Inspirational Internet Finds: Art/Music/Stories

Cast Net - February 2021

Bay St. Louis artist/photographer Kat Fitzpatrick shares her favorite bits of art and thought from all corners of the Web.

Photo by Kat Fitzpatrick

​A poem by Neil Gaiman to celebrate Valentine’s Day
Wedding Thoughts: All I Know About Love 
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This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.
 
Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.
 
It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.
Somebody's got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them…. 

(read the rest of the poem here)

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Magical Flocks of Starlings Swell Above the Danish Marshlands
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​Midwives of the Soul - a poem

We do not become healers.
We came as healers. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become storytellers.
We came as carriers of the stories that we and our ancestors actually lived. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become artists. We came as artists. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become writers.. dancers.. musicians.. helpers.. peacemakers. We came as such. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not learn to love in this sense. We came as Love.
We are Love.
Some of us are still catching up
to who we truly are.
 
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Advice column by writer Cary Tennis: 

I have everything. My life is empty - I've got the house, the wife and the money, so why am I not happy?
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“We know this much: Maximizing your purchases will not make you happy. The lifestyle of  consumption is not designed to make you happy. It's designed to make the people who sell you things happy. It's designed to suck the maximum number of dollars out of you for the maximum number of years, maintaining you as a dependable, lifetime revenue source on the nearly infinite ledger of American capitalism."

Read Cary Tennis's answer here: 

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​A Moving Ghost Story:

Near the end of life, my hospice patient had a ghostly visitor who altered his view of the world...

“Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”
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Read the storyhere. 

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'Where Are The Women?'
Uncovering The Lost Works Of Female Renaissance Artists
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"The nun's works were prized by Florentines during the 16th century because they were believed to be imbued with spirituality. Her contemporary, the art historian Giorgio Vasari, wrote that she 'would have done marvelous things if, like men, she had been able to study and to devote herself to drawing and copying living and natural things.'

Art restorer Elizabeth Wicks, an American based in Florence, says 'that like so many female artists, Nelli was then forgotten.'"
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In 2021, Take These 12 Incredible Mississippi Hikes, One For Each Month Of The Year
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2021 may have just begun, but it’s never too early to start making some plans for the upcoming year. If you’re in agreeance, you’ll want to read on because we’ve compiled a list of 12 incredible hikes – one for each month of the year.  
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Where Did the Phrase “Tree-Hugger” Come From? 

​ Indian Roots of the Term Speak of a History of Non-Violent Resistance   
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The late Lu Fly, hugging a Bay St. Louis tree, photo by Ellis Anderson

The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village.
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Shawn Colvin- This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
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​The song by new wave band Talking Heads, released in November 1983 as the second single from its fifth album Speaking in Tongues. The lyrics were written by David Byrne, and the music was written by Byrne and the other members of the band, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison.”
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The Myth of Talent
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Kurt Vonnegut.

 
When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you,’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
 
And he went "WOW. That’s amazing!"

And I said, "Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them."
 
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before:
 
"I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them."
 
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘Win’ at them.
 
- Kurt Vonnegut
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What Is a Teenage Girl?
Feeling things is an act of bravery 
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"What if we stopped seeing the unimaginable heights of teenage girls’ emotions as anxiety or hysteria (a hateful word derived from “hystera,” Greek for uterus) and instead likened these heights of feeling to space exploration, deep sea diving, scientific research into what makes us human?"

Read the story here. 
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February 1, 2021: 0 Dark 30, high winds, big chop
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Kat:  40 degrees, could only find one glove heading out the door. But wow, so worth it.  

Photo by Kat Fitzpatrick