wellness

“Onward to What?” Katherine Grody’s Fortifying Rant on Aging

Grody has a way of talking turkey about aging that we first wrote about in “@MandyPatinkin’s Heartening Reality Sandwiche”: honest, sometimes ambivalent, funny, heartening. This little tonifying video continues the conversation.

How to Keep Cooler and Use Less AC

This simple lesson we learned from an expert in ventilation helped us cool down the fierce summers in our hot top floor apartment, and lessened our air conditioner use and costs. Some days we even glimpse the feeling that illustrator Monica Ramos evokes in so many of her artworks…

A Question to Maintain Stillness, Attention and Flow

I rely on my tightly edited instagram feed to bring ideas and wonders right to me when I need them. Then a powerful quote from Saul Bellow sparked an essential question.

Erling Kagge on ‘The Secret Bond Between Slowness And Memory, Emotion, Intelligence’

“The pace we choose when we walk can be decisive for how we think”, writes explorer and philospher Erling Kagge in Walking One Step at a Time. Apply it more broadly and it becomes a startling life principle that can profoundly shift everyday experience…

Thoughts on Miracles (Charlie Allenson, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Cosmos)

A while back, we posted “Let’s Save Charlie’s Life”, about our friend Charlie Allenson who needed a kidney transplant to save his life, Charlie got his transplant through an anonymous donor touched by one of the messages asking for help that Charlie’s many friends and colleagues sent out via social media. It got us thinking about miracles, and we found insight from Whitman, Mary Oliver, and Charlie himself.

The Complex Meanings of ‘Languishing’ (Jenny Holzer, Ada Limon, Cesaria Evora…)

“Languishing” perfectly describes the unsettling emotional state so many of us find ourselves in a solid year into the pandemic. We looked deeper into its meaning, and found insight in art, music, poetry…

Alan Watts’ on Laughter and Anxiety

After David Saltman described his remarkable experience seeing Alan Watts give a talk in the 1970s, we hunted down some video of the essential astonishing lesson. Which led to way more…

Lesson for an Open Heart

After an extended pause from Improvised Life seeing my friend through open heart surgery, all is well. The surgery was successful, and my friend is slowly recovering. Through weeks of ICU and the unpredictable processes of healing, we have felt the powerful effect of the simplest of things: Kindness.

With Poetry as Balm for Dire Straits, We Are Taking Time Off (Mary Oliver, Su Tung p’o)

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…

What Breathing Does + How to Breath for Energy, Balance, Relaxation

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.

Let’s Save Charlie’s Life

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:

A Terrible Little Film’s Wonderful Lesson About Aging

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!

How to Socialize in the Cold + Richard Johnson’s Ice Huts

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.

Tiny Whale Videos Spark Dreamy Reverie

A therapist friend once described the idea of reverie as a tool for healing; dreamy meditation and daydreaming, free of anxious thinking, has a powerfully restful effect. That state is what I found myself in after I stumbled on these tiny videos…

How to Give Thanks Anyway (Melanie Beatty, Bob Dylan, Gary Snyder, Pablo Neruda…)

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.

How to Practice Magic

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.

“You Are Made by All the Hands that Touch You” (Elisa Moro)

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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