To-Do List
A Comic for Ordinary Time
I drew this comic for Common Good magazine on the theme of “ordinary time.” Here was the prompt from editor Sarah Haywood:
“In brief: Life isn't all that exciting. And that's how it should be. It's how our brains work — ecstatic experiences, or the highs of life, just aren't sustainable. And coincidentally, the traditional church calendar works that way too (with ordinary time being the period between Pentecost and the season of Advent).”
The assignment also made me recall this episode of On Being where poet Marie Howe talked about The Poetry of Ordinary Time.
Holidays and festivals are wonderful, but there’s a lot of everyday life to be lived in between. Still, maybe these ordinary moments contain the seed of the ecstatic.
Awesome comic! It speaks to a feeling I’ve been having in the last year or so, when I really became a full-fledged adult, getting married and adopting a cat and moving away from home and getting a job, all in the same year. It feels like life is slower, more boring, and like I have to fish for these transcendent moments a little bit more than before.