Translators: Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Mike Zonta, Hanz Bolen, Alex Gambeau
SENSE TESTIMONY: It can cost more to establish evidence of the Truth than there is value in the estate.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) The infinite value/benefit of the infinite estate of Truth/Consciousness is freely, effortlessly self-evident to all.
2) The One Infinite, Consciousness Beingness, is everpresently abounding in perfectly undiminished worthy Good, which is always self-evident and manifestly appreciable, as the True Equity belonging to every individual expression.
3) Truth stands as the I AM I, Fair Witness in establishing evidence that is harmonious to all concerned.
4) All One Mind Truth I am, We are, Thou art, is constant Absolute, pure, clear, Self Evident, All Powerful, All Knowing Sound Value, the Only Understanding and Agreement, touching being all there is Now and Always.
5) This Ecstatic Estate of Truth is clairvoyant Consciousness Conscious of Consciousness, this Experienced Power Validates Its’ own Sovereignty by Universally Principled Integrity, Pulsating as One Infinite Minds’ Exact Observation of Performance of Agreements’.
Jehan de Grise and his workshop, “The Heart Offering,” 1338-1344. Illustration from The Romance of Alexander, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.
We see the familiar symbol everywhere — in text messages, signs, cakes, clothing, and more. But we also know the real heart looks nothing like it. Historian Marilyn Yalom tells us how the anatomical organ became the symbol that we all know today.
In 2011, I went to the British Museum in London to see a collection of 15th-century artifacts, which included gold coins and jewelry that were part of the Fishpool Hoard found in England in 1966. I was particularly attracted to a heart-shaped brooch (below, one of the heart brooches from the hoard).
That day, I noticed the heart’s two upper lobes and its V-shaped bottom point as if I were seeing them for the first time. It quickly dawned on me that the symmetrical shape is a far cry from the ungainly lumpish organ inside us. From that moment on, the figure of the heart pursued me. I wanted to answer two questions: “How did the human heart become transformed into the iconic form we know today?” and “How long has the heart been associated with love?”
Artist unknown. Brooch from the Fishpool Hoard, 1400-1464, British Museum, London, England.
As far back as the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry identified the heart with love in verbal conceits. Among the earliest known Greek examples, the poet Sappho agonized over her own “mad heart” quaking with love. She lived during the 7th century BC on the island of Lesbos surrounded by female disciples for whom she wrote passionate poems, now known only in fragments, like the following: Love shook my heart, Like the wind on the mountain Troubling the oak-trees.
Greek philosophers agreed, more or less, that the heart was linked to our strongest emotions, including love. Plato argued for the dominant role of the chest in love and in negative emotions of fear, anger, rage and pain. Aristotle expanded the role of the heart even further, granting it supremacy in all human processes.
Artist unknown. Drachm depicting a silphium seed pod, ca. 510-490 BC. Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, Cyrene.
Among the ancient Romans, the association between the heart and love was commonplace. Venus, the goddess of love, was credited — or blamed — for setting hearts on fire with the aid of her son Cupid, whose darts aimed at the human heart were always overpowering.
In the ancient Roman city of Cyrene — near what is now Shahhat, Libya — the coin (above) was discovered. Dating back to 510-490 BC, it’s the oldest-known image of the heart shape. However, it’s what I call the non-heart heart, because it is stamped with the outline of the seed from the silphium plant, a now-extinct species of giant fennel. Why in the world would anyone have put that on a coin? Silphium was known for its contraceptive properties, and the ancient Libyans got rich from exporting it throughout the known world. They chose to honor it by putting it on a coin.
Illustration from the novel Manon Lescaut by Antoine François Prévost, iStock.
The ancient Romans held a curious belief about the heart — that there was a vein extending from the fourth finger of the left hand directly to the heart.They called it the vena amoris. Even though this idea was based upon incorrect knowledge of the human anatomy, it persisted. In the medieval period in Salisbury, England, during the church ceremony in the liturgy, the groom was told to place a ring on the bride’s fourth finger because of that vein. Wearing a wedding ring on that finger goes back all the way to the Romans.
