#Cartoon breaking the quiet 3 portable

She had her first room of her own - a sunny third-floor studio in one of the larger houses, with a heavy wooden writing table and a hospital-green portable Swiss typewriter. In the setting summer in 1959, Plath and her complicated husband, Ted Hughes, arrived at Yaddo - the gilded artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York - and took up separate residences a five-minute walk apart. Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) was twenty-seven and pregnant with her first child, a daughter, when she wrested from mushrooms one - more than one - of the most enchanting metaphors in the history of the imagination. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy) Mushrooms from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. They were the first to colonize the Earth.

It takes only one friend… to work miracles.Ĭomplement with David Whyte on the deepest meaning of friendship, Kahlil Gibran on the building blocks of meaningful connection, and this almost unbearably lovely vintage illustrated ode to friendship, then revisit Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived and the value of and antidote to despair. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… - poverty and loneliness. Those of us who are lucky to have it in our own lives can easily identify it, always with a swell of gratitude. This mutually sustaining circle of creative kinship begins with a single lifeline of connection. Henry Miller: The Hat and the Man from To Paint Is to Love Again. But first one must make friends, create them through one’s work. All that comes with time - or will never come. How distressing it is to hear young painters talking about dealers, shows, newspaper reviews, rich patrons, and so on. In a passage just as hauntingly true of the compulsion for social media “likes,” he writes: But the messages never get through.Īfter honing his ideas on two decades of living, Miller took up the subject again in his uncommonly wonderful 1968 book To Paint Is to Love Again. We live in a void spanned by the most intricate and elaborate means of communication. No concern for the vital, subtle things which mean everything to a writer, painter or musician. Considering the downfall of art in his own epoch, when the age of publicity and mass media was just beginning to maim culture, he laments the state of the creative community: In 1950, epochs before our social media were but a glimmer in the eye of the possible, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) reckoned with the seedling of our modern predicament in his meditation on art and life. This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Art by Arthur Rackham for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906. Through its tendrils, we find community - a place where our own creative work is reflected and refracted through that of others to cast a shimmering radiance of mutual magnification that borders on magic. It is often in the cradle of friendship - a word not to be used carelessly - that our creative energies are strengthened and renewed. Both, if they are worth their salt and we ours, ask us to show up as our whole selves. We may call them connection and creativity. The sunshine of life springs from twin suns.