A call for (creative) action

Spoiler Alert: This is a shameless self-promotion.

Dear readers, writers, artists, and eager, inviting minds:

In the interest of encouraging art and poetry,
In the advancement of new forms of old expression,
In a call for the experience of truth and power and joy,

You are invited,
encouraged,
urged

To enjoy,
read,
purchase,

Forecast, the special edition exhibition book
combining paintings by artist Tracy Weil
and poetry from writer Drew Myron.

Just in time for
the holidays,
everyday,
today.

Forecast is
the ideal gift,
guilty pleasure,
blissful, joyful, engaging
intersection of art and words.

Get it here.
Buy now. Enjoy always.

Fishing well

If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

— Pablo Neruda
from The Sea and the Bells

Search & Stumble

The world is so big, with so much to see. Thanks to StumbleUpon.com, I get a kaleidoscope view. And you can, too!

Check out StumbleUpon.com, a powerful website sampler offering a grab-bag of souped-up, search engine surprises. The free service matches your personal preferences and interests to thousands of websites and blogs, many of them obscure little treasures you would have never found on your own.

When I’m feeling stuck or uninspired (or avoiding the laundry, the bills, the deadlines looming), I stumble for a creative restart.

Today’s favorite stumble is Linda Zacks, a New York artist experimenting with art and words to produce an intriguing mash of edge and allure.

An accomplished graphic designer and illustrator, Zacks also creates one-of-a-kind handmade books incorporating the art of typography and photography. I especially love the way type emerges as an artform in the gritty book (pictured above), "I swallowed a rainbow, got drunk on air & puked it up all over the world."

Life is short — but unbearably long when rules and responsibilities slow your step. Go ahead, take some time to stumble around.

Ordinary things

We are in the transformation season. In this thin, long autumn light, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. I am hushed by the turning. This morning, the wren outside my window is a palm-sized wonder: that small beak, the focused bead eyes, every little feather.

This must be what new parents feel, the discovery of every detail, all of it a miracle, all of it so ordinary, saying again and again, how did we not see? before this, how did we see at all?

In spring’s crisp newness, life bursts with fresh possibility. But in this dying season, I feel a similar sense of wonder, though tempered with patience. Now, in these short days, there is a tender ache of acceptance. We are all so beautiful, all so flawed.

It’s a shame and a mystery, really, how our sight changes, how autumn’s soft glow can lift and elevate, can help us see in everything beauty. In beauty, everything.

The Patience of Ordinary Things

Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider from Another River: New and Selected Poems. © Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2005.

This poem appears in today’s Writer's Almanac, a free service delivering poems directly to your email each day.

The good find

The beauty of life’s good finds — a great bargain, a good book, a perfect café — is, of course, the thrill of the find.

The internet, with all its complicated connections leading down dark alleys of data, encourages the wonderfully imperfect art of stumbling. For example, the other day I finished Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s one of those fascinating reads that leaves you sated with a good story, uniquely told, and fascinated with the details. Frankly, as so often happens, I wanted more.

Longing led to Google. Once there, I skipped through a verdant field of daisy-chain connections. Junot Diaz led to Julia Alvarez (another writer raised in the Dominican Republic), which led to a commencement speech she gave at the University of Vermont, which led to a wonderful passage from writer Seamus Heaney:

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

— from The Cure at Troy,
a play written by Seamus Heaney

In my wandering, I stopped here at Heaney. He seemed to say it all, and just when I needed it. And that’s all — and everything — a good find brings.