Artist unknown, “Herr Alram von Gresten: Minne Gespräch,” from the Codex Manesse. Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany.
During the 12th and 13th centuries, the heart found a home in the feudal courts of Europe. Minstrels in France celebrated a form of love that came to be known as “fin’ amor.” Fin’ amor is impossible to translate: today we call it courtly love, but its original meaning was closer to “extreme love,” “refined love” or “perfect love.” Courtly love required the troubadour to pledge his whole heart to only one woman, with the promise that he would be true to her forever. Accompanied by his lyre or harp, he’d sing his heart out in the presence of his lady and the members of the court to which she belonged.
This explosion of song and poetry that started in France spread to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Hungary and Scandinavia, each of which created its own variations. Through them, love staked out its place not only as a literary concept but also as an important social value and an intrinsic part of being human. A yearning for amorous love seeped into the Western consciousness and has remained there since. The illustration (above) is from the German Codex Manesse, a compilation of love poems which historians place sometime between 1300 to 1340. Between the couple, a fanciful tree rises to form the outline of a heart, which carries within it a coat of arms bearing the Latin word AMOR (love.)
Jehan de Grise and his workshop, “The Heart Offering,” 1338-1344. Illustration from The Romance of Alexander, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.
In 1344, the first known image of the indubitable heart icon with two lobes and a point appeared. It made its debut in a manuscript titled The Romance of Alexander, written in the French dialect of Picardy by Lambert le Tor (and, after him, finished by Alexandre de Bernay). With hundreds of exquisitely ornamented pages, Alexander is one of the great medieval picture books.
The scene containing the heart image appears in the lower border of a page decorated with sprays of foliage, perched birds and other motifs characteristic of French and Flemish illumination. On the left-hand side (above), a woman raises a heart that she has presumably received from the man facing her. She accepts the gift, while he touches his breast to indicate the place from which it has come. From this moment on, there was an explosion of heart imagery, particularly in France.
Master of the Chronique scandaleuse, “Miniature of Two Women Trying to Catch Flying Hearts in a Net” (detail), ca. 1500. From Pierre Sala, Petit Livre d’Amour, British Library, London, England.
During the 15th century, the heart icon proliferated throughout Europe in a variety of unexpected ways. It was visible on the pages of manuscripts and on luxury items like brooches and pendants. The heart also turned up in coats of arms, playing cards, combs, wooden chests, sword handles, burial sites, woodcuts, engravings and printer’s marks. The heart icon was adapted to many practical and whimsical uses, with most — but not all — related to love.
Frenchman Pierre Sala contributed to the history of the amorous heart with a book titled Emblèmes et Devises d’amour, or Love Emblems and Mottos, prepared in Lyon around 1500. His collection of 12 love poems and illustrations was intended for Marguerite Bullioud, the love of his life, although she was married to another man. (She and Sala wed after her husband’s death.) Sala’s tiny book was meant to be held in the palm of one’s hand. In one of the illustrations (above), two women attempt to catch a bevy of flying hearts in a net stretched out between two trees. The winged heart, borrowing from angels, had already appeared in earlier illustrations as the sign of soaring love.
Artist unknown, Pensez à moi, ca. 1900. Paper valentine, image courtesy of Marilyn Yalom.
Though some people assume that Valentine’s Day is the creation of the modern greeting card industry, its history is much older — indeed, so old that its origins are clouded. Saint Valentine of Rome was added to the Catholic calendar by Pope Gelasius in 496, to be commemorated on February 14, the same day it still occupies. While there have been various theories of why St. Valentine became associated with love, it most likely developed during the late Middle Ages in the context of Anglo-French courtly love.
By the mid-17th century, the celebration of Valentine’s Day in England was customary for those who could afford its rituals. Affluent men drew lots with women’s names on them, and the man who picked a lady’s name was obliged to give her a gift. The earliest English, French and American valentines were little more than a few lines of verse handwritten on a sheet of paper, but over time, makers began embellishing them with drawings and paintings. These were folded, sealed with wax, and placed on their intended’s doorstep.
