I rely on my tightly edited instagram feed to bring ideas and wonders right to me when I need them. They remind me of the great, wild, often hidden, beauty in the world, like Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (above). And the collection Luigi LIneri spent 50 years amassing of stones he found on walks by the Adige River in Northern Italy. He catalogues them by shape (human profiles, tools, animal heads etc), believing them to be sculptures made by unknown forces:
The strange and wondrous moments I find…
…are reminders of the world’s endless creativity…
Some of what I see loosens my head up, with ideas I never thought of, like moss made checkerboard…
…and moldings made into decoration of a whole other order
…and this view of self that I recognize as totally accurate, but never had words for…
Then I found this quote from Saul Bellow on my instagram feed…
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
That state of stillness and attention and flow is what I value most in my days along with the equanimity that attends it. It isn’t so easy to maintain; I lose it, and find it constantly, like an alternating current. When I find myself going to instagram to wander, I hold in mind a question sparked by Bellow’s words:
It is this nourishment or distraction?
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Quote from above Improvised Life: “I rely on my tightly edited instagram feed to bring ideas and wonders right to me when I need them. They remind me of the great, wild, often hidden, beauty in the world, like Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (above).”
Note: Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest is not beautiful and not intended to be. Research what a Ghost Forest is.
Beauty can be terrible, painful, violent, heartbreaking…