“Patience, dear, the world is a very strange place, and the dice are always rolling.” This is a quote from a Tom Robbins book, Skinny Legs and All. If you like a good read that combines humor, philosophy, social commentary, and magic, you can’t go wrong with this book. It is full of memorable lines but this particular sentence jumped from the page into my eyeballs and landed right smack in my heart as a mantra to live by. Feeling stuck? Unhappy? No remedy in sight? That’s when it’s time to remember the way the world works. Those dice are always rolling and the one thing you can depend on is that change comes.

I created an illustration to remind myself of the truth in these words. It features me with a little black stray cat that I once befriended. He was hit and killed by a car which broke my heart in two. Now, years later, he has returned to me in the form of another black orphan kitty, rescued by a friend. At the time she found him, he was so tiny he could curl up in your hand. Danny and I fell in love with him immediately and made him an inside cat. Kitty is a mischievous little soul who entertains us and makes us happy, which just goes to show that, indeed, the dice are always rolling.

(To view the full illustration, go to “Galleries” in the menu, select “personal” and click on the desired image.)