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…
Question: When you wake up do you feel a sense of loss when you realize what happened to your legs?
Of course. But I have a different perspective for what my legs are now. Now they’re just tools, you know? If I still had my legs, I would be in line for a battalion command, and instead I’m flying a desk.
We were mulling Duckworth’s ability to shift her view in the face of daunting obstacles and find a way around them – to be SO resilient – when, as often happens, we found a similar idea resonating in our Inbox. A reader sent us this astonishing BBCvideo of Jessica Cox, who, born without arms, lives fully and richly —even flying a plane— using her feet as hands.
Both Duckworth and Cox figured out how to fly, despite all obstacles. read more…
A friend of a friend who happens to be a therapist made this very wise statement in reference to his very long and loving marriage. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve come to find this philosophy both liberating and enabling of a great deal of joy.
It was perhaps the biggest lesson our perfectionist-selves learned during last year’s renovation of ‘the improvised life’s Laboratory. In the heat of the fray, with a huge to-do list and limited budget, we found ourselves letting go of a lot of our notions of was “right” or “supposed to be” and made peace with the solutions at hand…which, in fact, have proven to be just SWELL. Some of the details may be a bit “off”, but we got the most important parts of what we wanted: a lovely luminous space that is a pleasure to be in. And that allowed us to not get hung up agonizing over what was wrong, but to revel in what is right…and move on to other things we really wanted to put our attention on.
“Sometimes ‘good enough’ is fabulous.” We’d never heard it put quite so perfectly.
In addition to helping out at ‘the improvised life’ every week, Dese’Rae L. Stage works two other jobs to support the website she started a couple of years ago. Live Through This is a collection of portraits and stories of suicide attempt survivors, as told by those survivors. The site is meant to give voice to the very taboo subject of suicide and in doing so, save lives. Says suicide prevention advocate and interviewee Kevin Hines:
…No person in a fight for their life is alone. There are millions of people out there fighting just as you are. Find that network. Talk about the issues.
Dese’Rae has created a Kickstarter to fund her travels across the country interviewing and photographing suicide survivors, to expand the presence and reach of Live Through This. read more…
When we walk through park or woods, we secretly imagine how we would surive there if we had to. What kind of shelter would we devise with what is there? It’s kid thinking, really: of forts and snug secret places, combined with our love of shelters of all kinds. Artist Elle Davies made that fantasy real in The Dwellings, a series of photographs of structures created “using a variety of traditional and improvised building techniques… from materials gathered from the forest floor.”
Our friend John Wellington is an artist whose controversial work has been called “classical, claustrophobic, fetishistic, beautiful, vulgar, architectural, humorous, morbid, decorative, and sexual.” He renders deeply personal imagery using Old Master techniques in unique ways and teaches his methods at the New York Academy of Art where he is an Adjunct Professor, and at his Manhattan studio.
For more than thirty years John created, copied, ruminated, lamented, critiqued, elucidated, explored and most importantly, drawn in sketchbooks. Recently, he created IDOLS DEMONS SAINTS, an iBook for iPads based on his sketchbooks. It is a kind of visual journal and art manual that offers insight into John’s creative process and the complex Old Master techniques he uses, from sketch to finished work.
IDOLS DEMONS SAINTS interests us for many reasons. First, we’ve learned a great deal from being able to see John’s process of painting; even though we are not painters, understanding his thinking helps us in our own work. The first page of the sketchbook, for example, lists principles useful in any creative endeavor.
Bill and Julie got married on Valentine’s Day in 1943, 70 years ago today. He was a GI who had managed to wangle a weekend pass to marry his childhood sweetheart. From the get-go,their marriage was an improv.
“We didn’t have a minyan, the minimum of ten people required for a Jewish wedding,” Julie recalls. ”So his brother went to the local movie theater and rousted ten guys out of the balcony and promised them dinner if they’d come. For years afterward, perfect strangers would come up to us on the street and say,‘Hey, I was at your wedding!’”
Today, Bill is 95, Julie will be 90, and they’re still in love. read more…
We know quite a few people who are making major life changes these days, living with the question of what to do next, waiting for the path to become clear. So we were really struck, and curiously heartened, by this series of images by photographer Ellie Davies… read more…
This sketch made by Henri Matisse January 7, 1940 is the first of thirteen he did in preparation for a wondrous painting The Dream completed in September 1940. Scroll down to see great artist’s process…as the painting emerges… read more…
Having an increasingly difficult time remembering things (and SO much to remember), we were very interested to read the Guardian’s How I learned a language in 22 hours about Joshua Foer‘s successfully learning an obscure language using a learning website called Memrise. Memrise bases their language courses on three essential principles, excerpted here from the very long and interesing piece:
The first is what’s known as elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you’ll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind’s eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it’ll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote.
One of the best-demonstrated principles of memory read more…
“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 not?” and trying it out.
Free from the weight of academic study and art history, so-called “outsider artists” operate with a certain cachet: they create in whatever form and with whatever method that moves them. Trained artists may claim to do the same, but they can become jet-setting sensations by breaking rules. When outsiders break rules, they do it without knowing that rules exist.
(Video link here.) A friend sent us this beautiful video of Ray Bethell, a multi sport-kite flyer from Canada of unknown age (we hear he’s in his 80′s):
His skin is like leather as he normally flies with his shirt off. He is deaf, so when he flies people hold their hands up and wave them for applause. He flies 2 with his hands and the 3rd one is attached to his waist. He performs at the Washington State International Kite Festival every year.
We had to know more.The bio on Bethell’s website tells the story of a self-taught man who figured out what he needed to know and broke new ground in kite-flying: read more…
Totally astonishing. Have no idea how to use. Polar opposite from chairs made of dowels. Maybe you could compare and contrast somehow? Every kid should see this: What math and science and engineering can accomplish. Long, but do watch to the end.
The video IS long but mesmerizing to watch. You can jump in anywhere and see something amazing, including a magical vicarious experience of zero gravity and the extraordinary technology of the space station. Williams’ clear enjoyment and ease with the whole experience is curiously uplifting (and dig that zero gravity hair!) read more…
Our friends Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton, creators of the wonderful Canal House cookbook series, have a friend in the appliance business who keeps offering to get them a big new stove for their kitchen studio. NO, they keep saying, We love our little side-by-side stoves!
Every great dish Melissa and Christopher come up with is cooked on their two vin-ordinaire gas stoves, which makes for eight burners and two ovens. And those very same plain little stoves appear in photographs of their unselfconsciously stylish, comfortable kitchen.
Which begs the question: What kind of stove will really help you to cook happily and easily? The answer, we’ve found, is read more…
(Video link here.) While walking in a nearby park one frigid day, I noticed that a sheer wall of ice had formed on the bedrock that rises up to make Mount Morris in New York City’s Harlem. It appeared to be alive. When I looked closely I saw its shimmering movement was due to water sliding down the stone face behind the ice, a rather astonishing “found” kinetic sculpture. (It’s a whole other experience with sound than without.)
This kind of thing happens all the time in the park, a hunk of nature in New York City. Ephemeral artworks appear and disappear all the time. All you have to do is look.read more…
, we heard that our friend Tom Ashcraft’s artwork was chosen to be in the illustrious 
