One morning, I found myself listening to poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge reading Wonder from her book A Treatise on Stars. I was transfixed, calmed, transported by her voice and the story it told. It proved a surprising lesson in seeing stars, and the connection between wonder and not knowing.
Read More
From his retreat at his upstate cabin, legendary actor Mandy Patinkin sings in Hebrew as gets his dog Becky’s food for her. We were surprised to discover that what he is singing is a prayer. And that got us thinking about blessings to accompany simple tasks of daily life.
Read More
Opening at random Richard Powers’ remarkable novel The Overstory, we found the ancient formula for gratitude.
Read More
These New Yorker cartoons describe the peculiar brand of anxiety that has become our weird shared experience. They give a much-needed sense of connectedness, AND levity…
Read More
We’re loving Jane Hirschfeld’s wonderful poem I Wanted to Be Surprised. It is the lens through which we’ve been looking to discover uplifting…surprises…
Read More
In a 2012 talk at AIGA, Zach Lieberman, cofounder of the School for Poetic Computation, read the short, powerful ‘I Am Art’ out loud. It is one of the most astonishing and rhapsodic proclamations of art-making we’ve seen and totally nails the exhilaration art brings.
Read More
Over our transom came this moving piece from Underland: a Deep Time Journey by British naturalist Robert Macfarlane. We’ve written before about his remarkable ability to connect us to nature, landscape, heart…
Read More
We are thrilled by the publication of Donald Judd Spaces, a rare visual survey of the legendary artist’s living and working spaces. It contains a trove of new and archival photographs alongside five essays by the artist which afford a close look and greater understanding of his integrative thinking and aesthetic, and very employable ideas.
Read More
Without realizing it, I’ve collected a few books about “doing nothing”, one for kids and a couple for adults. All have unexpected wisdom to offer.
Read More
The recent post about Mister Rogers got me thinking about how to give gifts that “encourage wonder and reflection? Here are some gift books that do just that.
Read More
As we work to move Improvised Life to a new form, we came across this passage from Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of finding her artistic voice: the secret of improvisation she learned from Sam Shepard.
Read More
We were casting about for a new book to read when we came across Patti Smith’s technique for rereading personal favorites “three-dimensionally, cubistically, from several angles.
Read More
Although I’ve often left art books open around my space so I could live with an image, it only recently occurred to me to do that with a volume of tiny, powerful poems.
Read More
YoYo Ma described The Art of IS as “a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present.” We find it full of surprising ideas that are also incredibly helpful.
Read More
How swell to see Improvised Life mentioned in New York Magazine’s ’31 Low Lift Home Improvements for Under $100′ for our decoding of Donald Judd furniture. We got a lot of ideas for jazzing up our space….
Read More
In the sixties, Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton published a magazine with a radical and artful mission. Here are some excerpts…
Read More
One of the most remarkable stories in the late Oliver Sacks’ posthumously published book is about Sacks’ unexpected meeting with an orangutan while visiting the zoo. It describes Sacks “”a brilliant singularity”: his ability for showing us the big fat gifts to be found in the everyday. Perfection in 274 words.
Read More
This morning we opened our Collected Poems of W.S. Merwin to the poet counting blessings and expressing gratitude. Which we find ourselves doing as we read it.
Read More
Inspired by studies that view trees as receivers of stellar energies, photographer Beth Moon traveled to the world’s “last dark places” to photograph ancient trees at night, in color.
Read More
In Tim McCreight’s The Complete Metalsmith, I was surprised to find poetic wisdom in his section about hand tools that apply to many kinds of tools we use in creative endeavors, sometimes even smart phones.
Read More