The past few mornings, our reading has been Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews with the poet Allen Ginsberg. Most of the interviews are very long, except one It asked a single question about how to balance working for obvious fortune and the creative life, concerns that resonate with just about everyone we know. Ginsberg’s answer totally blew us away. (We recommend…
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This lovely image and commentary Girl Knew York reminded us of the practice of applying “random kindness” not only to others but to ourselves, and Stephen Levine’s principle of “soft eyes”.
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We often write signs that say LOOK UP to remind ourselves to get our heads out of whatever we’re doing and look around. We also practice looking DOWN, and had been meaning to write about our wonderful discoveries doing just that on our daily park rambles, when Dutch artist Saskia de Brauw beat us to the punch.
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Current self-help wisdom asserts that ‘doing a geographic’ to solve your life dilemmas is a Very Bad Move. Blowing Dodge is no answer, they say. Well, I suggest common wisdom could be dead wrong.
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When we wrote about navigating loss during th holidays, 80+-year-old skydiver Karrolyn Belkis pointed out something we hadn’t thought of: we feel loss daily. Things we love disappear, whether it be a person, an ability we had, a familiar place, a tree, a friend…something we rely on broke or fell apart or got lost. In answer to…
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Loss is something that is rarely mentioned during the holiday season when everything is supposed to be just GREAT with little room for less-than-happy emotions. Yet I know a lot of people who are navigating loss and grief from events of the past year. What do you do when you are shaken by the passing of someone —or several people — you loved,…
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Yoko Ono‘s swell one-word bit of advice is what we are taking the time off to do. We’ll be back in a week. While we’re gone, we invite you to forage our vast archive.
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Last weekend, we walked around Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, on the homestretch of the New York City Marathon, to look at the signs local school kids had hung up to cheer tired runners on to the finish line. We found an astonishing one that summed up the whole thing.
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(Video link here) At Improvised life, we often preach saying YES….but here’s the catch: Sometimes saying yes to what’s right for us also means saying no to things we feel obligated to do…things we may do because of some old-fashioned guilt, or because others are making us feel like we “have to”. In a recent talk…
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(Video link here.) At Things Organized Neatly, a website about exactly THAT, we found this terrific except from Ten Bullets, artist Tom Sachs‘ essential principles — “his code” — for employees working in his studio. Here he outlines something he called “knolling”, an action we’ve always done but never had a word for. Sachs’ interpretation is…
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I spend a lot of time trying things and…failing. Hmmm. Is failing even the right word? I spend a lot of times trying things and having them not go as expected.
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At illustrator Monica Ramos‘ website, we stumbled on a section called 🙁 “Sometimes I want to fall off the face of the Earth” A solo show about about feeling overwhelmed and lost. Overwhelmed and lost is a feeling we know well, and hear about frequently from friends. Ramos’ image vividly describes the dual nature of…
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After a very busy LAST week, we let a few things slide over the weekend, and they will, no doubt, pile onto Monday’s to-do list, which will make it…daunting.
What to do?
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(Video link here.) As a farewell to its audience after 11 years of programming, CBS’s Wire Tap radio show made a video of people giving advice to their younger counterparts. It’s worth watching through to the very end. We love:
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When my 5-year-old-laptop bailed on me, I reacted like any strong independent woman with a brain and an alarm clock; I handed it off to my husband and said “This is broken, please fix it”. Seriously. Being the feminist my husband is, he said NO…….
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For us, this image of Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet for his wife Lucille at the Sphinx during their trip to Egypt in 1961 describes “sublime”. It reminded us of that feeling when everything is rich with pleasure, without worries, fine.
But what about those times when things turn in a moment and bad things happen? Armstrong had a powerful answer .
Max Richter’s 8-hour lullaby, Sleep (on beds in the concert hall) reminded me of how many people have difficulty sleeping. I learned how to sleep the hard way, by NOT understanding my body’s needs, and thinking that I could defy them because there was no immediately adverse effect. When my bad habits caught up with me, I had to re-learn how to sleep.
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We were wondering how we might illustrate the late centenarian ceramic artist Beatrice Wood’s extraordinary statement: “My life is full of mistakes. They’re like pebbles that make a good road” . Then we came upon the work of artist Richard Long, who for decades has made remarkable path works that seem to echo Wood’s words…
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Along with the wisdom of the MANY books we spent leisurely, thoughtful time with during our recent two week hiatus, THIS sign is among the most transformative things we read:
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We found this wondrous sign at Ellen Silverman’s Instagram. She stood at the chaotic corner of Broadway and 94th Street and made it into a cosmic little film. Check it out here (we couldn’t make the embed code work). A perfect reminder as we ponder the many ideas we have and find and the very…
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