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HOLD ON LET GO – urns for living and the art of trusting time (plus a raffle to get one of them)

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Edward Lear's Parrots

Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for being alive. Birds were not just an aesthetic passion for Edward Lear. “A deep black bitter melancholy destroys me,” he wrote in his journal. He painted what he saw in order to keep looking out. All melancholy is a stranglehold of selfing. All joy is a surrender to something larger than oneself. In nature, in wildness, Lear came unselved, so that he could gasp in his journal after a day of walking in the forest and sketching: “Is it not wonderful to be alive?”

Edward Lear's Parrots

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A #birddivination for your weekend from the peregrine falcon. Part of the set of 100 and also available as a solo art print.

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Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days — a book of cards. Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. More divinations here.

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defend joy as a destiny defend it from fire and firefighters from suicides and homicides from vacations and ruts from the obligation to be joyful

A Defense of Joy

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An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days – remixing 19th-century ornithological books into poems and koans for daily living.

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Our waking life is sometimes like a dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.

Uncaging the bird in the mind – William Henry Hudson and the gift of the ruin of your best laid plans.

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Susie… come home… and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to… I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation… makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.

#Pride with the love letters of Emily Dickinson, who never lived to see an era when her love had its basic human right .

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The milk, the blood, the rain. All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.

Anima – one woman's search for meaning in the footsteps of Bulgarian mountain shepherds

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Bird divination of the day

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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin's advice on writing

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Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you.

A cognitive scientist takes you on a tour of the reality you habitually miss.

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Remixing the NSF press release about the first images captured by the Vera Rubin Observatory into a cosmic poem. More about the process here.

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Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.

Louise Erdrich on the deepest meaning of resistance – magnificent, magnificent poem.

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This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write... That is how civilizations heal.

In these wordless times, a lifeline from Toni Morrison, worded 20 years ago.

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17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility.

18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian

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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. 

E.M Forster on the personal and political power of empaths and the relationship between democracy and creativity