March 2011
16 posts
“Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen every day.”
—Life’s Little Instruction Book by H. Jackson Brown
February 2011
9 posts
Art is Love
“One of the other most healing things I’ve done for my sense of self (other than picking up a camera) has been through dance. No matter how rough my day, or how good: I leave all other emotions aside and just show up in my own body and the dance movements. Each class over these past few years have gotten me just that been deeper into the ‘zone’ of getting lost in movement. Each class gets me more out of my head and into my body.
I was thinking about this during the meditation at the end of class (my meditation is dance…sitting still, not so much). I was thinking that this is self-love. Not particularly what happens when we create art, but the showing up and letting the art/creativity swoop you up in its arms.
Showing up at each dance class, sitting down at one’s art desk, or in front of the blank page, going on that photowalk, taking that time for ourselves.
I think the showing up is love. Sometimes it is the hard work of self-love: the showing up.
Art is one of the best gifts we can give ourself. Whatever form it takes.”
“It seems to me there is so much more to the world than the average eye is allowed to see. I believe that if you look hard, there are more wonders in this universe than you could ever have dreamed of.”
—Vincent van Gogh
“One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze.”
—Paul Klee
Play
“The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovering, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself but creating yourself anew. Seek, therefore, not to find out who you are; seek to determine who you want to be.”
—Neale Donald Walsch
Find the Thing You Love and Do the Shit Out of It
“I have been thinking a lot about love and friction… Love in terms of what I love, and who I love, and how those two things intersect… The answer to love seems pretty straightforward: figure out what it is you really and truly love, and move toward it. Do more of it, be around more of the people who facilitate it for you. Relentlessly hew to your love, and ignore that other stuff, or just deal and dispense with it as quickly as possible.
…Friction is more complex. More obviously complex, anyway. For our purposes here, “friction” is what stops you, or slows you—what creates drag. And the tricky thing is that you don’t want to get rid of it entirely, because some of the friction is good for you, and arguably necessary: who learns from easy?”
