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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Over the years, I’ve practiced various breathing techniques to reduce stress. But it wasn’t until I listened to this interview with James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art that I understood how breathing works in the body and emotions, and how we can use the simplest of practices to calm or energize ourselves, and heal.
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My amazing friend Charlie’s kidneys are failing. He needs someone to donate a kidney to save his life. If we join together to find someone to give Charlie a kidney, we can save the life of my remarkable friend. It’s easy to do. Here’s how we can make it happen:
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This interesting, badly-edited little film left us with a powerful feeling that we’ve been enjoying, so we’re glad we watched enough to get the gist. It yielded a nice big lesson, with a poem to boot!
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With winter fiercely, the covid-mandated necessity to socialize outdoors is challenging for those of us who live in cold regions or are simply cold-sensitive. So I’ve hunted down advice about how to hang out outside, whether at a restaurant or on a park bench or in an ice hut if you happen to have one.
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A therapist friend once described the idea of reverie as a tool for healing. That allowing oneself to fall into a state of dreamy meditation and daydreaming, free of anxious thinking, has a powerfully restful effect. That is the state I found myself in after I stumbled on this tiny video of a whale lazily…
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Many months after coronavirus radically changed our world, we don’t know anybody that is not having a difficult time. We turn to the greatest balancing mechanism we’ve found to find out way back to fullness, “enough”, clarity, joy.
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There is a big message in this little film, way bigger than its title, Reframe the Familiar. The visuals seem somehow of another time and act, with the words and odd voice, like hunks of poetry.
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Amid the subtle hues of black in the negative images of Elisa Moro’s photographs, only hands are in positive gray tones. “You are made of all the hands that have touched you” points to one of the great absences caused by the pandemic, and raises a compelling question…
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Understanding the nuances of “pura vida” made me wonder what if, in the face of all the chaos and uncertainty and rage and sadness, we were to embrace it as our daily mantra?
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Artist ciriacaerre made a video of repairing a smashed vase using kintsugi, the Japanese art that celebrates the scars and breaks. She, and other artist, eloquently describe its greater meaning…
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When we stumbled on thisimage by photographer Jill Burrow, we thought, ‘Ah yes. We’d love to sleep surrounded by flowers, especially now, after months of guarded and circumscribed living.’ Looking closely, we found permission to do it…
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I first became enamored of sunglasses worn OVER prescription glasses when I saw my friend Fran Black* wearing a pair; I suddenly noticed that there was a pair of glasses underneath her sunglasses. That’s just what I need, I thought, so I hunted a pair down. They made my life way easier. I didn’t have…
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In advance of reopening after months of coronavirus lockdown, the Metropolitan Museum of Art posted words by Yoko Ono on its facade. She created them in response to Covid-19 as an essential instruction.
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Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray and Emily Saliers put their finger on what makes poet/rapper Kae Tempest so unique: “…their willingness to love humanity through the darkness makes me hopeful”. That comes through powerfully in these two spoken word pieces and this short powerful interview. Words to live by.
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This morning we came across extraordinary words from Carl Jung. They describe a wholeness of experience that antidotes the very modern idea that we are each self-contained. Soon after, a Mary Oliver poem echoed it…
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Recently, the actual living trees that were the subject of van Gogh’s last painting in 1890 were discovered near the small French town where he lived. A photograph of the trees superimposed with the painting brings to life Gary Snyder’s idea of “tree intensity of mind”, and amplifies our own experience mightily.
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Color artist Kaffe Fassett likens color to oxygen, “…like breathing”. In this short video, he describes how he relies on color for healing, something it seems, we can all do:
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Worry and overwhelm are common emotions these days. This morning, we found two simple things that shifted us out of them.
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This remarkable video captures what is normally invisible to our eyes — how masks work to slow airborne infection carried on our breath — and resolves much conflicting information about them. Essential viewing for those that wear them and those that don’t.
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