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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Over the years, we’ve come to to view illness as a path that can, if we are lucky or open to it, provide a lot of illumination and healing. When we mentioned this to our remarkable physical therapist Rachel Miller Williams she nodded and offered this surprising view.
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The most helpful 50 minutes I’ve spent recently was listening to What’s Happening in Our Nervous Systems, a podcast from On Being with Krista Tippet. Clinical psychologist Christine Runyan discusses the physiological effects of the past years of pandemic and the profound changes its wrought in daily life. Knowing “what’s been happening on a creaturely level”, I’ve felt better, more grounded, despite the escalation of a new variant.
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We were instantly riveted by @tumanualidades.de’s tiny videos of mending because they were so restful to watch, offering seemingly simple solutions to fixes we have in the past spent too much time worrying or procrastinating about. They called to mind a cosmic view of mending and sewing from some favorite artists.
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For a long time, I was hard-pressed to find a good definition of “blessing” that encompassed its quality of kindness, possibiity and transformative power without referencing formal religion. I found it in ‘To Bless the Space Between Us’ by poet John O’Donohue, and in one of his exquisite blessings.
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This week, my dearest friend will have open-heart surgery, a territory whose outcomes and demands defy prediction. So I will be taking time off from writing Improvised Life. But I will be carrying its lessons with me as I navigate waiting, hospital, ICU…
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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,
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We take a walk daily because it never fails to refresh our thinking, change our view of things, calm us. Especially, in these most stressful times. It is perhaps our most powerful medicine. Walking, we find our mind shifting, ideas sparking, problems beginning to yield in ways we never expect. Rilke nailed it in A Walk:…
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Years ago, I learned a simple recipe for boosting my immune system from a legendary homeopathic doctor. He swore by it, and I’ve come to too. I’ve been drinking it twice daily since the fierce virus scare started and each time, feel its strengthening effect.
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Sir Patrick Stewart chose Shakespeare’s sublime Sonnet 116 to read in this fearful time. Utterly soothing, affirming, beautiful.
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An essay in a posthumously published book by the very wise Oliver Sacks gives a scientist’s view of the healing power of Nature and gardens.
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A reader wrote that she has poet John O’ Donohue’s benediction tacked on her fridge to remind her to “let my work feed and refresh me”. Which is what it does for us, mightily.
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Disconnection from nature is being recognized as the cause of widespread psychological trauma in modern life. A new lexicon and age-old practices are being used to heal it.
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Over the transom came a whole side of Jim Carrey we would never have guessed: Jim Carrey the artist who has much to say about vocation, art, healing…Check out his lovely, very surprising video.
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The great Joseph Mitchell reminded us that “thoughts of death and doom” are part of the human condition, and of ways to rid our mind of them.
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Emil Ferris’ started working on My Favorite Thing is Monsters, her astonishingly accomplished and imaginative debut graphic novel after she became paralyzed. “It helped me heal.”
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Over the past couple of years we spent a good amount of time helping friends navigate hospital stays. We started to write a piece about the many strategies we devised. THEN we stumbled on some photos of Yoko Ono’s hospital stay in the late sixties. The room was full of visuals that antidoted the ugly…
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Whenever we hit a period of illness or depletion, we think of this artwork our friend Thomas Ashcraft made many years ago, with its powerfully healing reminder.
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Every now and then, we stumble on a word with unusual powers. That is, it seems to resonate more than most, and we find ourselves changed just by thinking about it.
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My conversation with JC Miller yielded a remarkable lesson about creativity and healing. It came via his mentor, Robert Royston, one of California’s foremost Modernist landscape architects.
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