I’m heading out for an essential retreat to refresh and restore balance, with lots of forest bathing planned. If you want to keep reading Improvised Life while I’m away, or are a new subscriber, here’s ...
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Fred Sandback on Needing a Place to Play and Letting Your Fingers Think
Artist Fred Sandback stretched lengths of colored yarn taut in a space to make people experience it differently. His booklet, A Children’s Guide to Seeing, made to accompany an exhibition provides serious illumination for adults…
Manifestations of Gold: Forest Sculpture, Poem, Graffiti, a Dusting Found on Leaves
After I started working with gold, melting, rolling, forging the 22-karat coins I bought years ago, I started to see other forms of treasure, including Karin van der Molen’s beautiful sculpture…
The Art of Collage and Assemblage: ‘Everyday, Non-Art materials…Provoke Imaginative, Even Visionary, Thoughts and Associations’.
In the images from The Art of Collage and Assemblage on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was the ordinariness of many of the materials used that we found both moving and inspiring…
Bolivia’s Cholita Wrestlers and Mountain Climbers Transform Stereotypes with Fierce Acts of Empowerment
Aymara indigenous women in Bolivia, long marginalized, have embraced wrestling and mountain climbing in traditional colorful skirts to affirm their history and their visibility. Their motto: To want is power.
Revelations from Living with A Book Left Open
Although I’ve often left art books open around my space so I could live with an image, it only recently occurred to me to do that with a volume of tiny, powerful poems.
Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’ and Ted Talk ask: “What Is the Purpose of My Human?’
In her TED talk and HBO special, “autistic, pathologically shy” Hannah Gadsby tells how she came to be the most talked about comedian on the planet. It started when she asked herself an essential question:
Brené Brown’s Life Changing Question: Do You Believe People Are Doing the Best They Can?
When Brené Brown asked herself, ‘Do you believe people are doing the best they can? ‘ she admits to answering ‘Fuck no!’ until she explored it further, which yielded pure, transformative gold.
Build A One-Page Beautiful Website for Yourself or Your Project or…Anything, Fast
If you are daunted by the prospect of creating a website for yourself or a project, check out Carrd, a free platform for building simple, stylish responsive one-page sites, fast.
The Ear is The Way to the Heart
This huge little insight about listening startled us awake! And got us thinking about the powerful practice we all do daily…
Stephen Nachmanovitch’s ‘The Art of IS’ Decodes Improvising As a Way of Life
YoYo Ma described The Art of IS as “a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present.” We find it full of surprising ideas that are also incredibly helpful.
An Analog Kid’s Timer Increases Focus and Productivity
The simple, clever Time Timer has proven a useful visual aid that helps me focus on whatever I need to make headway with, and then get up and take a break, disrupting the obsessive overfocus ...
A Modern Mantra That Helps Frame Difficulty and Change
Lately, we’ve found ourselves saying an unusual mantra when we hit difficult situations. It affords an instant, very interesting shift of view, as do the lovely flower mandalas we stumbled upon about the same time.
Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s Trees with W.S. Merwin Haiku, Time Disappears
Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s trees are amazingly wonderful depictions of the treeness. As we looked, we thought of this haiku by W.S. Merwin…
The Best of Core 77’s Hilarious Weekly Roast of Really Bad Design
Core 77’s Weekly Design Roast gives our Annals of Bad Design a serious run for the money. Rain Noe deconstructs high-minded, idiotic design, channeling the hilarious design thinking behind it.
Oscar Murillo: Airplane Seat as Art Studio, Flight as a Sacred ‘Other’ Space
Columbian artist Oscar Murillo’s view of his singular seat on a airplane flight as a sacrad studio space will change your view of air travel.
A Homemade Foam Core Screen to Block the Sun or Define a Space
In my top floor space, the scorching temperatures have been pushing me to find non-electric ways of cooling the place down to mitigate air conditioner use. I turned to the material that seemed most likely ...
Lessons in Stillness and Quiet, with Mitch Epstein’s Astonishing Trees
At first, we only visited the New York Times “Lessons in Stillness from One of the Quiestest Places on Earth” because we wanted to see Mitch Epstein’s remarkable photographs of trees. But then, the story ...
Henry Miller and Others on the “Finest Medicine a Person Can Give Himself”
When we came across this quote from novelist Henry Miller, we thought, yes that IS some of the most powerful medicine we know.
New York Magazine’s Low Lift Home Improvements for Under $100 INCLUDING Improvised Life’s Big Fat Idea
How swell to see Improvised Life mentioned in New York Magazine’s ’31 Low Lift Home Improvements for Under $100′ for our decoding of Donald Judd furniture. We got a lot of ideas for jazzing up ...
Tiny Blossoms Knocked Off a Flower Make Unexpected Arrangements
Blossoms that might in one way seem broken or damaged can transform into something of startling beauty…
