Photo: Garry Knight I don’t start my day thinking, “I need some words to lift my spirits and help me see the circumstances of life differently.” After all, with just about everyone sequestered inside and living through their own experience of quarantine, opinions about how to live are plentiful. It is no surprise we are […]
Wisdom
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Solitude and Surprise. Gotta Have Both.
A solitary figure walking through an empty landscape. That feels like a good description of what this month has felt like to me. (My daughter Kellin, walking the beach at Duxbury a few years ago) Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there […]
Staying in the Fluid
Reflections of Commonwealth Avenue on a Boston University poster with a life of its own Discovering the selfless nature doesn’t have a monumental “Eureka!” quality. It is more like being continually perplexed, the way we feel when we’re looking for the car keys we’re so sure are in our pocket, or when the supermarket’s being […]
Marquezania
García Márquez in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2003. Photograph: Andres Reyes/AP
Nobel prize winning author and father of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez, passed away on Thursday at the age of 87.
His breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published in 1967. The book has sold 50 million copies in 25 languages. That novel was a revelation to me then, and my respect for him never wavered.
The imaginative power of his writing was stunning, and that otherworldliness of his storytelling has impacted me and my approach to my visual work all these many years. I had to take a moment here to honor and remember this extraordinary man and his work.
Quotes by him are in abundance since his death, but here are a few of my favorites:
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude.
But if they had learned anything together it was that wisdom arrives when it’s no longer useful.
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
There is always something left to love.
Leaving the Path at Any Moment
John Cage and collaborator/partner Merce Cunningham Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson has been my mainstay for the last several weeks. Every page has now been marked and annotated, leafed through many times. This is an unforgettable, inspiring, deeply moving book about a towering […]
Weil and Hesse
Simone Weil Eva Hesse The writer Simone Weil died in 1943 at the age of 34. In spite of her short life, her legacy is a rich one, spanning a variety of métiers including philosophy, Christianity, theology, social justice, mysticism. And even though her life’s work was from her point of view of a god-centered […]
Confounding Permanence
Discovering the selfless nature doesn’t have a monumental “Eureka!” quality. It is more like being continually perplexed, the way we feel when we’re looking for the car keys we’re so sure are in our pocket, or when the supermarket’s being renovated and what we need has moved to a different aisle each time we go […]
Wimanian Wisdom
Christian Wiman I wasn’t familiar with the poet Christian Wiman before watching his interview with Bill Moyers. But his tone in that conversation—the comfort with the “don’t know” mind, a willingness to drop into the interior landscape in spite of many prevailing cultural trends that favor distance and detachment, a fearlessness in facing up to […]
Guston as Hafiz
From the tomb of Hafiz at Shiraz, Iran Gurus and teachers. Having one is a given in most spiritual paths, common in many cultures and certain professions. But because I was never a good candidate for the disciple path (according to my mother, my resistance to authority was well developed at three years old), I […]
Moments of Being
Cawdra 1, from a new series Maureen Dowd, the waspishly wicked op ed writer at the New York Times, has periodic moments of reverie between her excoriating defamations of politicians. In a column that appeared in December, she touched on a theme that has been a steady leitmotif of this blog: silence. As fiendish little […]