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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Some remarkable writings and images describing intimate encounters with trees got us thinking about what really happens when we sit inside one, climb one, sit in its embrace…
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Memorial Day weekend is the real start of summer in our minds. And our minds are full of ideas for simple pleasures and ramblings, whether home or away.
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A tiny yet extraordinary exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum is evidence that we “are free to change at any age”.
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If this election has done anything, it has pointed up the grave flaws in our government and political system. We HEAR that many people in our country feel forgotten and uncared. We’ve witnessed extraordinary levels of fear and its companion, anger and hatred. And we see that we are not a one person/one vote nation. It is truly dispiriting. So we’ve compiled a few things to do to keep moving toward the positive.
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In an Illustrated Interview, the New York Times asked artist Maurizio Cattelan What would you invent to make life easier? His answer: A pause button.
YES! We all desperately need the ability to pause. But until an instant pause button is invented, here are some we thought of…
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In this season of frenzied holiday shopping, Quartz asked 40 leaders in art, business, fashion, science, and social justice the question: What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? Their surprising answers cast a lens on just what a great gift really is, along with some really lovely ideas….
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Linda Rodin, a late-sixty-something former model and fashion stylist is known for her signature style that revolves around a simple three element-formula: her long silvery gray hair, oversize glasses and red lipstick — always. She created her popular Olio Lusso Face Oil, which sells for $170 per ounce, by mixing the oils she used frequently “in a coffee cup…like salad dressing,…
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Usually we think that only difficulties come without warning. It hadn’t occurred to us that harmony and abundance can seem to come without warning as well, until we read this from the Selected Poems of Mark Strand:
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In the new Spring Design Issue of New York Magazine, artist Maira Kalman talks to longtime neighbor and friend Isaac Mizrahi about how Tel Aviv has influenced her New York apartment. The two images of Kalman’s apartment shows a warm, personal, comfortable, loose space, very different from the stark interiors of so many other designer’s…
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We really love Maira Kalman‘s picture of her worn, old-fashioned boots and it’s simple, insightful, refreshingly real-life annotation. It affirms something we practice many times daily: imagining, fantasizing, trying-on scenarios in our heads that we ultimately will never do because the reality is, well, something we don’t really want to deal with, or can’t deal with.…
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Zen Habits recently published the very useful Finding Peace with Uncertainty, one of our favorite subjects. It made us go back and leaf through the great Maira Kalman’s wonderful book, The Principles of Uncertainty. We clipped this image of her crossed-out musings thinking, for sure, she naturally applies Zen Habits’ 8 practices… Try something…
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(Video link here.) We can’t think of a better way to celebrate this lovely ordinary day than with this video of the great Maira Kalman – whose remarkable books are a blend of images and words into vivid stories – giving her two cents on what it is to be human. She covers a lot…
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We have a lot of respect for writer Michael Pollan’s writing about the food industry, and heard that his 2009 book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual presented a sane approach to eating. But we’ve been so bombarded over the years with”scientifically proven” strictures about what to cook and eat that were later proven WRONG, that our…
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