We’ve just discovered photographer Maria’s Robledo’s crazy-beautiful Instagram, a trove of images that will make you SEE the everyday differently and put you right in the moment. Only Maria could have come up with this simple, curiously moving arrangements of pussy willow blossoms (which people usually just throw away once they’ve been knocked off their stem). The image shouts SPRING. It seems the perfect accompaniment to this 4-line gem of a poem by Su Tung-p’o written over a thousand years ago:
Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green – when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town. Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering – in a lifetime how many springs do we see? read more…
According to motivation scientist Heidi Grant Halvorson at at 99U“Making if-then plans to tackle your current projects, or reach your goals, is probably – without exaggerating – the most effective single thing you can do to ensure your success.”
Yikes! Sign us up! What do we have to do?
If-Then thinking works like this: You decide in advancewhen and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal and then create the statement: If X happens, then I will do Y.
“IF THIS” becomes the trigger that spurs the “THEN THAT” action.
We are constantly knocked out by the wonderful endeavors our readers are involved in, committed to, CREATED out of nothing, improvised. Here are a few from the past week:
David was interviewed by NPR. When asked what he found, out came this fab nugget:
I talked to a monk in a monastery … and I asked him, ‘You see tens of thousands of people coming through here; is there one thing that unites us all that we all have in common, whether we’re atheists or believers?’ And he said, ‘Yes, actually there is. Anyone who does this pilgrimage — or any pilgrimage — is driven by an irresistible urge to do it, and they don’t know where it comes from. And sometimes they figure it out while they’re walking, or afterward, or never.’ And, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I set out with a zillion questions in my head, and I didn’t come back with a lot of answers; I came back with more questions. But I really do think that the question is the answer. read more…
We are smitten with Tables for One, reviews of imaginary restaurants, dreamed up by designer Evan Johnston using the nom de plume A. Pontius. We are charmed by Salé, where “salt is nowhere to be found in the food, nor can you find it in a the familiar little container on the dining table. That’s because the dining table, and plates, and chairs, are actually made of salt itself.”
…and especially love Acoustia:
“We don’t serve food,” the chef and sound designer for Acoustia explained to a passerby who was baffled by the specials for the evening, “We serve sounds.”
Going to the site spurs our own fantasies of wonderfully eccentric restaurants designed to feed other senses.
But we were especially touched to discover how Tables for One came about, read more…
(Video link here will take you to exactly the right point.) We love Fred Rogers’ —the famed Mister Rogers’ — perfect, illuminating acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 24th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards.
Rogers presents a simple 10-second practice that will shift your view, and provide you with a tool you can carry around throughout the day. (It starts at 1:27 seconds, or click the video link to go right there.) read more…
(Video link here.) In a recent post at the Houdini File, David Saltman rounded up a huge trove of formal public challenges to magician/escape artist extraordinaire Harry Houdini, inviting him to escape from all manner of restraints, one more complex and seemingly-impossible than the next. According to Saltman, Houdini accepted every single challenge issued:
“every challenge a new opportunity and a path to glory, he always said ‘Yes.‘ He never backed down – he took on all comers.”
Saltman’s rigorous research has taught us that Houdini, who has long been seen as a kind of caricature, was an immensely disciplined man, who adhered to a fierce set of personal principles and practices designed to help him master his craft, and the undermining weakness that plagues most people: fear. Each challenge issued forced him to solve a whole new set of problems, to use his talents and knowledge in new ways, and almost always, to improvise. We love his principle of viewing every challenge as an opportunity. He spent his life cultivating that mindset.
We are knocked out by this variation of the beautiful sleight-of-hand Houdini would do for impromptu requests to read more…
(Video link here.) This slightly rough, illuminating 4-minute TED talk is by Philip Henson, an artist who developed permanent nerve damage that made it impossible for him to make the fine drawings he loved; his hand shaked so much he could only draw squiggly lines. When his neurologist asked “Well, why don’t you just embrace the shake?” Henson decided to try it, and began experimenting with different methods of making art that didn’t rely on being in control.
I went from having a single aproach to art to an approach to creativity that has competely changed my artistic horizon…I realized embracing a limitation can drive creativity.
I wondered if you became more creative by looking for limitations.
Gradually the embracing of limitations led Henson to explore the idea of destruction. read more…
(Video link here.) We were knocked out by this must-watch-all-of-it TED talk by Anne Cuddy, a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people from the classroom to the boardroom.
The gist: everyone we meet is influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our body language and physiology; as we ourselves are. The talk is full of evidence that “power posing” – acting as “as if” — is not about being fake, but about practicing and accepting a new way of viewing yourself, that can become yourself. The most powerful example is Cuddy’s own extraordinary story of how she put it into action, starting at 15.40.
Though watching the whole talk is essential, the transcript itself is full of useful nuggets: read more…
We found this beautiful gif on Krulwich Wonders some time ago, along with a quote that resonated deeply:
We wax, we wane. It’s the dance of life. Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade.
There’s more to the quote, but the part we related to was principle of waxing and waning, the constant dance. As we find ourselves waning, dealing with winter’s flu and needing a few days rest to replenish and heal, we are reminded that it is the deal…Nature.
We’ve posted some links, below, that we thought you might enjoy in the meantime. You’ll also find an ongoing trove of cool and useful ideas on read more…
(Video link here.) When Sue Austin got a power chair 16 years ago after an extended illness, she felt a tremendous sense of freedom — yet others looked at her as though she had lost something. ‘Limitation’, ‘fear’, ‘pity’, ‘restriction’ were the words people used when they tried to imagine using a power chair.
I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people’s responses to me.
Realizing she had internalized these responses on a core level, she repurposed her wheelchair to become an object to paint and make art with, a vehicle for transformation (in which she even deep sea dived). read more…
We were reading a packed-full-of-revelations1992 interview with poet Gary Snyder when we came across this amazing, of-the-cuff line. What a concept! The context is his answer to the question about whether he’d work as Secretary of the Interior or other political post if asked:
I’ve never thought seriously about that question. Probably not, although I am foolish enough to think that if I did do it, I’d do it fairly well, because I’m pretty single-minded. But you don’t want to be victimized by your lesser talents. One of my lesser talents is that I am a good administrator, so I really have to resist being drawn into straightening things out. The work I see for myself remains on the mythopoetic level of understanding the interface of society, ecology, and language, and I think it is valuable to keep doing that.
The gist: Don’t let a not-terribly-important skill that you happen to be good at sidetrack the real work you need to do. How wise that guy is, always was…
In case you don’t know Snyder, here’s a couple of his poems that have much to do with how any creative work gets made. read more…
(Video link here.) Photographer Tim Laman and ornithologist Ed Scholes journeyed into the remote jungles of New Guinea in search of crazy dazzling Birds of Paradise, whose wondrous plumage is the result of some wild evolutionary development.…improvisation. Says Scholes:
The Birds of Paradise represent one of those singular events of evolution that stand out, that are extraordinary, that are something that is without precedent that evolved that is so unique, so exceptional, that you are driven to say “Why?” or ”How did that happen, how did that come to be?”
Want a closer look? Check out this slide show of photos by Tim Lamen for National Geographic. We especially love these New Guinea tribesmen, who have taken the Birds of Paradise (and some of their tail feathers) as inspiration: read more…
It turns out it’s built with a javascript library called D3. As far as I can tell it’s a library that uses data to render graphics in a compu-magical sort of way. I guess the original intent was to help make charts, visualizations and other forms of information graphing.
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