In this video, artist and radio astronomer, Tom Ashcraft echoes Walt Whitman in describing the awe and wonder to be found in the everyday
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Tom Ashcraft: Make the Heart Light Up
(Video link here.) For years, Thomas Ashcraft has been documenting atmospheric phenomena —meteors, space dusts, the sun, fleeting emanations of cosmic light called sprites. Although he’s gained a lot of recognition for the remarkable sightings he’s recorded in his All Sky Observatory in New Mexico, this is the first video that explores the inside of Tom’s thinking and method, of…
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Tom Ashcraft: Artist and Sprite Hunter
When we’re a little blue, or wondering where we’re heading, we find it helpful to look beyond our own small life and get a bigger picture. And the best way we know to do that is to look at either nature, or art, or both. The person we know that combines these two transformative forces…
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15 Seconds of Gorgeous from Tom Ashcraft
Tom Ashcraft “Artisan, Naturalist, Electroreceptor and Scientific Instrument Builder” is a man who completely defies categorization. He’s got all sorts of gear that constantly monitors and records wondrous things that are going on in the sky all around us. His lovely little film is like watching the night sky out in the country…
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tom ashcraft’s sign: cures arise, remedies appear
For several years, this sign from Thomas Ashcraft‘s site Heliotown has been my browser’s home page. In all that time, I’ve never tired of it, nor become blind to it (though Tom has since made it invisible on his site, having moved on to other things). Every once in a while, a friend will be…
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Thomas Ashcraft’s Hopeful Reminder in Fearful Times
Over the years, artist-scientist Thomas Ashcraft has made artful iterations of a message that we’ve found deeply heartening. Especially so now, in this anxious time…
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How Cures And Answers Arise (Thomas Ashcraft)
Whenever we hit a period of illness or depletion, we think of this artwork our friend Thomas Ashcraft made many years ago, with its powerfully healing reminder.
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‘the rules are meant to be broken’ + thomas ashcraft
K “Rules are there to be broken” is one of our favorite operating principles. We’ve learned a HUGE amount from seeing what would happen if we “broke the rules” and did things differently from the norm. It’s a practice: questioning the rules with a big “WHY?” and then, when we have an idea, asking “Why…
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new year’s eve: ashcraft’s shooting star + ‘winter’s tale’
(Video link at Heliotown) Two days before New Year’s, we came across this passage from Mark Halprin’s Winter’s Tale, describing the moment the old year turned into new: Then the hands of the clock started to race like the tortoise and the hare, and both reached midnight at the same time. The clock struck along with…
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2-second video from thomas ashcraft (look up!)
We love this teeny, potent 2-second video from our friend Thomas Ashcraft at Heliotown, an artist/radio astronomer/”electroreceptor” who spends his time monitoring the heavens for interesting activity, like this unbelievable ‘fireball‘, a deluxe shooting star. We see Tom’s videos as reminders of things that are going on all around us as we live our lives,…
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ashcraft’s music: d-i-y recordings of sun + planets
A good deal of our inspiration comes from seeing how other people improvise to get where they need to go, build what they need, figure out solutions. We also benefit mightily from things that remind us that there is a huge, endlessly creative universe out there, and that we are a part of it. Tom…
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thomas ashcraft: artist as electroreceptor
Could the planet finally be ready for Thomas Ashcraft? He’s been called an “artist-scientist-philosopher”, “inventively creative almost beyond belief”; a “scholar-mystic“; “a romantic visionary”; “inveterate experimenter, artist and extrapolator”; none of these words do him justice. I’ve known him for many years and followed his work closely, so I was happy to hear a profile…
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New Year’s Resolutions: Let’s NOT ‘Budget for New Management’
In our long life, we’ve learned a great deal about New Years resolutions from abandoning them so many times that we finally got with the fact that they generally didn’t work. We relate mightily to this wise, funny little video we found in Instagram…
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Make Your Own Fire Cider for Well-Being, Cocktails, Cooking
We learned a lot from ‘How to Create Your Own Herbal Tinctures’, including Jade Mark’s compelling recipe for Fire Cider.
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When Normal Equals Perfect
Our readers know Sally has been occupied lately with the serious illness of a close friend – namely, myself. Now recuperating, we’ve realized something about perfection: it does not mean being super-human or doing everything exactly right. It simply means means being normal. This revelation was amplified by our friend Thomas Ashcraft, a remarkable artist/science.
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yayoi kusama’s art-medicine
In The Art of the Flame-Out, Carl Swanson writes about visionary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s return to the New York Art scene after 40 years in a mental-hospital exile. But whatever you make of her retreat into a psych ward, her mantra was always “self-obliteration”—to lose herself in the work, or to the work, to save herself.…
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name this nyc raptor: kestrel or hawk owl?
A couple of days ago I found a raptor perched on my terrace rail, right in the middle of Harlem in New York City. I took it to be an owl and posted it on ‘the improvised life’s Facebook page. Since then, a small controversy has been raging, as to whether it is a Hawk…
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‘leap and the net will appear’…
In response to our many LEAP photos, and the recent one of a woman wading in (a slow leap) – a definite obsession – reader Maia Tabet emailed us this adage…with her tiny comment. It’s perfect – charmingly old-fashioned, almost children’s rhyme-ish – and speaks to the practice we work to cultivate, of having faith…
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embracing the blank canvas
This photo of artist Lucio Fontana reminded us how central that concept of “blank canvas” is to ‘the improvised life’. Getting up in the morning, the day ahead is our first blank canvas. Each post we write starts as one as well: blank space that is pure potential; we often don’t know where it will go,…
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linen apron as improvised table cloth
When Ellen Silverman was over photographing Prunes in Armagnac for our holiday food gift post, we were hunting through our collection of tablecloths to use as a background. Nothing seemed right. It was the end of the day and the light was waning. In desperation, she threw a big linen apron of Sally’s onto the…
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