yoko ono

What Mending Can Mean

Long out of favor due to the glut of cheap clothing, products and materials, mending and repair is on the rise again. That’s got us looking into the deeper meaning of mending.

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…

Short, Powerful Instruction for an Alternative Possibility of Being

We read haiku often for the power they offer in just a few lines; they are HELPFUL, always offering a shift of our thinking and deepening of the moment. Jane Hirschfield illuminated why.

A Calling Card that Sends Interlopers Away, and Other Unexpected Messages

The calling card Adrien Piper created as an artwork got us thinking of the many potential messages a little, portable card could convey.

Instructions for a Tumultuous Election Day

Has any election in America’s history created as much anxiety as this one? It seems like our very lives are on the line. So we’ve put together some instructions for navigating Election Day.

David Foster Wallace: ‘the only thing that’s capital-T True’

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life is a teeny book that we return to, and give, frequently. It’s the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Reading it is humbling and an instant shift from default setting to compassionate mindset. Here are 229…

It’s a New Year: Imagine!

(Video link HERE!) The lovely GIF we saw at Hedwiggen, below, suddenly made us flash on John Lennon singing Imagine in 1971, over forty years ago. The video he made with Yoko Ono, with its image of the opening up of the dark, shuttered rooms of a house to light, resonates still. We think of all that happened to…

Fantasy Face-Lift

At a photo shoot at Maria’s studio, Suzanne Shaker and I played “face lift”, standing behind each other and gently “lifting” each other’s face. It was a funny, weird, grown-up girls’ game played by women who’d never actually get a face lift. We’re game to go where our faces take us…For a moment, we found a way to improvise younger selves.

grapefruit: yoko ono’s book of instructions

Always on the lookout for things that shift our view and spark ideas, we were very happy to discover that Yoko Ono’s 1970 book Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono has been reprinted. It is a FINE book of instructions— koan-like meditations that will, in fact, make you see a little…

a few cool gifts by artists + designers

We’re not big on bought gifts, preferring to donate money to charity in our friends’ name, or give food gifts we’ve made. That being said, it’s nice to have an arsenal of useful, well-designed, not-too-expensive treats to give on the holidays or otherwise — our favorite gift-giving is just for the hell-of-it when we’ve found…