The Guesthouse This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may […]
Poetry
- Art/Language
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Les Murray, Bush Bard
I’m still pawing through a summer’s worth of half read New Yorker magazines. (My friend Lesli calls this perpetual battle with The Stack as the “tyranny of the unread”.) And to follow on yesterday’s posting that included an excerpt from an interview with poet/essayist Dan Chiasson, I found a June issue with an effervescent and […]
Green Valleys
Sweet stars, I’ll ask a softer question: Moon attend me to the end. I’m here alone. The feeling that one is on the edge of many things: that there are many worlds from which we are separated by only a film; that a flick of the wrist, a turn of the body another way will […]
Mabou Mines
Yet another reason to be in New York sometime in the next week, more specifically Miller’s Launch, a forgotten corner of Staten Island. Mabou Mines, a theatre company that has been thrilling my sensibilities for 30 years, has done it again and stepped way outside the expected. This time it is a new production from […]
Married to Amazement, with the World in Her Arms
When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the […]
Something of the Hermit
There is something of the hermit about my kind of art making. I spend long hours alone in my studio. Sometimes I spend the entire day there without lifting a brush, just looking. There’s lots and lots of just looking. There is also something of the hermet when we engage with grief or sorrow. I’m […]
Grateful for Whoever Comes
The Guesthouse This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may […]
A Thousand Brilliant Lies
I’m now in the last lap of preparing for my show that opens in Provincetown on July 20th. The last few weeks have been a kind of silence retreat, intensity without a spoken language component. And something does shift for me when visual language becomes the dominant modality for an extended period of time. When […]
Wisdom from Hafiz
Tripping over Joy What is the difference Between your experience of Existence And that of a saint? The saint knows That the spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And Bursting out in […]
Descent, and Descent
The Death of the Painter At the end of his life he had money and attention, and certain towns were known in connection to his name. He was fastidious, and wore a tie, was photographed with brushes, with a bird. under the subtropical sky he forgave the things long done. He hardly saw his children, […]