Improvised Life

A Terrible Little Film’s Wonderful Lesson About Aging

This interesting, badly-edited little film left us with a powerful feeling that we’ve been enjoying, so we’re glad we watched enough to get the gist. It yielded a nice big lesson, with a poem to boot!

How to Eradicate Unpleasant Odors in a Washing Machine

For those who to use a shared laundry room say, in an apartment building or laundromat, we’ve found a solution to a common vexing problem: strong synthetic perfume residue left in the machine from the previous user’s detergent. We’d tried every fix we found on the internet to eradicate annoying floral perfumes residue that would…

Tree.fm: Listen to Forests Around the World and Plant Some Trees

The past week working at our desk, we listened to soundscapes of forests in Malaysia, Estonia, Portugal, China and France… Through a remarkable website, we found ourselves transported into tranquil environments AND quickly able to gift trees to friends…

Dial-a-Poem’s Strangely Wonderful Experience (+ Poem Texts and Random Readings)

As soon as we read “Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People Hear Poems Read by Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & More” at the great Open Culture, we picked up our phone and dialed. We were surprised by a curiously intimate experience, to add to our arsenal of ways to weave poetry into our life.

New Views of a New Year (Antonio Gramsci, Arundhati Roy, Patti Smith)

Something doesn’t ring true to us about the idea that with a simple change of year would come an erasure of the heavy mood and fearful times we’ve been feeling. Here is a different view…

A Question for The Last Week of a Fearsome Year

As always, we are taking the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. It’s a time to slow way down and reflect on the rough year that’s passed and on the new one we are about to begin, starting with this question from Yoko Ono…

Odes to Joy in Days of Darkness

Bach’s Ode to Joy got us thinking about how JOY works when when life throws in a giant monkey wrench and we find ourselves navigating darkness we never imagined…,

Cosmo Sheldrake’s Remarkable Musical Collaboration with Endangered Birds

Over 9 years at dawn, Cosmo Sheldrake carried recording gear, laptop, and sometimes a keybord into fields and woods to make music in collaboration endangered birds. The result is his new album Wake Up Calls; it is both charming and illuminating…

How to Socialize in the Cold + Richard Johnson’s Ice Huts

With winter fiercely, the covid-mandated necessity to socialize outdoors is challenging for those of us who live in cold regions or are simply cold-sensitive. So I’ve hunted down advice about how to hang out outside, whether at a restaurant or on a park bench or in an ice hut if you happen to have one.

Life Lessons from the Forest

Ferris Jabr’s deeply-pleasurable “The Social Life of Forests” tells the story of scientist Susan Simard whose pioneering research changed the way we think about the fundamental nature of forests: as complex deeply-connected networks that allow trees to communicate and cooperate. It offers a powerful lesson for this time of pandemic.

Marina Abramovic’s Public Service Announcement

In this video, performance artist Marina Abramovic describes the tree therapy she developed many years ago in the Amazon rainforest. It has become part of her “Abramović Method,