"You are going to be one of a profession to which everything on this earth means something. Keep every faculty you have been blessed with wide awake."
Part 2: Abbey’s Advice to a Young Artist
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2013/06/part-2-abbeys-advice-to-young-artist.html
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"Most people assume you need a PhD to publish in peer-reviewed books and journals, but it’s not true—I’ve published in peer-reviewed venues without even a bachelor’s degree, because I learned the material well enough on my own to engage at the cutting edge of human knowledge."
Don’t Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Learning (10 Pictures)
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/13/dont-go-back-to-school-kio-stark/
Shared from Brain Pickings on Flipboard. Download Flipboard for free here.
“The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it shouldwork. So Brain Pickings became the record of my alternative learning, of that cross-disciplinary curiosity that took me from art to psychology to history to science, by way of the myriad pieces of knowledge I discovered — and connected — on my own. I didn’t live up to the entrepreneurial ideal of the college drop-out and begrudgingly graduated “with honors,” but refused to go to my own graduation and decided never to go back to school. Years later, I’ve learned more in the course of writing and researching the thousands of articles to date than in all the years of my formal education combined.
Don’t Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Learning (10 Pictures)
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/13/dont-go-back-to-school-kio-stark/
Shared from Brain Pickings on Flipboard. Download Flipboard for free here.
…whether “sacred space” is primarily a function of architecture or, rather, primarily a function of the character of the communities that dwell in built environments.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/do-suburbs-lack-sacred-space/
(Source: https://twitter.com/ayjay/status/347807349530034177)
"When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. . . . But in many other ways obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources — not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."
Ted Hughes on the Universal Inner Child, in a Moving Letter to His Son
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/ted-hughes-inner-child-letter/
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"You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.
I write as though you were a man. Well, you must know my heart is set on you. It isn’t your success I want.
There is a possibility of your having a decent attitude toward people and work. That alone may make a man of you."
Sherwood Anderson on Art and Life: A Letter of Advice to His Teenage Son, 1927
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/09/sherwood-anderson-letter-to-son/
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“Painting was no longer about the description of the visible world; it became a means of conveying the inner landscape of the artist’s heart and mind.”
"the future of “the new music business.” Authenticity over pretense. Honesty over obligation. Humility over celebrity."
http://lukebrawner.com/2013/06/06/the-new-music-business-or-why-i-am-no-longer-a-fan-of-derek-webb/
(Source: https://twitter.com/lukebrawner/status/342455640456839168)
"On possibilities: “Human history, our history, the history of every one of us is never “finished”; it never runs out of possibilities. Rather, it is always opening to the new — to what, until now, we’d never even had in mind. To what seemed impossible.”
(Source: https://twitter.com/godgrrl/status/342487991127773184)
“Surviving the passage of time is the major test of spiritual purity.”
(Source: https://twitter.com/godgrrl/status/342487991127773184)
mattlumpkin 