My admiration for Diane Ackerman dates from my first encounter with her unique blend of earthy spiritualism and a poetic sense of the material world. A Natural History of the Senses was published in 1993, and I have been shadowing her ever since. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, writer Paul West. […]
Wisdom
Earnings
My sister in Fairfax County, Virginia has 30 inches of snow outside her door. My son in Arlington hasn’t been to his office for a week. Maureen, blogger/poet extraordinaire who also lives in Arlington, has been basking in her snowboundedness, digging into the stacks of compelling books that are duly displayed on every floor of […]
The Bottom Line on Happiness
Double happiness (Chinese). I like the concept, but where does it end—gazillion billion trillion? Maybe best not to get started on multiples… Amy Bloom is a terrific writer. Her latest book, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, was published last month. Therapist and storyteller, Bloom is in a unique position to write about our […]
- Aesthetics
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Inner and Outer
The Crossing, video/sound installation by Bill Viola (Photo: Kira Perov) One of the added pleasures of the MOCA Los Angeles show (reference to this is in the blog below) was the quotes from artists that accompanied their works. Many are worth sharing and are compelling even without the specific context of the work on display. […]
In the Hive, and Out
Human beings are in some ways like bees. We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives. Nicholas Kristof included this quote from Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis in his recent column in the New York Times. Entitled “Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex […]
Keeping The Edge On
Snow, and part of a shoe If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in […]
- Enlightenment
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Peace is Only a Thought Away: Jill Bolte Taylor
Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You see a book on a friend’s bedstand. Even though there is big stack (just like your bedstand at home), that one book jumps out at you. Then a week later someone mentions that same book to you, out of the blue and with no prompting. Another few weeks pass […]
Other Laws
Spiral carvings on Long Meg, a menhir that sits outside the Long Meg and her Daughters stone circle in Cumbria Here are a few more thoughts that percolated through me during my stay in the Lake District. The spiritual meaning of art belongs to the realm of the subjective or superconscious mind. Only when the […]
Self Sowing
The landscape in the Lakes, near Hesket Newmarket One of the reasons I have made repeated visits to the Lake District in England is because the land feels porous. It is as if the barriers are fluid and the membrane between earthness and creatureness has been rubbed into a soft and pliant translucence. Being in […]
Flavors of the Ineffable
Winner of the “best conversation between an artist and his/her son or daughter”: My friend George is an artist whose work ranges from representational painting to highly conceptual installation work. He’s extremely facile, but sometimes that range of output can leave his various audiences a bit confused. After his new body of work was greeted […]