loving the process

We all know that life does not hand out bouquets. Flowers do not just appear in the world. The same is true for a life of meaning. Both are grown, over time, from the tiniest seeds. You have to cultivate meaning in your life. You need to do the hard work of tilling the soil and nurturing the seeds. No one can do it for you. Grow your own flowers... See more

There is this idea I return to all the time, talk about all the time, that comes from a quote by one of our late elders, Eddie Benton Banai. He said that to live an Anishinaabe life, to live according to our Seven Grandfather teachings, is to live a life where every footstep becomes a prayer. Isn’t that beautiful? You know how when you walk through... See more

Lombard was more sophisticated than Bow, but she had the same bald enthusiasm for life: “I love living,” she declared. “Eating, sleeping, and waking up again, skeet shooting, sitting around an old barn doing nothing, my work, taking a bath, talking my ears off, the little things, the big things, the simplest things, the most complicated things — I... See more

He offers a thought experiment: what if the brief to design a new train connection was given to Disney instead of railway engineers? The latter immediately focuses on speed, time, distance and capacity. With Disney, the goal wouldn’t be to shave minutes off the journey. They may ask a different question: “How do we make the train journey so... See more

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is... See more

Making ceramics requires patience and is an exercise in delayed gratification (or dissatisfaction). There are so many ways to fuck something up, so many stages to the process, and entering that cycle of hope, expectation, and either failure and trying again or ecstatic satisfaction added a new dimension to the rhythms of my life.

I feel my life has unfolded in a way that prepared me to do this work and along the way, especially so in the last decade, so many doors have opened that shouldn’t have and I feel the weight of the hands of all of my ancestors on my back urging me through them. So the essential part of this work is to show up. Show up when asked to represent my... See more

Every pretty good, sorta nice, kinda fun thing you abandon is like shedding a weighted vest that lets you move at top speed. You were so busy focusing on how much you could carry, you never realized you could run this fast.