Blogging is its own kind of neighborhood. You share the road, the same convenience store, snowstorms and sports teams. When someone suddenly moves away and leaves no forwarding address, it’s like you lost something that didn’t really belong to you but felt like it did. So here’s celebrating the return of a former denizen of […]
Wisdom
Seasonal Surrender
Street view, January 2009 I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most […]
- Aesthetics
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Winnicottisms
In a remembrance of the writer Harold Pinter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (and posted on Slow Painting), Charles McNulty included a memorable quote by D. W. Winnicott: But for all his vehemence and posturing, Pinter was too gifted with words and too astute a critic to be dismissed as an ideological crank. […]
- Uncategorized
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Report from the North
It’s hard to not be cynical when the talking heads announce that the US economy is “officially” in a recession and has been since December 2007. The absurdity of not being able to name what everybody knew until a year after the fact is one more piece of what feels like the cold-blooded machinations of […]
A New Flavor of Slow
Barbara Ganley, near her home in Weybridge, Vt., thinks of blogging as a meditative art form. The article below from the Sunday New York Times caught my attention immediately. Slow blogging. But of course! As aligned as my blogging efforts have been with the relatively new term “slow”, I must admit I had not heard […]
Birds Circling
Clouds Gathering It seemed the kind of life we wanted. Wild strawberries and cream in the morning. Sunlight in every room. The two of us walking by the sea naked. Some evenings, however, we found ourselves Unsure of what comes next. Like tragic actors in a theater on fire, With birds circling over our heads, […]
- Art Making
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Bellying Up
Do not quit. You see, the most constant state of an artist is uncertainty. You must face confusion, self-questioning, dilemma. Only amateurs are confident . . . be prepared to live with the fear of failure all your life. –William Ormond Mitchell The toughest patch of uncertainty in this artist’s life is usually those few […]
Schooled by Sand
I just returned from three days in Maine. My friend Katie is part of a family that has been going to the same hidden spot–Maine’s largest stretch of undeveloped shoreline–for four generations, and it is through her that I came to know and love this exquisitely unpopulated, shimmeringly pristine beach. Everything here revolves around the […]
Saints and Ordinary Folks
This is an exquisite truth: Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start. Inquiring about a difference is like asking to borrow string when you’ve got a good strong rope. Every Dharma is known in the heart. After a rain, the mountain colors intensify. Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s […]
- Philosophy
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Sky Dancer
When I was in India in August, I became friends with a wonderful woman. Kristin Brudevold is a graduate of Naropa Institute and a walking resource of all things Buddhist. Our conversations as we trekked through the mountains of Ladakh were very rich and provocative. One of Kristin’s projects before leaving Naropa was to research […]