Cello suites and reclusive painters…

I’m short on time this week, so I just wanted to share with you a podcast I really enjoyed. It’s called Our Common Nature and it is created by Yo Yo Ma the classical cellist, interviewing local people in various wild areas of America, and then creating art on location including music and poetry. The first episode is so delightful, I was smiling the whole time I was shaping the bread. I hope you’ll get a chance to listen and let me know what you think. Here’s the link to that. I listen to a lot of jazz on bake days, but I notice on dough days I’ve been listening to more and more classical, and I’m stuck on this particular video of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach’s cello suites next to a creek in the woods, which is how I found the podcast. Watch that, and let me know if you feel the same way.

I’m currently reading “At the Center of all Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life” and it is fascinating. I just finished a chapter about Cezanne and (one of my favorite painters) Pisarro, followed by a chapter about Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. It’s a great meditation on time spent alone, but also the courage it takes to simply exist in transgression of common social norms as a creative person. New ways of thinking are deep inside us, if we can only turn down the volume of everything else just a little bit, and truly be ourselves. I’m still learning how.