Echoes from the Wander
17 November 2025
Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I finally received my copy of The Four Chinese Classics, translated (and beautifully expanded) by David Hinton.
I barely made it through the first paragraph of the introduction to Tao Te Ching before something strange happened:
I picked up a pencil and started sketching.
“As it embodies the process of change itself, dragon appears again, and so is in constant transformation.”
~ David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics
I don’t know what it means yet. I only know it arrived.
I am not a sketcher. Drawing is not my language—writing is. But on Sunday morning, I drew four images that felt … summoned. I plan to ink them, maybe even Zentangle them, before I share. I love ink sketches. I also have no idea what I’m doing. Time will tell.
What compelled me to draw them?
Words. Words that painted pictures in my mind—something that almost never happens for me. What a feeling. I hope someday I can do that for someone else with my own writing.
Have you ever felt moved to try something totally outside your comfort zone because of someone else’s words?
I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
Where JL wandered last week…
Wednesday Whimsy #27 – The Muse hitchhiking somewhere east of El Paso, deep in west Texas. (I will forever love that Greyhound bus station and the best Mexican restaurant in the 1970s. Memory insists it still exists.)
Fifty Years Before I Called It Writing – A refurbished old blog piece that tugs at me still. Proof you can have clean dishes and eat dessert.
Danger of Drowning – A daughter/maiden poem in the Crone’s Cairn series, exploring mermaids and submerged risk.
If you missed any, they’re still there waiting.
And where are we headed?
A phaiku is brewing. The Tao sketches will likely reveal themselves. Two recent articles—one about how genres reshape our minds, one about poems acting like telescopes—have essay sparks bubbling under the surface.
I tend to be most inspired by peer-reviewed journals, not fiction. Fiction delights me, but it rarely pushes me to the page. Scientific papers do. I can’t be the only one.
How about you—does reading fiction ignite your writing, or simply your admiration?
From the Crone’s Cairn, a mother poem—Reigns the Brain—will likely arrive Friday, and Wednesday will undoubtedly deliver another shot of mischief from the Muse. Thursday’s essay? A mystery, mostly to me. (No pressure.)
One final delight: if you haven’t seen the new radio-wave images of the Milky Way, please treat yourself. Doctoral student Silvia Mantovanini helped produce them. I have a soft spot for doctoral students. The view is breathtaking—our Galaxy in unprecedented radio color.
Funny—my dragons circle a world the same way our galaxy spirals through space. Maybe everything is always drawing itself anew.
Wander beneath the stars—or among them.
Until next we meet, be well.
—Jennifer
JL Tooker
Yay for spontaneous sketching energy! I have a copy of Tao Te Ching but have never taken the time to really go through and study it. Perhaps I should revisit that in the not too distant future.
Community is what typically spurs me into creative action. Of course, most of my community are storytellers, whether through words or pictures. It's like a web, each of us sharing our own work plus what inspired it, all the strands connecting, sometimes vibrating just so with one person, not so much with another.
Nice! The ouroboros consuming the world, perhaps.