This Good Life

What's next after six years of Still Life

Sadie Bell Nelson, Center Medallion—Single-Block "Monkey Wrench" Variation, c. 1965. For more, see the history of Gee’s Bend quilts.

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Friends,

Still Life started with bees and flowers. Lindsey and I were sitting in our car in Los Angeles, and we heard the faintest sound of bees gathering pollen and flowers falling above our heads. The sun roof framed the moment, etched it in our memories. Today, over six years later, I’m writing you from our apartment in Minneapolis. The trees are bare, and it’s a dark gray winter morning. We’re surrounded by suitcases and opened gifts, by next year’s calendars waiting to be filled.

There’s a lot of life between today’s letter and the very first Still Life letter (shared below), and I’m tempted to try to make some grand statement, some kind of summative truth that could tie all the threads together into one clear bow. But how can you? Hundreds of poems, hundreds of artworks, hundreds of thousands of words….reflecting on the whole shape of Still Life needs time and space. And, frankly, lots of rest.

It wasn’t just the bees and flowers that inspired Still Life—it was the frame, a way of looking at the world. Just like artists gathering objects on the table and painting them over and over, the objects were the subject, but they weren’t the only goal. There’s a habit of mind and attention that inevitably takes shape when we do the same thing over and over, and that’s what Still Life has been about: the art and poetry and spirituality, of course, and also the struggle to live a life where these things weave together. Where we learn to literally make sense, a deep sense that can only emerge as the arts help us slow down and reflect on our own lives.

The title for this newsletter came from Mark Doty’s book Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy. Specifically, these words have always captured my attention:

I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

For this poet, looking carefully at a painting helped him rehearse an embodied intimacy with the world, one he took out of the museum and into his life. A way to practice tenderness. That’s always been a goal of mine from the beginning, and I hope that each Still Life letter has been a kind of frame, one that, hopefully, you can read through—whether into your own life, into the world, or into the lives of others.

Still, there have been times during all this writing when the distance between myself and the world has increased instead of the other way around. When it’s been harder to make that leap from an intimate knowledge of text and object to, say, intimacy with other people. Or an intimacy with my own life, what I actually need, what my body is saying and not just my eyes or brain. But the rehearsing isn’t the goal. It’s preparation for the main act, for the real intimacy: the sense of intimacy we share with one another. That’s been one the primary gifts I’ve taken from these weekly letters: your responses, the connections that have formed, the mutual sharing.

That’s the point, right? To close the loop on human making back to humans ourselves, back where we can connect with one another and live more textured, whole lives? It makes me think of visiting the Louvre a few years ago. Yes, I saw the Mona Lisa, but if you ever go, don’t miss the real artwork. Stand as close as you can to the small painting, turn around, and you can’t miss it: the crowd of people, shoulder to shoulder, all ages, face by face by face. A collective portrait never to be repeated again, utterly precious and living.

What am I trying to say. The point of Still Life has never been the letters themselves, or even only the artworks or poems. It’s always been about where the arts can direct us: toward attention and people, toward tenderness and care. About letting the arts lead the way as we learn how to see one another, how to look where no one else is looking, how to remember what matters.

So what’s next? For starters: I’m giving myself the gift of an indefinite break. No schedule, no future commitments, no preparing new letters, no strategizing what’s next—wide open, empty time and space so I can rest and recover.

What does that mean for these Still Life letters? This newsletter is on hiatus, and I’ll be out of your inbox for a while. Whenever I return, it’ll be different. The weekly cadence, the constant curation, that has to change for my own health and to keep my writing life sustainable. Hopefully, like any artistic practice, all this work has been training for whatever creative work emerges next. I’ll always be writing, but I just don’t know what that will look like yet. You’ll be the first to know.

In the meantime, I hope you double back and read a letter you missed this year and follow along with the Twin City Life calendar if you’re in the area. But more than that, please know I’m grateful. Thanks so much for reading, for your support, for the books and donations, for the conversation. None of these letters would exist without you. Finally (because I literally can’t help myself) here’s one more quote before I sign off for a while. Here’s John Paul Lederach from his book on peace-building and the moral imagination:

The creative act is a turning point where we're not enslaved to old ways of thinking and instead realize that the birth of something new is possible.

The birth of something new is possible, in your life and mine. Maybe it’s already happening—let’s keep our eyes open.

Take care,

Michael

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“Bees, Frames, Slow Looking”
December 12, 2017

The other day before driving to work, Lindsey and I sat in our car by a tree, our minds sifting through the upcoming week like sieves. A soft hiss and tapping caught our attention, and we looked up through the sun roof window—hundreds of bees were weaving through the branches while yellow flowers the size of peppercorns fell onto the glass. It was a small durable gift framed by the sun roof we wouldn’t have seen if we didn’t pause to look.

This frame was on my mind when I decided to name this newsletter “Still Life.” A humble (even rote) genre of painting, creating a still life is a deliberate process, not a quick glance. Gathering objects from around her studio or home, the artist rearranges them in a new context, and looks deeply with each stroke of the brush. Whether the result is a vanitas or a straightforward table scene, the genre begins with slow looking and a new frame on the world. In a lecture on literature, Frederick Buechner put it this way:

The magic of the art of words is that not only does it ask us to pay attention, it enables us to pay attention. To put aside all the things that are going through our heads and our stomachs and our hearts and simply participate in, be present with that which is on the printed page. Be present with this book, and in a way, be present in your own skin. Be present in your own life.

Buechner suggests that this is the most basic shape of art and literature: a frame for our lives enabling us to see what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Most days, I struggle to see this freshness of the world, but a poem, a quote, even a sun roof—these things can help us practice, and I hope this newsletter can be a frame to arrange them together.

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“Bees” by Jane Hirshfield

In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries—ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?

* * *

“Art” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Art can survive
the last bugle of the last bureaucrat, can survive
the inarticulate choirs of makeiteers,
the stolid in stately places,
all flabby gallantries, all that will fall.
Lending our strength to keep art breathing we
doubly extend, refine, we clarify;
leading ourselves, (the halt, the harried) through
the icy carols and bayonets of this hour,
the divisions, vanities, the bent flowers of this hour.
We hail what heals and sponsors and restores.

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🌱 🌱 🌱 🌱