Then, the first commercial valentines appeared in England at the end of the 18th century. They were printed, engraved or made from woodcuts and sometimes colored by hand. They combined traditional symbols of love — flowers, hearts, cupids, birds — with doggerel verse of the “roses are red” variety. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, mass-produced Valentine’s Day cards obliterated the handmade variety in England and the US. The French, too, began exploiting the commercial valentine, with cards featuring angel-like cupids surrounded by hearts (above, a French card, circa 1900).
Milton Glaser, I Love New York, 1977. Trademarked logo, New York State Department of Economic Development, New York, New York.
In 1977, the heart icon underwent yet another transformation when it became a verb. The “I NY” logo was created to boost morale for a city in crisis. Trash piled up on the streets, the crime rate spiked, and it was near bankruptcy. Hired to design an image that would increase tourism, graphic designer Milton Glaser created the famous logo (above) that has since become a cliché and a meme. With the logo, Glaser extended the heart’s meaning beyond romantic love to embrace the realm of civic feelings and thereby opened the gateway to new uses. Once it became a verb, could connect a person with any other person, place or thing.
Twenty-two years later, a new graphic form appeared that brought the heart into a whole new realm. In 1999, Japanese provider NTT DoCoMo released the first emojis made for mobile communication. In the original set of 176 symbols, there were five concerning the heart. One was colored completely red, one included white blank spots to suggest 3-D depth, another had jagged white blanks at its center signifying a broken heart, one looked as if it were in flight, and one had two small hearts sailing off together.
Now there are more 30 different emojis containing a heart, and I suspect the heart image will keep evolving in unknown ways for centuries to come.While the heart may be only a metaphor, it serves us well, for love itself is impossible to define. Throughout the ages, men and women have tried to put into words the various shades of love they’ve experienced — fondness, affection, infatuation, attachment, endearment, romance, desire or “true love.” But when words fail us, we fall back on signs. We add to our emails, texts and notes. We send valentines adorned with to those dear to us. We give gifts withpatterns. We make -shaped cookies for children. The continued global popularity of the heart as a symbol for love offers us a small dose of hope, serving as a reminder of the ageless assumption that love can save us.
Richard Grenell, the American ambassador to Germany, says he plans to lead a campaign to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. CreditFelipe Trueba/EPA, via Shutterstock
BERLIN — The American ambassador to Germany plans to lead what his embassy said Wednesday was a new and “specific push” to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.
The ambassador, Richard Grenell, rumored to be a candidate as the next American ambassador to the United Nations, invited about a dozen gay and transgender activists from around Europe to a dinner at his Berlin residence Tuesday night where the effort was discussed.
Guests from the Lithuanian Gay League posted a photo on its Twitter account showing two members posing with Mr. Grenell at the event, thanking him and calling on their country and other European Union members to support the effort, which the Lithuanian guests described as a “Global US campaign.”
The State Department in Washington has not announced a new global campaign for gay and transgender rights, raising questions about the official status of the ambassador’s plan. A department spokesman described the effort as a continuation of longstanding American policy.
The undertaking by Mr. Grenell, the most prominent openly gay diplomat in the Trump administration, was first reported by NBC News on Tuesday.
In recent public statements, Mr. Grenell has denounced Iran in particular, among the 71 countries where homosexuality is outlawed, for its persecution of gay people.
But in an interview with NBC, Mr. Grenell sought to portray the effort as much broader. “This is not just about Iran,” he said in the interview. “This is about 71 countries, and Iran is one of them.”
Mr. Grenell also declined in the interview to answer whether he was interested in the United Nations ambassador post, which has been vacant for nearly two months. “I serve at the pleasure of the president,” he told NBC.
