“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else...”

― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“We are a link in a chain in making a contribution that goes well beyond our own life. And that’s part of what makes dying tolerable. That’s what makes being a mortal creature tolerable.”

 --  Atul Gawande

 Listen to Atul over at On Being : What Matters in the End and then revisit this one, How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations

Karin Mamma Andersson: Paintings as Weapons from Louisiana Channel on Vimeo.


“Being an artist,” says Mamma Andersson, ”is to go around in circles in different directions. You always go back to start like in a game of Monopoly.” It is a professional development that is akin to personal growth, a constant coming back to core issues to understand yourself.” For Mamma Andersson, this means always returning to painting and images: “It's through painting that I reach a psychological or political level.”

Karin Mamma Andersson

I am not unhappy
I have learnt to drift and sip
The smallest things are gifts

-- Julia Darling.

inks

Ink tests from the Toronto Ink Company

no seeing everything at once

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. Found via even*cleveland

Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun ... Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience ... who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay.

Jia Tolentino, "The End of The Awl and the Vanishing of Freedom and Fun From the Internet." The New Yorker, 1/18/2018.

 life got on the way of posting for awhile, but i'm happy to be 'sketchbooking' again....

slouchy monoprints by Renee Gouin

For Equilibrium, a Blessing

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.


― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

note to self

Our ignorance is their power so take every opportunity to make the connection with those around you, listen and learn.
Connections create community.
Community helps understanding.
Understanding fuels empathy.
Empathy facilitates change.

John McCracken

family

The Family, the cosmic, transcends our realms of humanity.
Your mother
         father
         sister
         brother
         stranger
         lover
         friend
         and enemy
The birds
The bees
The flowers
The trees
All interstellar entities
Everything that lives and breathes
We are all family.

--Zoe Bedeaux from i-D Soul

Gillian Wearing

we are all one here

John Ashbery, from 'How to Continue.'

You Are Me

Barcelona-based director Gerard Montero talks about Empty, a film he made with choreographer Paloma Muñoz:

"The film explores ideas around dance and the significance we place on movement, which can't always be easily explained. In this empty space of the swimming pool we explored the poetic potential of the body’s movement and how a place can effect how we shape it.

turtles all the way down

“My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
—Stephen Hawking, 1981

Stephen Hawking opens his new book with a marvelous old anecdote. A famous astronomer, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady, who was perhaps under the influence of Hinduism, that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the astronomer asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: “You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down.”

Most people, Hawking writes, would find this cosmology ridiculous, but if we take the turtles as symbols of more and more fundamental laws, the tower is not so absurd. There are two ways to view it. Either a single turtle is at the bottom, standing on nothing, or it’s turtles all the way down. Both views are held by leading physicists. David Bohm and Freeman Dyson, to mention two, favor the infinite regress—wheels within wheels, boxes inside boxes, but never a final box.¹ Hawking is on the other side. He believes that physics is finally closing in on the ultimate turtle.

--  Review of A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen W. Hawking

Riccardo Guarneri

i can hear her breathing

Everything is Connected

From Sustainable Human, check it out, brilliant stuff.

the gifts we give

this piece of writing is magnificent. very much worth a read, but be warned, it's a weepy...

“An Eskimo [Inuit] custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.”

― Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

a record collective disobedience.

"Desire lines, also known as cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails), can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth. They appear anywhere people want to walk, where no formal paths have been provided. (Sometimes they even appear despite the existence of formal paths, out of what seems to be sheer mulishness—or, perhaps, cowishness.) Some view them as evidence of pedestrians’ inability or unwillingness to do what they’re told; in the words of one academic journal, they “record collective disobedience.”

Robert Moor, 'Tracing (and Erasing) New York's Lines of Desire.' The New Yorker, 2/20/2017.


Image by Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking, 1967.

Between hitchhiking lifts, [Long] stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work ...

(I have a copy of this on my wall...thank you natalie!)

where i am for now

What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in the aggregate all this isn't enough, but it's where I am for now.

Teju Cole, from 'A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon' in Known and Strange Things. (found via evencleveland)

slack jaw

Slack Jaw - Ellen Page & Emma Portner from Emma Portner on Vimeo.

John Opera

John Opera, Cyanotypes

blue is the light that got lost

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world."

-- Rebecca Solnit  A Field Guide to Getting Lost