How do you create a pure art place where everything lands? Zen lessons in creativity, purity and process from Rick Rubin and Richard Linklater.
Tag: zen
Be more Praline
The least you can do can be the most you can do. Here I draw on the example of my beautiful guinea pig friend Praline, and on wise words from Scott Adams, Rick Rubin and Helen Reynolds.
#SaturdaySix March 2018: #Sketchulence, Jaws, Shandling’s Zen & more!
Beware the #SaturdaySix of March! This is my latest monthly round-up of six things that are inspiring me right now. And I’d love to know – what are you finding inspirational, right this minute? 1: Sketchulence Introducing #Sketchulence, a home for sketches, scribblings, scrawlings, art, photography and musings, created or curated by – in a […]
Live it full out (anger not invited)
Resolutions don’t work for me. If a change needs to be made, why not make the change right away? But seeing as it’s a new year, why not move to make positive change starting now? I write in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2018, strong coffee to hand, hypnotic music unfurling. The world […]
Like nobody is reading
If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?* Is the true Zen wisdom of blogging to be found not in whether it speaks to an audience, but in the purity of writing itself? Moby has been there and done that. In a fascinating chinwag […]
What takes you into the heart of simplicity?
What can you do that takes you to the heart of simplicity? We can all of us cut through it all, and achieve simplicity through focus. Bizarrely – to me at least – both Muhammad Ali and Garry Shandling found focus via boxing, of all things. “Boxing is all publicity,” said the dear-departed Muhammad Ali […]
Stage fright? “You’re already Garry Shandling”
A wise gentleman once said to me that all of life is a performance, but none of it really matters as long as we have love, laughter, health and happiness.* By this chalk, as long as there has been human life as we’d recognise it, there has been the need to perform. Inevitably, as long […]
After the snow, the silence
There’s just something transportingly beautiful about waking to find it’s snowed overnight. The world is still, silent and white. This morning (Sunday 17 January 2016, also my seventh Twitterversary) is the first day on which any snow has settled in the nearly 18 months since I moved here. It was an honour and a delight […]
When the chorus of souls sings to you
What does inspiration mean to you? What inspires you? Can you pinpoint the moment when inspiration strikes, when you can hear the chorus of souls singing to you? Long before Google first engooglated (and – I should stress – before other search engines, which also exist, first engineered any searches there were things called dictionaries. […]
What’s the least I can do?
What’s the least I can do? The title of this post isn’t intended as a call to down arms and embrace laziness (but if you choose to interpret it as such, I salute you). What I want to look at here is achieving maximum effect from minimum effort. To quote Rick Rubin: “There’s a tremendous […]
