Lightly Child, Lightly

~ Live & Learn

The Mekas image had a caption, drawn from 2007’s To New York with Love. YOU LOOK AT THE SUN. THEN YOU RETURN HOME AND YOU CAN’T WORK, YOU’RE IMPREGNATE WITH ALL THAT LIGHT. We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are?

— Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency ( W. W. Norton & Company; May 12, 2020)

Notes:

  • Image Source
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

23 thoughts on “Lightly Child, Lightly”

  6. So true.

    Every time I look at art, it makes me think anew. My last museum show was March 8 in DC, Degas. As someone who’s studied and written about ballet, it was immediately obvious he had a great fantasy life — some of the scenes he painted/drew were absolutely never going to happen (like a dancer sitting on a bass or perched atop the studio piano.) No one would have dared!

    Most interesting — even then — was Degas’ reliance on photography, a fact I never knew.

    When I saw an amazing show of Hoksusai at the British Museum in 2017 I also discovered he was broke and struggling most of his life (who now doesn’t recognize his wave image?!) I love hearing the backstory of art. We rarely do.

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  8. I think everything in life is a work of art. Either nature’s art or human art — there is creativity in everything and we express ourselves in artful ways — it’s just we like to pretend that life is a serious matter and we are much more ‘serious’ than all that artsy fartsy stuff! 🙂 She says as the artist in her rises up, hands on hips and stamps her foot! “Listen up!” she exclaims. “We’re all creative by nature. We just express ourselves differently – and seriously, if your life isn’t a work of art, what is it?” (the ‘she’ is the muse in me who gets all excited when she reads words that stir her soul. 🙂 )

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  9. @ Catlin of Broadside…I will admit to this…When a child, I always liked, when it was my turn to dust…we had a Baby Grand Piano the top was usually up. I had fun, running the dust rag over the keys, the shinning mahogany, mirror like and smooth…the top would need to be dusted and since I couldn’t put the top down I climb up over the closed key board stand on the piano frame base grab the highest part of the top of the open lid, prone…and slide down the front side of my clothes did a decent job of dusting part of the lid…I never went on the whole lid just the area I could climb to…I was a creative child…with five siblings! The boys were so much older than us girls…one day our Mom gave us me and the youngest red headed sister a cast off Mink Stole, man that was hard to cut through…Barbie became the proud recipient of a Mink Stole bedspread…decades before faux Mink bedspread because vogue…

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