There I sat at my desk—anxious at best, stressed at worst—beginning a new letter before finishing the previous letter. Anxious and stressed, that is, until my questioning illuminated the answer at the heart of ZEN = ZAZEN.

I've decided to bring these principles to my letter writing predicament. Though far from finished in design and though I feel physical pain at the thought of sharing something pre-completion and pre-manifestation of vision, I am sharing it all the same.

Such is the wabi-sabi way, finding beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete.

Microcosmic of the transiency of this whole being human thing and frequently mentioned in this second most recent letter, I now grant you permission to have a fragmentary glimpse at something long after it was finished for you but far before it was ready for you.

Squirming in unease though I grow nonetheless,

Liza

P.S. I'm feeling increasingly squirmish at the thought of not adding color to this note, or of not erasing my pencil marks, at not finishing my drawing. The struggle is reality.