What if the future of well-being is about “tipping the scales in the world away from fear and toward love”? asks On Being’s Krista Tippett in The Future of Well-Being. This simple premise feels like a guidepost for navigating the extraordinary elevation of fear the past years have brought, wrought by the pandemic, politics fueled by animosity, climate change. We were particularly struck by the idea of “microdosing of well-being”.
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Over the years, artist-scientist Thomas Ashcraft has made artful iterations of a message that we’ve found deeply heartening. Especially so now, in this anxious time…
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Every morning, we take a minute to look at this image of artist Lucio Fontana approaching a blank canvas. It offers an essential insight about creative work as does this tiny poem by Gary Snyder.
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In this lovely animated film, legendary composer Abdullah Ibrahim tells how improvising guided him during dangerous run-ins with white police, an active practice throughout his life and music.
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Sometimes it seems impossible to live with the horror in our daily news, with its echoes of so many recent attacks, of 9/11, and violence that seems to come at random. Heartsick, felled, two things came to mind…
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After many years of suffering stage-fright in certain situations, I wonder what would have happened had I known neuroscientist Ian Robertson’s “magic trick” that transforms certain forms of anxiety and fear into excitement.
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Ten Meter Tower shows people who had never been on a 10-meter (about 33 feet) diving tower before, and had never jumped from that high. The film is about approaching a personal limit —a potential leap — full of fear, and either making the decision to make the leap or not. Watching it is both moving and illuminating.
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When a friend of artist Laura Brody had a stroke, Laura began to take notice of assistive devices that are ‘almost insultingly ugly’ and impersonal. She set out to understand why AND transform them into objects of personal expression.
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Every morning when we open up our office for work, we take a minute to look at this image taped on our wall, of artist Lucio Fontana approaching a blank canvas. We never tire of it. We think two things: That canvas is the day or a project or a new path, full of possibility AND… Look…
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Reading Holton Rower’s “Run Toward Your Fear” sign recently, I recalled a remark that Tom Robbins made to me years ago when I was fretting about whether to sign up to design a big, new project with a tight deadline that required a great many skills I did not have—skills I would have to learn on…
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Artist Kadir Nelson who painted the New Yorker cover of young Nelson Mandela said that creating Nelson’s portraint maid him feel “empowered and proud like the man himself.”
That’s how seeing the cover makes us feel. As do Mandela’s empowering words.
(Video link here.) One of our favorite films has long been My Dinner with Andre, which is, on the surface, a conversation between two friends during dinner in a French restaurant in New York City. Andre Gregory vividly describes his revelatory, new-ageish, risk-taking experiences in experimental theatre while his modest less-adventurous friend Wally Shawn listens and…
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When we first saw this sign, we though ‘Yeah, for sure’. Then we started thinking more critically about fear and realized it is not always a bad thing. We searched “antidote to fear” and found bits and pieces about love antidoting fear, and especially, being present antidoting fear. Then we stumbled on a rough draft…
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CreativeMornings Short: George Lois on Courage from CreativeMornings on Vimeo. (Video link here.) In this short, great clip from design legend George Lois‘ CreativeMornings talk, he gives what he considers to be his most essential piece of advice for creatives — for anyone — : “be courageous!“. And suddenly we realized that Lois is curiously reminiscent of the Cowardly…
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