Studio view, South Boston Art making is, for me, a zone of inchoate nonlinearity, one that does not have the Wallace Stevensish delineations* to mark direction or any measure of “progress” (a word that, these days in particular, seems to always need to wear a pair of quotes.) Mostly I am thankful for having worked […]
Wisdom
Both/And, With a Bit of Pure Paralyzed
Winter view looking out from my friend Anne’s house in Carson New Mexico. The chair feels inhabited, and yet not. To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. –Lao Tzu And what do you get when you are in search of both? Martha Beck, a fan of the mangled […]
- Aesthetics
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A Bit More
March, a month to think about what green means A few follow ons to earlier posts… *** One more thought on Shenk’s book about genius…A quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. *** A few more places online where you […]
Practice, With Frequent Failures
Research continues in a pursuit of the how, why and where of who we are. A new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, by David Shenk is reviewed by Annie Murphy Paul in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. And for […]
Sages of Silence and Fear
A painter and a poet. Martin and Stafford have been (and continue to be) elemental influences on me. *** Agnes Martin (Photo: Charles R. Rushton) To discover the conscious mind in a world where intellect is held to be valuable requires solitude, quite a lot of solitude. We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. […]
The Sound of Silence
View of the desert sky, this one in the American Southwest I am having an ongoing attraction to the concept of silence, of what happens when you choose to move into the spaces that exist without language, without the need to speak. I’ve written about this here on and off for months, and the attraction […]
Hangin’ with Tom
Who knew that Tom Robbins would keep surfacing as a personal wisdom source? These things happen, and when you least expect it. (Another great Robbins quote is here.) Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be […]
Willing
Simplicity and complexity: A piece hanging on the wall at sculptor Paula Castillo’s studio in Santa Fe. The two entries below, a poem by Moramarco and a quote by Tom Robbins, were included in two separate posts on my favorite random access wisdom source, Whiskey River. But when I landed on the site this morning […]
Entropy and the Super-Growth of Consciousness
A dear friend who is also a neighbor announced quite unexpectedly last night that he had decided to sell his beautiful new condo and move into a home built in the mid-1800s 20 miles away. “Be happy for me!” he pleaded, seeing the anticipated loss of his frequent visits painted plainly on my face. Of […]
Life That Doesn’t Lie Flat
Galactic beach wood, from Half Moon Bay We fall into a story about enlightenment—about life, in fact—and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but […]