Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire explains how great ideas arise:

"Inspiration is merely the reward for working every day."

Source: Curiosites Esthetiques (1868)

A crush is a powerful little vial of that pure feeling—the longing, the push and pull. In his poem “The More Loving One,” W. H. Auden compared unrequited love to looking up at the stars, observing their beauty while knowing full well they “do not give a damn.” But he wasn’t mad about it; he saw that that’s how it should be, and anyway, he was more ... See more

I don’t think that humans can really move forward into whatever’s coming for us next without facing what we’ve done to our home and each other. Such a reckoning includes the beauty, joy, and community found in crisis, as well as the pain. The sociologist Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble.”

"To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life."

Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially brutal about something I’ve done or failed to do, I imagine I’m one of my own girlfriends, someone I love and who loves me in a way that’s expansive and forgiving. Then I reassess whatever I’m being mean about, through her borrowed POV, or by way of asking – what if she’d done or failed at this thing, how woul... See more