Hold on to the smoke for a moment, and consider how mirrors are revolving doors between complementary sides.  A professor of biblical spirituality once parenthetically stated in a class I was taking that we’d all be much better off approaching sacred texts not so much like answer-providing crystal balls but rather as question-provoking mirrors. Rumi asked: “If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”

OK, you can exhale now.  I toy with mirrors from time to time.  This morning I decided to play around with this artifact in Fifty Three Paper.

It’s all practice.  I’m not sure what it means if it means anything at all, but it was a study in a new technique and an opportunity to play with the familiar image even though I usually have two mirrors facing one another partially.  The colored outlines on the mirror frame were my attempt to loosen it up after the fact; I find the drawing tighter than necessary, and I hope to relax over time. I started with the cigarette because it was the first related image that came to mind. I was searching for an image that could stick out the same way it would stick “in,” you know, kinda’ like a two-handed saw.  I went with a cigarette instead. I tried to capitalize on the notion of inside vs outside smoke.  Then the ashtray happened; and here’s where I tried something new with the lighting and reflection and variegated coloring, something unusual for me and my black & white, stick-figure imagination.

I’ve done some mirrors in the past. In the above drawing, because of the iPad drawing app and the corresponding techniques at my disposal, I deviated from what had almost become an irreversible pattern, as depicted in these examples:

You exhaled, right?