Reposting this paragraph from my weekly delivery of the Brain Pickings Blog, written by the amazing Maria Poppova. If I get in touch with something well enough to give it voice, it's interesting how The Universe responds.

Artist Louise Bourgeois on How Solitude Enriches Creative Work

"Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude,"young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged period of solitude in life. Even if we don’t take so extreme a view as artist Agnes Martin’s assertion that “the best things in life happen to you when you’re alone,” one thing is certain: Our capacity for what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has termed “fertile solitude” is absolutely essential not only for our creativity but for the basic fabric of our happiness — without time and space unburdened from external input and social strain, we’d be unable to fully inhabit our interior life, which is the raw material of all art.

Ted, Jack, and Charlie with friends and nineteen spider crabs

After my last post about feeling lonely after ten months on the road, I remembered how drained I felt while teaching in a NYC high school, and living in the city, with 24/7 electronic stimulation, 24/7 connectivity, the public transport system, the crowded streets and shops. My perspective shifted, and this solitude feels absolutely blessed today. I also had a quick flight home to see my family, and had my emotional batteries re-charged.

Here's a link to this wonderful blog:

Brain Pickings – An inventory of the meaningful life.

https://www.brainpickings.org/

Maria Popova

An inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness, spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more.