In addition to some interesting music, we found a fat nugget in “Shocking the Consciousness”, Amanda Petrushich’s piece on 80-year-old radical/New Age composer Laraaji in The New Yorker: His online laughter meditations designed to help you generate your own medicinal sound.
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Psychologist, yogi, spiritual teacher Ram Dass’ devised a simple method for softening judgments of the people around us.
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We love seeing two of our favorite materials — chairs and concrete — married into the stunning amphitheater designed by artist Armand Pierre Fernandez for Milan’s Parco Sempione, Milan in 1973. Embedded into the concrete steps are the personalities that chairs inevitably evoke, each seat curiously special and intentional. It made us think of artist Maria Lassnig’s view of chairs…
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We recently returned to the Guggenheim Museum with a singular purpose: to revisit the handful of remarkable late paintings artist Alex Katz made of trees, lake, night. Those are really not the subject. He paints the sensation of seeing.
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How many times have we heard the exhortation: ‘Don’t ‘should’ on yourself.’? Sometimes that’s easier said that done. We have some pretty fierce ‘shoulds’ in our heads that carry the weight of obligation and duty, and a narrow view of choices. Then we tried a simple shift.
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As we’ve read tributes in celebration of Yoko Ono’s 90th birthday, we’ve been thinking about her too and of the many amazing things she has put into the world. She has lived through so much and never stopped making her art, speaking up, working to antidote the violence of our age. The mindshifts her work catalyzes remain refreshing, heartening, helpful. Here are a few of our favorites:
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When a friend threw THIS over our transom, we felt instantly better. Clarifying, heartening, it pulled us out of our heads into just the right place.
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Entertaining these days often means being challenged with feeding a mix of carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, and people with specific prohibitions who can not eat something or other. Then I fall back on a strategy I devised years ago to feed a crowd.
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The strange brilliance of ordinary humans heartens us daily. High on the list is this remarkable invention by a woman traveler passing through a busy airport in the time of high virus threat.
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We got interested in psychotherapist Marsha Linehan after a reader told us that it was she who first used the Buddhist concept of Radical Acceptance as a therapeutic tool in psychotherapy. It was a groundbreaking approach, as were the treatments she pioneered for patients who were previously written off as hopeless. The story of how she developed it — as a young woman she had been one of those “impossible” patients — is a marvel of resourcefulness and creativity.
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Found at Lucinda Chambers instagram: Permission to NOT tile an entire bathroom wall, but just selected parts. Beautiful! As is her inspiration…
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Reeling from the news that our friend Cara de Silva had passed away, we cast about for solace for ourselves and for her close friends whom we knew were grief-struck, missing their daily conversations with her. Into our hands jumped Maira Kalman’s wonderful book “My Favorite Things”, opening to this by Lydia Davis…
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All year long, Andrew Ross Sorkin has diligently and carefully reported on the wild and often dispiriting going- on in world through an financial and economic lens. We were heartened by his recent round-up of the most promising developments of the year, possibility-thinking made tangible.
Read MoreI want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.Susan Sontag
In 1966, sculptor Alexander Calder and his wife Louisa published this full-page ad in the New York Times. Bold and hopeful, it is a fierce statement that resonates as much today as it did then. Every New Year’s Day, we remember that ad, finding it about the most perfect wish for the New Year.
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The perfect accompaniment to the reflective week between Christmas and New Years is the Universe in Verse, an event masterminded by The Marginalian’s Maria Popova, to explore the question “What is Life?” through science and poetry. A gathering of extraordinary humans “celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling”. It offers a mightily hopeful view.
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Soon after David Saltman called to read us 6 perfect words by Basho, the great Edo period poet, we stumbled on this image by Nahasawa Rosetsu, a painter from from the same period.
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Looking out at the park across the way, the wild rain and wind made the Christmas tree in the distance appear to sparkle with a kind of fiery iridescence…It reminded us of the unexpected magic that appears daily, even in difficult times, and what we need to experience it.
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Blue Room is a beauty of a New York Times video editorial by filmmaker Merete Mueller. It shows incarcerated men and women watching nature videos on loop, in a mental health experiment to see how seeing nature impacts their experience of isolation and the relentlessly bleak environments in which they must live. Its quietly powerful 11 minutes took us way beyond its subject.
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There are good reasons I cannot NOT write about persimmons every winter. I love all the ways that they seem defiant, wild, beyond my control… I want others to find their way to the rare experience they offer.
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