Ania birthday-gifted me with two wonderful stacks of tree and ink today: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and an excellent Taschen book on Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is a massive set of three hardback tomes, a beautiful 1440 pages collecting every strip Bill Watterson ever released for circulation. Simply flipping through, I'm struck with wonder at every smile, every arc of tiger through air, every well-wrought flip of social commentary disguised as the shenanigans of a six year old: all simple pen strokes placed deliberately by the artist's hand.

The book on Wright is filled with gorgeous photos of his architecture and blueprints. I can never get enough of Wright's work: sweeping lines, complex geometries made deceptively simple, an interdependence with setting to the extent setting becomes a part of the creation. Wright created dwellings the way Watterson imbued his characters with life: every beam, every angle, every space an expression of its creator's pulse.

These works of art, these breathing embodiments of aspects of their artists, live equally in our minds as in the physical world. That's where the creation began: in an artist's mind. Through artistic expansion and expression, their creations as avatar allow simultaneous appearance throughout the world and throughout time. Watterson walks our minds still in the eternal pair of boy and tiger, and Wright is very much alive as modernity and progress itself.

I like New Year's Day for the mass cleansing and renewal our society longs for and attempts, but my true, personal measurement of year to year is from birthday to birthday. My life as lived, like those of all artists, all human beings, is an aspect of my mind, which popped from void into this improbable place on this day. What I see is what I create, what I do is what I will, what I am is what I believe.

A new rotation, a new creation... architecture, sketches, tigers and fallingwater.... I wonder what I'll build in this brand new year?