The righteous rabbits

mundane things - love, life and kindness

Like millions of people (135 million viewers or so¹) I grinned and cheered as I watched Bad Bunny's recent performance at the Superbowl!

Since then I've been drawing rabbits and ordinary things (interspersed within this post) and thinking of the importance of common mundane things like language and food. I've been thinking of how mundane life itself is always going on without waiting for permission from us or any of the powers that be at the moment.² Life just keeps continuing in the smallest of ways often in the face of dramatic circumstances. So I keep thinking that it’s the small things that matter.³ And while the small things do matter very much they don't have to be idealized things or be perfect or to be “optimized ”.⁴ We can, for example, mindfully get a decent set of silverware and have decently tasty meals and then just go on with our life. The quality of silverware can add a small niceness to one's meals just as a fun cup can add niceness to one's mornings. We sustain ourselves when we focus time and attention on the many incremental things within our ordinary lives that reflect what we value and enjoy.⁵

So I drew some silverware and a bunny…

I've also been thinking of how humans are the only animals who cook, read, laugh, and use visual and verbal symbols to connect.

That led to thinking of how often humans will, to more or less degrees, require shared ideas, more or less in common, before breaking bread together.

To a degree this is understandable and a matter of personal comfort within one's personal life. Many, I'd say most, people are fairly flexible and are able to see that someone who might seem very different on the surface might actually be someone with whom they share many ideas in common. They might, for example, have the same shared moral ideas, the same behavioral lines-in-the-sand such as “don't hurt people” despite seeming to be very different from each other in terms of age, gender, physical attributes, life experiences, etc.

For example, my wife J. L. Sullens is older, taller, cuter, smarter, has life experience around horses and is better at math than I am. (J. L. here: I agree with the older, taller, has had more life experiences around horses [2 broken arms], and maybe a bit more able to do math, thanks to Mrs. Hendricks at Jacksboro High. I heartily disagree with Sue's cuter and smarter references in regard to me. That's all I wanted to insert. Thank you. I'll be letting Sue carry on now with her thoughts.) So while she and I are radically different on the surface (another example: when we met she was a meat-and-potato eater while I was a vegetarian) we're extremely alike in our abstract ideas. We share ideas such as “don't hurt people”, “save, be frugal and careful with money” and “always remember to check the spare tire when planning road trips ”. We're so compatible in the ideas-sense of living that we’re celebrating 30 years together this week!!!

Here's us on a walk by a river…

But I happily digress…

Sometimes the human desire to align ideas with other people becomes rigid, becomes intolerant, becomes not one's personal choices for one's personal life but becomes a license to seek out ways to harm “them” the people who are superficially different in some way. It's easier to see visual differences between people and make snap judgments than it is to take the time to share abstract ideas and see if there's some alignment. At some point the human need to have particular abstract ideas in common can stop some people from cooperating and creating the world together with other people who seem, in their minds, to be “too different”. I thought of racism as an example of that … and wrote this in one of my notebooks.

And I thought of how the abstract ideas of some people are so abhorrent that they don't merit cooperating with at all.⁶ Some abstract ideas are so horrible, so abusive that they need to be and deserve to be loudly denounced from very high-profile stages⁷. Again I thought of how it depends on which wolf, the wolf of anger and hate or the wolf of kindness and love, that the abstract ideas feed.⁸

And again I'm aware of the need to slow down and think about things before carefully speaking and acting.

This week I took some time to read “This Book Will Make You Kinder” by Henry James Garret. It was a soothing yet challenging reminder of the many ways empathy matters and ways to fortify one's empathy against the enshittification storms.

This weeks fiction, a darling one to cheer up by, is titled “The Incredible Kindness Of Paper” by Evelyn Skye.

And this week I drank coffee and tea while wearing my occupational therapist recommended and custom fitted thumb braces that look more like jewelry. Since I'll be dealing with thumb collapse and arthritis the rest of my life I might as well make my mundane need to stabilize my thumbs as functional and beautiful as possible.

The first photo below shows my new braces. The second photo shows drawings of coffee… and in case you haven't personally noticed it lately, the mundane thing of a thumb holding a cup securely is something to notice and appreciate.

This week a dear friend, Beverly Herndon who, besides being a long-term good friend, is an accomplished Asian brushwork artist (whose artworks my wife and I have saved our pennies in order to purchase, and have been lucky enough to have on occasion received as gifts from the artist herself) reminded me of the various wet-in-wet ink wash techniques. Those techniques might be a bit easier on my thumbs. 🤔 So I did a practice sketch following her suggestions…

I still have so much to learn about ink drawing and painting!! I'll keep hopping down that rabbit trail… (👇mug link here)

I hope you'll keep hopping too…

P.S. My fine art exhibit continues at the Aurora Gallery (see links here and here) and I'm still very pleased with my newest artist book The Rag Dog (printed book link here and my read-aloud video is here). Thank you all again for your ongoing support and encouragement of my work - your comments and your 7 dollar subscriptions may seem like small things but they matter to me. Thank you! 💙💚

1. Source for the number of Bad Bunny's halftime show viewers:

February 9, 2026

2. Bad Bunny Took the Super Bowl, In Spanish, With Love, and Zero Apologies

3. "Consider the books on your shelf, the art on your walls, the worn armchair by the fireplace. Are these simply items, or are they totems of your intellectual curiosity, your aesthetic sensibilities, your moments of peace? When every element of your home tells a story, resonates with personal significance, and contributes to an overall feeling of harmony, you are, in essence, building a sanctuary for your spirit."

The Architecture of the Soul and How Our Homes Shape Us

4. Stop Optimizing and Gamifying Your Life

5. "The tomorrow of my imagination is defined by more than the absence of villains. It includes reciprocal joy, collaboration, and care. That kind of future will not materialize through one-click cancellations or perfectly worded condemnations. It will take participation, sustained though often unspectacular. To refuse the pleasure of contempt is not to excuse injury—it is to decline the addictive clarity of hatred. To participate in what we want to exist is to invest time, money, attention, and labor in the institutions, communities, and alliances that embody our values, even when the returns are slow."

Prime suspect

6. "The problem before us should not be: "How can we find common ground with racists?" We should ask more uncooperative questions: "How do we find common ground with everyone else to better exclude them (the racists), as long as they insist on making race an exclusionary principle?"
We cooperate with anyone willing to play the cooperation game.
We never cooperate in any way with those who play murder game." https://www.the-reframe.com/hating-the-game/?ref=the-reframe-newsletter

7

8. Was it good, kind for ordinary human beings?
That's all that really matters. Unplug from the oligarch extortion machines.