identity

Jessamyn Stanley’s Liberation Yoga: ‘Fuck Comparison’

In a short demo session, body-loving yoga master Jessamyn Stanley undid my shame about not being perfect AND set me straight why we NEED yoga. She is a force of nature, who is making yoga accessible.

A Blessing for Creatives for All Kinds (John O’Donohue)

A gift via email has fueled us ever since we received it: a blessing from poet and philosopher John O’Donohue’s superb book Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. We find it to be the perfect first-thing-in-the-morning reading, and deeply heartening and calming anytime, so we’ve made a pdf you can download.

How to Have Patience (Mira Keras)

Last summer I fought long and hard for a new prosthetic leg after a surgery drastically changed the shape of my residual limb. Getting a new prosthetic required dozens of hours of phone calls and pleading with insurance company phone reps. I was waiting in doctor’s offices and waiting on hold with my insurance company…and all this came while I was really waiting to heal. This extended lesson in patience actually helped me to be more patient with others.

The Day After, via Rumi, William Saltman, Beckett, Ali, Lucien Freud

We’ve collected a few bits of wisdom and thoughts on……the clear…..next…..steps….

Work Wherever, However You Need

It’s tempting to imagine that writers are creating from glossy white offices, with fresh cut flowers, and lattes in artful cups. It can feel like if that’s not your reality you’re not “doing it right”. That’s bullshit.

Hidden Wonders in ‘Dullness’

In a video about the Dull Men’s Club, an online community of men wishing to just be ordinary, and novelist Nicholson Baker’s wise writing about dullness, we discovered the thread that runs through both is gratitude and curiosity.

Why You Should Do Whatever You Want to Your Hair (Mira Keras + Solonge)

Hair has been both a prison and a means to empowerment for women since the beginning of time. Empowerment is at the fore —going blue proved a deeply expressive statement for me—and Solange’s ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’ nails it.

Annals of Healing: 30 Ways NOT to Say ‘Pussy’ + Tweeting REAL

Among the best responses to Donald Trump’s now infamous “Grab them by the pussy” are Samantha Bee’s brilliant riff on improvisional pussy slang and Kelly Oxford’s powerful twitter question. Both antidote shame.

Opulent Mobility Antidotes What We All Fear

When a friend of artist Laura Brody had a stroke, Laura began to take notice of assistive devices that are ‘almost insultingly ugly’ and impersonal. She set out to understand why AND transform them into objects of personal expression.

Dressing for Camouflage or Self-Expression w Rumi

Walking around the park recently, we saw a man leaning on a fence, minding his own business, wearing an astonishing hat: a baseball cap turned backwards and interleaved with fresh green branches. When we asked him how he came to make it, his answer got us thinking about just what our personal apparel really does for us…

‘Soy Yo’: A Joyous Anthem of Personal Liberation

Soy Yo is an astonishing visual anthem about a young girl’s small powerful acts of personal expression and liberation. As she encounters a morning’s worth of possible “girl prisons” —humiliations and messages of ‘less than’ —, she navigates her way through them with aplomb. She is our new role model, and the music our wakeup call.

Stuart Ringholt: ‘Can Art Be Super Practical and Improve My Life?’

This compelling chair made of a sawed-in-half bathtub is the creation of artist Stuart Ringholt who, in the throws of hashish psychosis, wondered if art can be practical. In making art, he found his answer.

Lumineer’s Cleopatra: Ode to Ordinary Life

(Video link here.) The Lumineers’ short, moving video Cleopatra tells many stories as a woman-of-a-certain ages wends through her day:

An Unusual Memorial for a Loved One: Hair

Hairstory Studio in downtown Manhattan calls itself “part think-tank, photo studio, art space, and production house…challenging beauty stereotypes through the art of cutting, coloring, and styling hair”. Each month it welcomes a handful of people for fresh cuts, color, and portraits. And to tell their story through their hair. We find Oakley’s to be the most deeply personal and unexpected.

What You Can Do When You Are Too Challenged To Do Anything

Last week I was supposed to write some articles for Improvised Life and couldn’t do it. I am a few weeks post-op from a serious surgery. Healing at am unexpectedly glacial place is wearing away at my normally very high optimism, physical energy and focus. I’ve talked openly on Improvised Life before about “being myself in a…

Work with Hands, not Brands

In conversation, I never call Improvised Life a blog. The Blogging world is an ubiquitous, saturated and aspirational one; most bloggers put their true opinions aside to survive. We are trying to do something different.

Tattoos As Self Reclamation

As a tattoo artist I witness the myriad reasons and kinds of people who get tattooed. I have tattooed a mourning 64-year-old-man transforming his grief, a Hasidic jew wanting to secretly express himself, a young cancer survivor during his post chemo celebration. Memorials, achievements, jokes and dares, even the most controversial of all — pure aesthetics —…

Freedom Means Letting Go of Shame

From very early on in my life as an amputee, I’ve loathed using crutches or a wheelchair. I am a very autonomous person. I have blue hair and tattoos. I don’t think too much about the opinions or stares of others, but put me in a wheelchair and all that rebel-heartedness melted into shy shameful…

Eco on Why We Make Lists + Some Favorites

Our friend Tim Slavin, of Kids, Code and Computer Science sent us this image, knowing that we write often about lists, a critical tool in managing a creative life. We discovered it was from a 2009 interview with Umberto Eco in Der Spiegel about his exibition at the Louvre on the essential nature of lists. Eco…

The Art of the Hair: Creativity in Trump’s ‘Most Fantastic Feature’

In a New Yorker recently we found a short piece about Keith Allen Johnson, a sculptor from Flowery Branch, Georgia who created a bust of Donald Trump that he planned to present to Trump’s Georgia campaign office. Most notable was the artist’s acute description of Trump’s unique hairstyle:

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