The ambassador was traveling on Wednesday and was unavailable for comment. But the American Embassy in Berlin confirmed in a statement that he had met with the European gay and transgender rights activists and that Mr. Grenell had viewed the meeting as “the start of a specific push” to decriminalize homosexuality everywhere.
“We are working with European allies on a brand-new launch to decriminalize homosexuality,’’ Mr. Grenell told NBC, despite other issues that divide relations between Europe and the United States. He also said he had spoken to senators supportive of using American foreign aid as part of the effort, although he declined in the interview to specify which senators.
A number of American allies are among the nations that outlaw and severely penalize homosexuality, including Saudi Arabia, and it remained unclear how the effort led by Mr. Grenell would persuade the Saudis or others to end deep-seated discrimination.
Mr. Grenell told NBC that the activists, from Turkey, Ukraine, Bulgaria and other European countries, had joined him and an Iranian expatriate around a large table to discuss the effort. The ambassador said it would require “71 different strategies.”
Also unclear was whether the decriminalization effort was, in fact, new. A State Department spokesman in Washington, Robert Palladino, queried after the NBC report on the effort was broadcast, said: “This really is not a big policy departure. This is longstanding and it’s bipartisan.”
American-led diplomacy to promote gay and transgender rights internationally expanded under President Barack Obama, well before the Trump administration took office. The United Nations Human Rights Council passed its first resolution establishing L.G.B.T. rights as human rights in 2014.
David Pressman, a former American diplomat who is a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, who helped lead the Obama administration’s international L.G.B.T. rights strategy, said that despite his contacts among groups who work on such issues, he first heard about Mr. Grenell’s undertaking from news reports.
“What’s surprising is that no one who works these issues within the U.S. government appears to be aware of this effort,’’ Mr. Pressman said. “No one in the groups who have been engaged on these issues appears to be aware of this effort.”
Some leading European rights groups, including the Brussels-based ILGA-Europe, which represents L.G.B.T. people across the Continent, said they had not been invited to the dinner.
“We don’t know the plans or the content of the decriminalization campaign,” said Markus Ulrich, a spokesman for Germany’s largest gay and lesbian rights association, LSVD.
The Trump administration, wary of alienating evangelical conservative members of the president’s base, has a mixed record on L.G.B.T. rights. While Mr. Trump has said he “is fine” with a Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage is legal, the administration has taken steps to roll back civil rights for gay and transgender people. He also has reversed an Obama administration policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
American critics of Mr. Trump expressed skepticism of Mr. Grenell’s effort. Jeremy Kadden, senior international policy advocate at the Human Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T. advocacy group in Washington, said that the administration had “consistently worked to undermine the fundamental equality” of gay and transgender people.
“If this commitment is real, we have a lot of questions about their intentions and commitments, and are eager to see what proof and action will follow,” Mr. Kadden said in an emailed statement.
Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Edward Wong and Lara Jakes contributed reporting from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Ambassador Leads Bid For Gay and Transgender Rights. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Pity…is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities [and when he’s pitied]. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied.
Learned helplessness is behavior that occurs when the subject endures repeatedly painful or otherwise aversive stimuli which it is unable to escape from or avoid. After such experiences, the organism often fails to learn or accept “escape” or “avoidance” in new situations where such behavior is likely to be effective. Wikipedia
Marveling at the mysterious sanctum that his new book explores, the French journalist Frédéric Martel writes that “even in San Francisco’s Castro” there aren’t “quite as many gays.”
He’s talking about the Vatican. And he’s delivering a bombshell.
Although the book’s publishers have kept it under tight wraps, I obtained a copy in advance of its release next Thursday. It will come out in eight languages and 20 countries, under the title “Sodoma,” as in Sodom, in Western Europe and “In the Closet of the Vatican” in the United States, Britain and Canada.
It includes the claim that about 80 percent of the male Roman Catholic clergy members who work at the Vatican, around the pope, are gay. It contends that the more showily homophobic a Vatican official is, the more likely he belongs to that crowd, and that the higher up the chain of command you go, the more gays you find. And not all of them are celibate. Not by a long shot.
