Artful Living
soft air
March 9, 2010
There is something so intoxicating about the soft air of spring. To me, spring feels like a time to clean, a time to polish and for our very own awareness to come unwrapped. The morning light, the added daylight allow one to see the essentials of our life. Making seasonal lists gives me a guideline. It is all about designing an artful life, be it writing, illustrating, creating one’s day.
Start by making a list of essentials to follow to realize the reward of your promise.
My Father told me that having children was one of life’s greatest rewards. He told me that it is essential that you pay close attention to their minds and to find promise within each being. Fathers give good sound advice. Fast forward to yesterday, my son came home wanting to know if I had ever read any of “Jack Kerouac’s ” books. He had me, in a nano-second, I was full of intrigue. I asked him to read to me, so he did. The words felt like soft air on my neck.
My Father told me that having children was one of life’s greatest rewards. He told me that it is essential that you pay close attention to their minds and to find promise within each being. Fathers give good sound advice. Fast forward to yesterday, my son came home wanting to know if I had ever read any of “Jack Kerouac’s ” books. He had me, in a nano-second, I was full of intrigue. I asked him to read to me, so he did. The words felt like soft air on my neck.
Then I wanted to know more about him. Here is a list of thirty essentials for writers. What is on your list? Soft or Hot air?
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside your own house
- Be in love with your life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven