We read straight H is for Hawk straight through, riveted by Helen McDonald’s tale of grappling with numbing grief by training a fierce goshawk, as gripping and unusual a tale of personal transformation as we have read. We find ourselves returning to McDonald’s superb insights frequently, deeply heartened by their beauty and perspective.
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For a bath person, it is heaven to luxuriate with whatever you need close at hand: cocktail, herb tea, iPad, novel… A bath board that rests across the tub makes for a perfect surface to rest things on. Recently, we saw an easy-to-make iteration that David Sanford made for a friend…
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Textile designer Stine Linneman had some old cones of yarn lying around her studio and wondered “What would happen if …I sliced them straight across?” The result is not simply a wondrous surprise…
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We recently learned a powerful practice from artist/poet/humanitarian Ginny Jordan. Acutely aware of how precious time is, Ginny found a way to quickly discern what is truly meaningful amid the endless time-consuming activities of modern life. Here’s how she describes it:
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Spotted on Christoph Niemann’s Instagram #AbstractSunday: Beach ON/Beach OFF, a strangely inspired sand creation. It echoes our psyche: it’s time for Beach ON and to get a small hunk of summer and rest. We’ll be back just after Labor Day. In the meantime, you’ll find more inspired sand as art material here and here and here and 4,000 illuminating paths…
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“One of my life’s quests has been to eat as many flowers as possible” wrote Dina Falconi in the wonderful Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. Here’s Dina’s list of late summer flowers and essential advice for using flowers in your cooking and her sensational Leaf & Flower Custard Ice Cream Master Recipe.
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When we stumbled on an image of the polka-dot cloth-wrapped trees in Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary Ascension of the Polka Dots on the Trees, we felt instant joy and astonishment and were reminded once again of Kusama’s use of art as her own medicine. It got us thinking about vocations, passions, practices, arts that actually help us to live in the world.
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We love this very practical, very stylish idea from Oink Studio: a plywood-lined niche set in a in sheetrock wall. Baltic Birch’s stripey uniform plies make for a pleasing natural edge that gives a crisp furniture feel with an organic edge. Here’s what you need to know…
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In this astonishing simulation, Nasa tracks the flow of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide across the planet over the course of a year and shows just how much trees clean the air. It increased our awareness of how essential trees are, beyond their beauty, shade and energy. And what we can easily do to increase earth’s tree population.
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So much of what I see on the web are strategies for planning and controlling your life, it was a huge relief to read Kottke’s recent piece about how it can be better NOT to have goals.
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Legendary martial artist Bruce Lee always carried a small notebook in which he wrote down quotes, affirmations, appearances, poetry, philosophical ideas and his personal practices for training his mind and spirit NOT just his physical skill. Take a look.
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When Ellen Silverman came by, she asked for some EV olive oil for her breakfast of yogurt, berries and nuts. It was incredibly delicious and deepened the flavors dramatically. It was the first time I had olive oil on breakfast yogurt, but not the first time I had olive oil as a sweet.
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Every now and again, a reader writes something so perfect, it can be a post unto itself.
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We’ve written about all sorts of practical things made out of copper pipe and tubing from room dividers to tables.The copper lighting we’ve posted has been simple, with one or two bends NOT the wonderfully freeform tangles of artist Anna Fasshauer’s light sculptures. Which seem, possibly, diy-able.
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Ellen Silverman spotted this sign in tiny street garden in Paris. The curiously personal, handwritten note of fierce protection and thanks got us thinking about the loose, personal-yet-targeted messages left in public that we sometimes see that are quite different from graffiti. And that we could make some ourselves.
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We love instagram (especially our own SignLaboratory) but also get tired of….er….photographs. So the New Yorker’s cartoon-a-gram has come as something of a relief; we love having a cartoon fly into our day at random. We’ve found that a number curiously echo Improvised Life’s themes and messages…
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This lovely image by Gigi de la Torre’s seems to sum up Improvised Life’s curious mashup of books and trees, inner and outer, poetry and practicality, organic and cerebral, and the unexpected connections of ideas made when the Creative is at work. We were waiting for the right moment to publish it. We found it this morning when we randomly opened to these just-right words.
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Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook by Dina Falconi, illustrated by Wendy Hollender, will enable you to actually cook with the many abundant, common wild foods hiding in plain sight, or available at your farmer’s market.
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This astonishing composite photo of gymnast Simone Biles performing a difficult vault at the Brazil Olympics exemplifies the LEAP as visual metaphor for risk taking, having faith, taking on challenges, attempting to FLY. We wondered what such leaping and flying was like from Biles’ point of view. This insight applies to many of us.
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Years ago in Paris at dinner at art dealer Maxime Defert’s home, each place setting had the glass knife rests in the form of a hard candy. They proved not only wonderful to look at but eminently practical. Resting our sauce-slicked knife on it allowed us to reuse it at the next course, saving on dinnerware, without…
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