Hi All,
Josh and i read Letters To A Young Poet this week- we gave ourselves an assignment to read it and search for images which illustrated some of the themes and ideas that jumped out at us. I have created a pinterest page where i will be placing my visual research for the show. CHECK IT OUT.  Below are some of the passages from the letters which resonated with me... i love the idea that our brains, when deprived, or rather withdrawn from external sensory input, human contact, the drama of public life.. will create these complex fantasies, additional realities... we will experience these extreme highs and lows.. For me some of the most intense feeling of love for someone, or shame for that matter, are only accessed when you have the time to parse it all out and extract it from the white noise of everyday life..  anyhoo- these are my thoughts for now- hopefully the images in the pinterest get at these ideas- that the scale of our internal conflicts has the ability change dramatically... aloneness facilitates epiphany and creativity...... that sort of thing. anyway- enjoy!

"It is also good to love: because love is difficult...With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves."

"..perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly;.." 

"That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable."

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience."