The World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 This morning I excerpted from an article in the Chicago Tribune about Daniel Burnham on my Slow Painting blog. For those of you who have read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, you will recognize his name. Burnham was the architect and visionary behind the magical Chicago […]
Surfacing into a New Season
This weekend was like the joyride down the mountain you spent a grueling morning pedaling up. For the first time in three months I had three halcyon days with no hint of that ambient grief that arrived uninvited, filled my front room with baggage and has blocked my view ever since. Maybe it was the […]
- Body
- ...
A Hum in Our Ears
Summer arrives on Saturday, so say the calendar keepers. (Although the idea of a season having an official “opening day” seems rather absurd, doesn’t it?) I’m not waiting, I’m ready to celebrate the sensuousness of this warm swing through the solar system NOW. This stanza is from another beguiling Fleur Adcock poem called Prelude, and […]
Ups, and Downs
In my studio yesterday, I felt some of the old familiar feelings of “flow”, a sense of things that invariably calls up an unforgettable line from Mary Oliver: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a quiet place, that soft animal of my body right now. […]
- Art/Science
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Birds Do It, Bees Do It
Isabella Rossellini as a spider This is just too entertaining to pass up: Isabella Rossellini has gone public with her ongoing fascination regarding the sex life of insects. Put together as a series of shorts called Green Porno, the project features the beautiful Isabella herself playing a variety of insects in their mating glory. My […]
A Bowl of Warm Air
A Bowl of Warm Air Someone is falling towards you as an apple falls from a branch, moving slowly, imperceptibly as if into a new political epoch, or excitedly like a dog towards a bone. He is holding in both hands everything he knows he has— a bowl of warm air. He has sighted you […]
- Ideas
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Cathedral of the Mind, Take 2
A rich trove of wisdom arrived in the form of comments to my posting on June 11 about the Nicholas Carr article in the Atlantic (See below.) The issues raised by that piece are an ongoing concern for anyone who lives a rich life both online and in the flesh version. Rick Mobbs, a visual […]
- Poetry
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Even to the Boulder
I’ve been thinking a lot about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon after having renewed my relationship with their poetry this weekend (See the posting below, The Third Thing.) I posted a poem by Hall yesterday that he wrote during her illness, but thought Kenyon deserved a few of her own too. As Donald Hall wrote […]
The Third Thing
When I started this blog in 2006, I did not anticipate how deeply satisfying it would be to develop companionship around content that matters to me. Sharing visual art and poetry are gestures that happen best outside of time, ones that are well suited for the disembodied 24/7 nature of cyberspheric reality. Discovery in this […]
- Imagination
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J. K. Rowling (Part 2)
This is Part 2 of a highlighted version of J. K. Rowling’s Commencement Address delivered at Harvard on June 5, 2008. In this section Rowling focuses on the importance of imagination and takes a different approach than I would have expected. She correlates imagination with empathy, placing its power in that larger context of the […]