inspiration Archives - Page 3 of 37

Ram Dass on ‘Allowing’ + Turning People Into Trees

Psychologist, yogi, spiritual teacher Ram Dass’ devised a simple method for softening judgments of the people around us.

A Brilliant Concrete Amphitheater + Maria Lassnig’s Body Awareness

We love seeing two of our favorite materials — chairs and concrete — married into the stunning amphitheater designed by artist Armand Pierre Fernandez for Milan’s Parco Sempione, Milan in 1973. Embedded into the concrete steps are the personalities that chairs inevitably evoke, each seat curiously special and intentional. It made us think of artist Maria Lassnig’s view of chairs…

Alex Katz Flings Us Into The Immediate Present

We recently returned to the Guggenheim Museum with a singular purpose: to revisit the handful of remarkable late paintings artist Alex Katz made of trees, lake, night. Those are really not the subject. He paints the sensation of seeing.

A Simple Shift of ‘Should’ Sparks Possibility Thinking

How many times have we heard the exhortation: ‘Don’t ‘should’ on yourself.’? Sometimes that’s easier said that done. We have some pretty fierce ‘shoulds’ in our heads that carry the weight of obligation and duty, and a narrow view of choices. Then we tried a simple shift.

For Yoko Ono on Her 90th Birthday

As we’ve read tributes in celebration of Yoko Ono’s 90th birthday, we’ve been thinking about her too and of the many amazing things she has put into the world. She has lived through so much and never stopped making her art, speaking up, working to antidote the violence of our age. The mindshifts her work catalyzes remain refreshing, heartening, helpful. Here are a few of our favorites:

Alan Watts Puts Us In Our Place

When a friend threw THIS over our transom, we felt instantly better. Clarifying, heartening, it pulled us out of our heads into just the right place.

Rustic White Bean Ragout with Embellishments To Satisfy Various Diets and Hungers

Entertaining these days often means being challenged with feeding a mix of carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, and people with specific prohibitions who can not eat something or other. Then I fall back on a strategy I devised years ago to feed a crowd.

Improvised Virus Protection + Personal Phone Booth

The strange brilliance of ordinary humans heartens us daily. High on the list is this remarkable invention by a woman traveler passing through a busy airport in the time of high virus threat.

Marsha Linehan on Building a Life Worth Living

We got interested in psychotherapist Marsha Linehan after a reader told us that it was she who first used the Buddhist concept of Radical Acceptance as a therapeutic tool in psychotherapy. It was a groundbreaking approach, as were the treatments she pioneered for patients who were previously written off as hopeless. The story of how she developed it — as a young woman she had been one of those “impossible” patients — is a marvel of resourcefulness and creativity.

Bathroom ‘Tile Painting’ Is an Unexpected Liberation

Found at Lucinda Chambers instagram: Permission to NOT tile an entire bathroom wall, but just selected parts. Beautiful! As is her inspiration…

Head, Heart (For Cara de Silva)

Reeling from the news that our friend Cara de Silva had passed away, we cast about for solace for ourselves and for her close friends whom we knew were grief-struck, missing their daily conversations with her. Into our hands jumped Maira Kalman’s wonderful book “My Favorite Things”, opening to this by Lydia Davis…

More Reasons for Optimism in 2023: Possibility Thinking Made Tangible

All year long, Andrew Ross Sorkin has diligently and carefully reported on the wild and often dispiriting going- on in world through an financial and economic lens. We were heartened by his recent round-up of the most promising developments of the year, possibility-thinking made tangible.

I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

Susan Sontag

Reason for Optimism in 2023: The Universe In Verse on “What is Life?”

The perfect accompaniment to the reflective week between Christmas and New Years is the Universe in Verse, an event masterminded by The Marginalian’s Maria Popova, to explore the question “What is Life?” through science and poetry. A gathering of extraordinary humans “celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling”. It offers a mightily hopeful view.

Synchronicity in the Edo, and Now

Soon after David Saltman called to read us 6 perfect words by Basho, the great Edo period poet, we stumbled on this image by Nahasawa Rosetsu, a painter from from the same period.

Wishing You Iridescent Readiness!

Looking out at the park across the way, the wild rain and wind made the Christmas tree in the distance appear to sparkle with a kind of fiery iridescence…It reminded us of the unexpected magic that appears daily, even in difficult times, and what we need to experience it.

Escaping Prison Through The Natural World (Merete Mueller)

Blue Room is a beauty of a New York Times video editorial by filmmaker Merete Mueller. It shows incarcerated men and women watching nature videos on loop, in a mental health experiment to see how seeing nature impacts their experience of isolation and the relentlessly bleak environments in which they must live. Its quietly powerful 11 minutes took us way beyond its subject.

Why I Can’t NOT Write about Persimmons Every Year

There are good reasons I cannot NOT write about persimmons every winter. I love all the ways that they seem defiant, wild, beyond my control… I want others to find their way to the rare experience they offer.

BIG Bedside Tables Via Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Donald Judd

They say that that if we want to get a good night’s sleep, our bedroom needs to be dedicated only to that and love-making and nothing that might stimulate thinking, even reading. But stumbling on photos of several artists in bed made us realize that we love, and miss, the idea of bed as relaxing, creative outpost and retreat outfitted with what we need to feed our heads and fuel creativity. That got us thinking about their use of big bedside tables…

‘Trees are Sanctuaries’: Hermann Hesse’s Writing and Watercolors

A snippet of a Hermann Hesse quote about trees sent us hunting for the whole thing. We stumbled on “Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings”, a little gem of a book: thirty of Hesse’s watercolors with his essays and poetry about trees, for him, a symbol of transcendence and rebirth.

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