Well.
It's been a year here. Lots of theater work last Spring, family sickness after that... A useful, difficult, unexpected year. And this new year? It looks to be different but the same: difficult, we can expect surprises, and certainly can expect it to be at times very difficult.
Here are a few brighter spots:
1) Spring will come. Even in a year where it Snows in New Orleans! it will thaw into Spring.
2) There is plenty of work to be done. And here we all are, sleeves rolled up, able (if not quite ready) to pitch in to help.
3) Art still matters, perhaps more than ever. Go ye forth and make some!
I'm rereading Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness. (Highly recommend! Both for the Architecture and the Happiness.) I'm going to excerpt a bit here:
"In his memoirs, the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man... Then the First World War broke out, he was called up and, in a period of leave from his battalion (three quarters of whose members would be killed in the course of the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin during a rain storm. There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli's Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably."
Even in my little corner of the theater world - a long way indeed from Botticelli - I have met a few people who told me that a play has touched them and, in one instance, it was the alarm to leave a bad relationship.
So. Art. Of practical use too sometimes.
Also, here is a little vid I found heartening today, from Austen Kleon (whose book Keep Going remains helpful) about the importance of planting your garden:
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