Dostoevsky said “Beauty will save the world.” He didn’t mean surface beauty. He meant poetic beauty.
Or as James Hillmans says: “the way in which the Gods touch our senses, reach the heart and attract us into life.”
That kind of beauty will save the world.
Many years ago, a friend talked me into attending a creative writing workshop. Since I’d never done anything like that before, I had no prior expectations. I was totally unprepared for what happened. We were given some topic to write about, I put my pen to the page and I found myself writing a fantasy-fairy…
The word aesthetics comes from the Greek word “aisthenesthai” which is the “ability to perceive.” I’ve always had a strong desire to explore teaching and learning as deep, rich, and aesthetic processes. Beautiful, life-giving, and creative rather than dry, boring, and joyless. Both teaching and learning require courage, an open heart, and the willingness to…
Many scholars have noted how Einstein sought beauty in his theoretical work. “As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, [Einstein] really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle…
It’s been a horrific fire season in Northern California and yesterday I had a speaking engagement in San Francisco where I knew that some of the participants would be evacuees from the fire. (So far the death toll is 40 and 90,000 are homeless. Wildfire has consumed people’s homes, entire communities, schools, businesses…) I didn’t…
Many years ago during the summer after I received my PhD, I stood on the mountain overlooking Berkeley and the bay. It was late at night, with a brilliant, star-filled sky. I gazed out over the city and Bay and committed to myself that I was going to live a creative life. Creativity was going…
Picasso: Every one wants to understand art. Why not try to understand one song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand? But in case of a painting, people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works because he must,…