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Heidi Targee: Photographer, artist, experience junkie

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How devastating that we have lost David Bowie – remember his trailblazing and courageous spirit with his answers to the Proust Questionnaire.

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If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything. A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Beautiful essay by Mark Manson. 

Lest we forget, “how we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at.”

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[stuffgurlswant]

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Every single writer, artist, and seeker of a fulfilling life should read Ann Patchett on writing and self-forgiveness.

[humansofnewyork]

“I feel good right now. Ever since I left my job in insurance, I’ve written twelve plays and two children’s books. I’ve had my plays performed in Atlanta, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Yale University. My ex-wife and I have become best friends. I apologize all the time for the man I was before I followed my passion, and she comes to my plays and readings. I moved to New York at the age of 65 to take things to the next level. Now I want to see one of my plays on Broadway.”

[beautifulliterature]

Your told thay you’re in your head too much, a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebal. Or maybe theres another word for such people: thinkers.

Susan Cain, Quiet:The Power of Introverts in a World that can’t stop talking. (via beautifulliterature)

[beautifulliterature]

If your nerve deny you, Go above your nerve.

Emily Dickinson (via beautifulliterature)

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What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65… and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

Anne Lamott, who is 61 today and who remains one of the wisest writers and most wonderful spirits of our time, on how to stop keeping ourselves small by people-pleasing – the kind of read that jolts you into aliveness.  (via explore-blog)

[frenchingbothlips]

4-8-15 EVERYONE IN THE FLORIDA AREA My math teachers daughter is disabled and she left the house a few days ago and hasn’t been seen since. She was last seen in the Miramar area on a bus. But please spread this around so we can find her

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One of humanity’s wisest Zen teachers on how to love.

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I had delved down into a space where I perceived this great pool of gratitude and sadness. And don’t mix sadness up with depression or despair… All sadness is is a way of sensitizing you to what really matters, what’s really meaningful. And death does that. I see my death. It looms in front of me sooner than I would like, but because it’s there, because we live with that, I am so grateful for just this moment, for this time together. And that is a great gift.

Absolutely magnificent On Being conversation with Bruce Kramer, who died of ALS earlier this week, while the show was in production. His moving memoir, We Know How This Ends: Living While Dying, is out in April.

Couple with philosopher Joanna Macy on how Rilke can help us befriend our mortality to live more fully. 

(via explore-blog)

[heiditargee]

Henry Rollins -according to Wikipedia "attended The Bullis School, then an all-male preparatory school in Potomac, Maryland."

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Timeless wisdom on life from some of the greatest commencement addresses of the past two decades. 

[nevver]

Then and now with Weegee

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One weekend in August of 1971, Margaret Mead and James Baldwin sat down for an extraordinary, wide-ranging conversation spanning identity, power and privilege, race and gender, human rights, beauty, religion, social justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. I came upon it in the aftermath of Ferguson and Eric Gardner, and it instantly stopped my breath with its remarkable prescience.

I’m resurrecting this forgotten cultural treasure in a multi-part series – here is the first installment, focusing on the two intellectual titans’ views on forgiveness and the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility. 

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Shel Silverstein

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We stand before a work of art and our spirit is lifted by it: amazing that someone is like us! We stand before a work of art and our spirit resists: amazing that someone is different! […] Maybe most of all great art encourages us, as does this film, as does Rothko, not to stop at opening our eyes, but to go on to close them, as well.  To go to what we know deepest, earliest and most clearly: that we humans are, in essence, humane, fair, kind.  Gracious. Light-filled. Wise.  And that our darkness is just what it is: an intrinsic and balancing ballast to all that loveliness. …Perhaps the most radical suggestion we can make about ourselves is not that we are not different. Or even that we are. But that we are both.

If you haven’t yet read Tilda Swinton's spectacular speech at the Rothko Chapel, do.

Then, see some related thoughts on what we believe about ourselves and each other.

(via explore-blog)