Life Formatted Visually?

In the business of love. Unwrapping it, finding new ways to do it, growing in it. Growing in it above all things. I've been thinking about a way to create something that serves as a visual representation of the way I feel about life, as a way to regain my perspective when I start to lose it. I want this picture to be the foundation of it.. the mind/body/spirit triad. As a way to remember that I am a mind; a thinking thing, a (sometimes) intelligent being who can rationalize and construct and create and understand. But that is just one part of me. As a way to remember that I am a body; a walking and talking and breathing thing - I experience life from within this thing with skin and limbs and bones that restricts me from lots of stuff, but also enables me to experience the world, life - it is my house, my temple, my vessel. But that is just one part of me, too. I am also a spirit with a soul that feels and loves and hurts and is connected to all things, something matterless, something that for the cultivation of virtues. But that is just another part of me. I am all of this together - ultimately something divine.

I also want to create a visual representation of Love. A heart just doesn't seem to cut it anymore. It's nice as a quick, socialized, commercialized way of transmitting a message because people all speak the language of hearts, but I want something more me.  I'll have to define that concept more.. personally I guess before I do that though. This is a pretty solid defintion that seems to have worked for me my whole life. The most attractive thing about it is the way it deals with resilience.

Love
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love

 

I've been writing for a while now, but after studying language and culture and people and especially Phaedrus and works like it and doing lots of stuff involving silence, I've come to acknowledge that words are just too inadequate. They are useful, just not all-encompassing. Neither are visuals obviously, but maybe they come closer to embodying emotions, feelings, and truths because they are simultaneously (not to generalize) objective and subjective. How can you write about Love or God or the Human Condition and expect that the mere 26 letters that you have to work with will do the job? When I write, I always feel like I have to follow up one thought with another, like I have to explain myself. There are always "buts" and assumptions to be made and tangents to go off on and one idea always flows into another. Not that I have anyone to whom I am writing or explaining myself, but when I look back on my catalogue of meanderings I want to be clear about they way I felt about life and its frictions.

A picture is worth a thousand words? Maybe? Why, though... because it says something without saying anything? Maybe? I like that, though, so, yes.