I’m supposed to cheer, right? I’m an openly gay man. I’m a sometime church critic. Hooray for the exposure of hypocrisy in high places and the affirmation that some of our tormentors have tortured motives. Thank heaven for the challenge to their moral authority. Let the sun in. Let the truth out.
But I’m bothered and even a little scared. Whatever Martel’s intent, “In the Closet of the Vatican” may be less a constructive reckoning than a stockpile of ammunition for militant right-wing Catholics who already itch to conduct a witch hunt for gay priests, many of whom are exemplary — and chaste — servants of the church. Those same Catholics oppose sensible and necessary reforms, and will point to the book’s revelations as proof that the church is already too permissive and has lost its dignity and its way.
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Although Martel himself is openly gay, he sensationalizes gayness by devoting his inquiry to Catholic officials who have had sex with men, not ones who have had sex with women. The promise of celibacy that priests make forbids all sexual partners, and what violates Catholic teaching isn’t just gay sex but sex outside marriage. In that context, Martel’s focus on homosexuality buys into the notion that it’s especially troubling and titillating.
His tone doesn’t help. “The world I am discovering, with its 50 shades of gay, is beyond comprehension,” he writes. It will seem to some readers “a fairy tale.” He challenges the conventional wisdom that Pope Francis, who has detractors all around him, is “among the wolves,” clarifying, “It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens.” Maybe it’s better in the original French, but this language is at once profoundly silly and deeply offensive.
The sourcing of much of “In the Closet of the Vatican” is vague, and other Vatican experts told me that the 80 percent figure is neither knowable nor credible.
“It’s not a scientifically based accusation — it’s an ideologically based one,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for Religion News Service who visits the Vatican frequently and has written several highly regarded books about the Roman Catholic hierarchy. “One of the problems is that Catholic bishops have never allowed any kind of research in this area. They don’t want to know how many gay priests there are.” Independent studies put the percentage of gay men among Catholic priests in the United States at 15 percent to 60 percent.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Martel stressed that the 80 percent isn’t his estimate but that of a former priest at the Vatican whom he quotes by name in the book. But he presents that quotation without sufficient skepticism and, in his own words, writes, “It’s a big majority.”
He says that “In the Closet of the Vatican” is informed by about 1,500 interviews over four years and the contributions of scores of researchers and other assistants. I covered the Vatican for The Times for nearly two years, and the book has a richness of detail that’s persuasive. It’s going to be widely discussed and hotly debated.
It depicts different sexual subcultures, including clandestine meetings between Vatican officials and young heterosexual Muslim men in Rome who work as prostitutes. It names names, and while many belong to Vatican officials and other priests who are dead or whose sexual identities have come under public scrutiny before, Martel also lavishes considerable energy on the suggestion that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and other towering figures in the church are gay.
Perhaps the most vivid of the double lives under Martel’s gaze is that of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of Colombia, who died a little over a decade ago. According to the book, he prowled the ranks of seminarians and young priests for men to seduce and routinely hired male prostitutes, sometimes beating them up after sex. All the while he promoted the church’s teaching that all gay men are “objectively disordered” and embraced its ban on priests who are believed to have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” whether they act on them or not.
Part of my concern about the book is the timing of its release, which coincides precisely with an unprecedented meeting at the Vatican about sexual abuse in the church. For the first time, the pope has summoned the presidents of every Catholic bishops conference around the world to discuss this topic alone. But the book “is also bound to shift attention away from child abuse and onto gay priests in general, once again falsely conflating in people’s minds homosexuality and pedophilia,” said the Rev. James Martin, a best-selling Jesuit author, in a recent tweet. He’s right.
The book doesn’t equate them, and in fact makes the different, important point that the church’s culture of secrecy — a culture created in part by gay priests’ need to conceal who they are — works against the exposure of molesters who are guilty of crimes.
