Alexandersmap

    Category: Art

    • Art With a Spritz of Lime

      “Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life.”— Peter Altenberg

      A close friend has a flare for living well. He’ll spritz lime on a potato dish and make something extraordinary of what was moments before thought to be disparate produce. He’s always looking for the exceptional in an otherwise average day. And he drives many people mad as a result. Like that burst of citrus in a starchy dish, I find his perspective punctuates life perfectly.

      This business of living artistically is something to aspire to. Capturing moments with a bit of magic and moving through the ordinary with je ne sais quoi, these are the things that matter very much in a world that wants you to fall in line and fit right in. Certainly, we must do our job and do it well, but why always settle for vanilla?

      We each live on both sides of ordinary. It’s a gift to be human at a time and place when you can express yourself freely. We ought to use that gift and add more flavor to our days. Like every gift, we must choose to use it. Art is a deliberate act, expressed uniquely. What might we bring to the table if we have the gumption to try something new?

      We all know the expression: when the world throws you lemons, make lemonade. There’s another clever expression I once found on a kitchen magnet that adds a twist: when the world throws you limes, make margaritas. To this I’ll add, don’t forget to save some lime for the potatoes.

    • Keep It Simple

      “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” —Jack Kerouac

      Simple seems so complicated some days. Mondays often openly mock the very idea of simplicity. Want to do big things in this lifetime? Meet your wrestling partner, complexity. Complexity usually doesn’t play by the rules.

      Of course, Kerouac danced with eloquent simplicity in his writing through applied effort. For him to point out he too was a work in progress is a generous gift to those of us fighting the same battle. If there’s a takeaway, it’s to do the work anyway. It won’t write itself, no matter how complicated our lives are. Simple isn’t easy, it’s only meant to appear that way.

      My own rulebook states I click publish every day. I always aim for morning, but that’s negotiable, while publishing daily is very much nonnegotiable for as long as life and luck allow. We all have our lines in the sand and our own idea of what simple means. Writing every day, each day becomes an incremental step towards our own version of simple.

    • Where Is This Going?

      “A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.” ― Carlos Castaneda

      It’s fair to ask ourselves, “where is this going?” now and then. We already know, deep down, where things are going. The question merely raises to the surface things we bury in busy.

      If we only seek answers about the path we’re on, are we giving the path itself time to reveal itself to us? Yesterday, we considered the fact that the road doesn’t move, we do. Thus, the path is merely a path. We’re the ones who change. When we ask, “where is this going?” we’re really asking, “where am I going with this?”

      When Castaneda asks, “Does this path have a heart?”, he’s really asking, “Do I have the heart for this path?” The question is the same for all of us, whether we’re building a career, stacking words together just so in a blog or novel, hiking a seemingly infinite list of trails or sailing around the world. When we put everything of ourselves onto the path, we figure out just where we’re going. And whether it’s right for us.

    • Finding the Way

      Nobody ever says of a painter that he has lost his way. It is said of writers. But when one is talking about a painter one says, “He is finding his way.” — Mary Oliver, Sand Dabs, Six

      The curse of restlessness, as described yesterday, is a burning desire to pile on more and more to the to-do list. How much can we fit in? More, more, more! The worker bee in me seeks to do more. The philosopher in me wishes to still the madness and listen to the universe. The writer in me finds his way tactfully between the two, looking for just the right way to sum up the day.

      And so it is that the words come. Today, before the wave crashes, I delight in the colors in the clouds as I listen to the growing roar. And click publish before I’m swept away.

    • No Other Way

      when it is truly time,
      and if you have been chosen,
      it will do it by
      itself and it will keep on doing it
      until you die or it dies in you.

      there is no other way.

      and there never was.
      — Charles Bukowski, so you want to be a writer?

      Keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. The writing continues for another day. Who it finds is anyone’s guess. But like a spouse bored of life with you it must find a way out. Nothing boring, nothing pretentious, nothing that doesn’t scream to leave you and meet the world.

      A high bar to clear. We’ve all slogged through countless boring books, tedious slogs through the waist-deep piles of words that mean nothing but a thesaurus referred to. And, if we’re honest, we’ve written our share of boring too. All to tempt the muse. All to find the magic and make ourselves a part of it. Join the Great Conversation once and for all, and maybe, if we might be so bold, find a place at the table one day.

      But not today. Not just yet. Today we work through the process. Truly, there’s no other way.

    • Create It

      “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” — Franz Kafka

      We’re each authors of our story, written daily. It’s easy to forget that sometimes. The novel we’re writing is realized in our daily action, page-by-page. We either arrive at the finished product or we flounder in the minutia of distraction. Nobody said life was fair, friend, only relentlessly present. And we all know the present is our gift.

