Inspiration for today.

Born on this day, 1887

Charcoal Drawings in a Mailing Tube

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on 15 November 1887 on a dairy farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of seven children. She decided as a young girl to be an artist and said so to anyone who asked. By her late twenties she was teaching art in Texas and South Carolina, far from the galleries, and one autumn she put away her colours and made a series of charcoal drawings of nothing but shapes, forms that felt true to her and resembled no one else's work. She mailed them to a friend in New York with instructions to show them to nobody. The friend carried them to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who hung them in his gallery in 1916 without asking. O'Keeffe came to protest and stayed to talk. She spent the next decades painting flowers so large the viewer had to stop, and later the bones, hills and adobe walls of New Mexico, where she lived alone into her nineties. When her eyesight failed, she turned to clay.

For todayMake one small thing today that looks like you, not like anyone else, and keep it even if nobody sees it.

Died on this day, 1630

Eight Minutes of Arc

Johannes Kepler died on 15 November 1630 in Regensburg, far from home, having travelled there to collect salary owed to him for years. He had been a sickly, short-sighted child from a poor family in southern Germany, and had meant to become a clergyman. Instead, in 1600, he went to Prague to work for Tycho Brahe, who owned the most precise observations of the planets ever made and guarded them jealously. Kepler was given Mars, the most troublesome. For years he tried to fit its path to circles, as every astronomer since antiquity had done, and he nearly succeeded: his best model disagreed with Tycho's data by only eight minutes of arc, a sliver smaller than a fingernail held at arm's length. A lesser man would have called that good enough. Kepler trusted the measurements over the tradition, threw out the circles, and found that Mars moves on an ellipse with the Sun at one focus. The error he refused to ignore became the foundation of modern astronomy.

For todayWhen something almost fits today, pause over the small gap instead of rounding it away.

Wisdom

If You Did Not Have Them

Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast: but of the things which thou hast select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VII.27

Gratitude lists can feel forced. Marcus proposes a sharper exercise. Pick the best things you have, not everything, just the best, and imagine for a moment that you lacked them and were trying to get them. The warm flat you grumble about would be the dream of someone sleeping rough. The friend who texts too often would be an answered prayer to someone lonely. The working knees, the job that bores you, the ordinary Thursday. Seen from the side of wanting, they regain their weight. He adds a caution in the next line: do not cling. But for today, simply noticing what you would chase if you lost it is enough to change the colour of the afternoon.

For todayChoose the three best things in your life and imagine, for one minute each, wanting them and not having them.

Parable · Zen story

Bring Me Your Mind

Huike had searched for a long time and found no rest. He came at last to the cave where Bodhidharma sat facing the wall in silence, and he waited outside through a night of falling snow until it reached his knees. In the morning the old monk turned. Huike said what he had come to say: his mind was not at peace, and he begged the master to set it at peace. Bodhidharma considered him. Very well, he said. Bring me this mind of yours, and I will settle it for you. Huike stood in the snow and looked inward for the thing that had troubled him all these years, meaning to hand it over. He looked for a long while. I have searched for it, he said finally, and I cannot find it. There, said Bodhidharma. I have set it at peace. The snow went on falling, and something that had never been solid let go.

For todayWhen worry rises today, try to find exactly where it is, and notice how it shifts the moment you look.