As David Clohessy, a longtime advocate for survivors of sexual abuse by priests, said to me on the phone a few days ago: “Many priests have a huge disincentive to report sexual misdeeds by colleagues. They know they’re vulnerable to being blackballed. It’s celibacy and the secretive, rigid, ancient all-male hierarchy that contributes to the cover-up and, therefore, more abuse.” Abuse has no sexual orientation, a fact made clear by many cases of priests having sex with girls and adult women, including nuns, whose victimization by priests was publicly acknowledged by Pope Francis for the first time early this month.
But that’s a crucial subtlety that’s too easily lost in the thicket of exclamation points in “In the Closet of the Vatican.” And more people will read the racy headlines about the book than read the book itself. What they may take away is this: Catholic priests are twisted characters. And gay men are creatures of stealth and agents of deception who band together in eccentric societies with odd rituals.
I asked Martel what his aim was. “I’m a journalist,” he said. “My only goal is to write stories. I’m not a Catholic. I don’t have any motive of revenge. My concern is not that the church will be better or worse. I’m outside of the church.”
I asked him if he worried about homophobes weaponizing the book. If they read it correctly, he answered, they’ll realize that rooting out gays would mean ridding the church of some of their heroes, who inveigh against homosexuality as a way of denying and camouflaging who they really are. The cardinals most accepting of gays, he said, are those who are probably straight.
All else aside, the book speaks to the enormous and seemingly growing tension between a church that frequently vilifies and marginalizes gay men and a priesthood dense with them. “This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and gay, in an excellent cover story for New York magazine last month. It explains why so many gay men entered the priesthood, especially decades ago: They didn’t feel safe or comfortable in a society that ostracized them. Their sense of being outsiders gave them a more spiritual bent and greater desire to help others in need.
They weren’t pulling off some elaborate ruse or looking for the clerical equivalent of a bathhouse. They were trying, psychologically and emotionally, to survive. Many still are, and I fear that “In the Closet of the Vatican” won’t help.
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Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books. @FrankBruni•Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Vatican’s Gay Overlords. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
What trait do you think best enabled people imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps to survive?
It wasn’t strength, youth or selfishness, according to Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, but rather having a firm reason to live.
Frankl believed we all have within us a “will to meaning,” and that we can make it through even the most unimaginable suffering when we find a sufficient reason for living – an idea echoed in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
After the Holocaust, Frankl created logotherapy – a psychoanalytic approach that argues life is inherently worth living and people should strive to find their own meaning. Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” gives three suggestions:
“We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed [the way of achievement or accomplishment]; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone [the way of nature and culture, and the way of love]; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”
There are few dedicated logotherapists working today, but it’s easy to see Frankl’s influence in more modern psychological approaches like meaning therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
Before Richard Dawkins was known as an dogmatic atheist, he wrote The Selfish Gene, an incredibly poetic take on the subjects of genetics and evolution.
Originally presented as a sequence of lectures given in Scotland in 1985, Dyson’s inquiries spread from biological diversity on Earth to the cosmic scheme of things.
Kuhn challenges the concept of scientific process and considers it rather to be a shift of paradigms in which we radically change our view of the world.
The philosopher Alan Watts framed the confusion of modern society this way: ‘We’re all alone together, whistling in the dark.’ How do we make sense of the world without a guiding myth like religion?
According to Watts and the renowned Joseph Campbell – who popularized the idea of the hero’s journey – ideology is a poor guide because it’s not your story. “Like the hunter of old who has nobody around him to tell him how to feel,” as Watts described in the essay “A Return to the Forest”, we must search for truth on our own.
Campbell expressed a similar idea:
“You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”
“These are the kinds of experiences that cannot be transmitted, which for their very nature are something one finds out for themselves,” Watts said. “If they could be explained or transmitted they couldn’t be the very thing which they are intended to be. Our discoveries of something authentic, genuine, first hand and part of one’s universe, cannot be codified and be factored into social communication.”
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NY” logo was created to boost morale for a city in crisis. Trash piled up on the streets, the crime rate spiked, and it was near bankruptcy. Hired to design an image that would increase tourism, graphic designer 