      “Man plans, God laughs.” – Yiddish adage

      We may not arrive at what we set out to create, but we’ll be further along than had we never begun. Is that enough? I went to Iceland for the Aurora Borealis, and found relentless cloud cover mocking me each night. But I found glaciers and ancient volcanoes expressed as waterfalls and basalt columns instead. Am I the lesser for having gone? The lesson is to leap anyway.

      Kafka isn’t stating that just because we desire something deeply enough that we create it, only that we can’t possibly create it unless we desire it to exist first. Fate and grit play their part in the end. All we can do is do the work.

    • A Visit to Reykjavik

      Reykjavik is the capital city of Iceland and the northernmost capital city in the world. As with any great city it has a strong foundation of history, culture and character. For the most part it’s highly walkable with a vibrant and diverse food and bar scene, friendly and interesting people. The trick is navigating the ice and wind in winter. They deal with ice by heating some of the main sidewalks, utilizing their abundance of geothermal heat. The wind you just learn to deal with. This blog post is a postcard from a city I’ve quickly grown to love.

      Hallgrímskirkja Lutheran Church
      Leif Erikson Statue, given to Iceland by the United States in 1930 to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of his discovery of America
      Parliament Building
      Harpa Music Hall

    • Simply Do

      “I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.” — Naomi Shihab Nye (with a nod to @MayaCPopa for showing the way)

      Fame is overrated, contribution is where it’s at. We are utilitarian at the root of it, here to be productive in our time, whatever our calling, lighting the way until we pass the torch.

      We tend to lean into complicated. This is a distraction from the beautiful truth, a collective turn away from the briefness of being, a wish before the song fades and we blow out the candles. It’s contribution that lives beyond wishes.

      Poetry stares the truth in the eye, wanting nothing more than to face it. I wished somedays I was a better poet, a better writer. I’d forgotten what I could do. Now I simply do.

    • A Wisp of a Moment, Captured

      On a recent walk I noticed the recently painted median strip dividing the road featured artwork now and then. It seems they painted the road in autumn, as the oak leaves returned to the earth to close their cycle and begin again. A few rebels, wishing for immortality perhaps, found the opportunity to capture the moment. It struck me this was what all artists do; reach out from the anonymous mass of their moment and leave something of ourselves for others to find.

      There’s something lovely in the temporary nature of this street art, akin to chalk drawings on sidewalks or sandcastles at low tide. Some art is meant to someday be a memory, recalled in quiet moments when you again walk down that street or on that particular stretch of beach. Do you remember the leaves of autumn, swirling in the wind? How quickly they fade from memory. We surf on a wisp of a moment, sometimes captured, mostly lost forever. We ought to embrace the freedom in that, elusive as it feels, for this is our fragile dance.

      “If you would create something, you must be something.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      At times we hear the call from the naked page of a notebook, and at times from the middle of the road. Leaves locked in the amber of their moment are a whisper from seasons past to do something with this one. To feel the urgency of the season and make the most of it before the moment fades. This is the unique call of our work, leaping to our attention in the strangest of places. In each case, the question lingers in the moment: Where will you take us now?

    • The Shape of Our Circles

      “We are mirrors reflecting one another. The people with whom we surround ourselves shape us, and we shape those around us, too.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness

      I had a conversation with two strong players in my circle of influence who both disliked The Banshees of Inisherin, a movie I absolutely loved. The movie shows the desperation of breaking free of circles when you feel trapped in a place. The four main characters each deal with this in their own way, but ultimately the circle is broken. How you react to the character’s choices generally informs what you think of the movie, but it isn’t about their choices, it’s about the desperate friction of a limited circle.

      We don’t live in a movie, but they capture our imagination because they often mirror moments in our own lives. Our circle can be a trap that surrounds us or a blessing that informs us. It’s often both, and when we break out of it we can reshape ourselves. People come and go from our lives, and the circle around us fluctuates with the stages of our lives. We ourselves have the agency to choose our dance partners in this lifetime. We’ve each felt the sting that each character in the movie feels.

      We’re collectors of people, each of us, gathering relationships and nurturing them over time. We aren’t meant to go it alone for the long haul. Solitude is a blessing best savored in doses. And we are the average of the five people who we associated with the most. This in itself is a blessing or a curse, offering guidance with whom we ought to spend our days with. Our closest relationships help inform us of who we really are, and also reveal where we’re going.

      Sometimes we find that the circle doesn’t suit as anymore, and sometimes we find that the people in our circle feel more alive in a different one. Over time we reconcile our place in a series of circles. We’re either running around in circles, circling the wagons or spinning off to another place. That’s life, dizzying as it might seem. But we must always remember we have a hand in shaping our circle even as it shapes us.