Over 9 years at dawn, Cosmo Sheldrake carried recording gear, laptop, and sometimes a keybord into fields and woods to make music in collaboration endangered birds. The result is his new album Wake Up Calls; it is both charming and illuminating…
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S.B. Dworski reflects on the nature of being “siloed”, which most of the world is grappling with, and a new way to think about it.
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We take a walk daily because it never fails to refresh our thinking, change our view of things, calm us. Especially, in these most stressful times. It is perhaps our most powerful medicine. Walking, we find our mind shifting, ideas sparking, problems beginning to yield in ways we never expect. Rilke nailed it in A Walk:…
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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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In this mesmerizing little film, Pierre Soulages slowly works black pigment to create different effects of light. He describes the very personal conversation at the heart of his luminous black paintings.
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This sublime short film is about “saxophone colossus” Sonny Rollins’ two-year musical sabbatical playing on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge and what he found there.
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In his beautiful kinetic choreographies of pendulums, artist William Forsythe draws our awareness to ways we negotiate and choreograph our paths…
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In posts and emails, I shared the questions fueling Improvised Life’s new architecture and many changes. Among the deeply affirming messages I received from readers, the most interesting was from long-time contributor Susan Dworski. She wrote of the contagious aspect of this sea change.
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On Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi’s mesmerizing YouTube channel. she doesn’t speak and there are no how tos or manic hosts,. Instead she evokes a quiet, very pastoral, very ancient way of life whose effect is deeply soothing.
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This short video compiles some very surprising answers to On Being’s Krista Tippet’s favorite interview question. It evokes “a very fertile place in everybody’s imaginations, whatever their story is…full of questions and searching and softness.” It’s a wonderful question to ask ourselves…
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We know quite a few people who are making major life changes these days, living with the question of what to do next, waiting for the path to become clear. What’s the mindset to embrace in limbo: all questions, few clues, no answers?
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The impetus for Dr. John Kitchen’s radical life change into the skater Slomo was the answer a very old man gave him when he asked, “What is the secret to living so long?”
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At his instagram, photographer Alex Soth posted a beautiful little video of a rock rolling down a path, an homage to artist Richard Long’s work, who mightily inspired an interesting view…
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For decades nintey-year-old artist Yayoi Kusama has embraced the culturally taboo practices of obsession and accumulation, using them as a means of transformation and healing. Her remarkable “art medicine” has been her balm for mental illness.
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When a friend sent us VENN diagrams of the Japanese concept of Ikigai last week, we found we couldn’t get its big fat question out of our mind.
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With the release of Vol. 14 of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg series, Columbia Records released a video of the first take Dylan recorded of his song “If You See Her, Say Hello” with a unique twist, for unexpected intimacy and insight.
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When we stumbled on this image by the great Christoph Niemann at #abstractsunday, we thought: OMG, look at that fabulous doorway. What a vision! How can we get ourselves to imagine more expansively? And that got us thinking about the creative vision and where ideas come from.
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Henri Matisse likened his state of mind when making art “close to that of prayer. So we’re viewing each one of these 13 ravishing sketches in preparation for painting The Dream as a sort of prayer…
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In this little gem of a video, artist Francis Alys transforms our view of the harsh, dull, strangely monochrome landscape of Mosul, Iraq, where he was embedded with American soldiers. We had not seen the colors in that landscape until Alys showed us, and the possibility of hidden colors is now reverberating in our daily…
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When we’ve worked hard taking care of something and feel there is still more we should do, leaving us restless and worried, we employ this 10-word reality check, learned from a psychotherapist friend.
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