Five Terrific Pieces You Will Love on this First Tuesday in December (5th).

A joyful artist. Simplicity fosters connection. Communing with ducks. An abecedarian. Sharing the Earth. Love, liturgy, and change. 2024 read-along of War and Peace and Wolf Hall.

Dec 05, 2023

Friends, We have five great pieces today from a variety of artists.

You will also find at the bottom an important announcement about

’s community project to read along during 2024 both War and Peace and Hilary’s Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall.

Please enjoy. — Ben

Bailey Richardson

at Art Dogs shares a wonderful piece about Nick Cave, an artist whose works will make you smile and wonder.

Cave is an

[a]merican sculptor, dancer, performance artist, and professor. The New York Times has called him “the most joyful, and critical, artist in America” as well as “one of that select group of artists, like Jeff Koons or David Hockney, who is celebrated by both high art and popular culture.”

Bailey writes of his work: “Words don’t do justice . . . .” She’s right. It’s wacky, colorful, creative, fun, thought-provoking, and moves freely.

An adventure ride into a unique mind and his work.

In Please Understand Me,

Brad Montague

shows us how the simplest items and acts can foster meaningful connections in foreign places.

What I failed to say with words came out much better through doodles. Simple play can create deep connections. There’s something special about time spent together laughing, no matter the language or setting. Delight, it seems, truly is universal. Time spent just playfully—and profoundly—being human together is life-giving in ways that go beyond words.

I love everything about this piece – the writing, the discovery, the joy, and the photos that reflect them.

In Love is Liturgy,

Sarah Carter

writes about faith, prayer, motherhood, and one of the most important and naturally changing relationships one can have.

A top-notch piece.

Nature photographer

Bill Davison

brings us The Restless Fall Sky, a gentle, mesmerizing piece about his relationship with ducks. “I go to great lengths to commune with ducks,” he writes.

Nature is a magic show. Fall waterfowl migration brings us sparks of summer that fall from the sky, bringing us warmth, energy, and an infusion of life. The ducks are filled with golden light as they drift through our lives, like glowing embers of timeless energy.

His prose is beautiful. The anticipation of his interactions is palpable. The photos are sublime.

Roselle Angwin

shows how our perspective on the world around us matters deeply. She writes in 7 Of Mice:

[S]omething that exercises me is how we tend to classify other species as either a ‘resource’ or a ‘pest’ in relation entirely to our species. If it’s a resource, a commodity, we exploit it as another object in our extractive economy. If it’s a pest, we eliminate it. In doing either, we are making Other into an ‘it’. . . . In either case, it’s extracted from the web of life in which we all have our own part to play, large or minute. The web depends on all of us in the interdependent relationships that co-create it, and that are destroyed at immense cost; as we all know, potentially at the cost of life on this little planet.

This is a thoughtful, spiritual piece — a common theme today, it seems.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

These were mine. They are gone now. I did think of everyone at the time.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Simon Haisell

has done something extraordinary for the Substack community. He has organized year-long read-alongs of War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, the first in her Cromwell Trilogy. Mantel’s historical fiction chronicles the life of Thomas Cromwell, one of the leaders of England’s Reformation and chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540, when the king ordered that he be beheaded.

If you want to join Simon’s year-long read-alongs in 2024, the appropriate links are here:

War and Peace

Wolf Hall

These projects are truly a labor of Simon’s love for these works. The communities they foster are personal to him. He shares his thoughts on the 2023 read-along of War and Peace, which he has read five times.

And somewhere in another seat in another country, another reader turns the page. The same page. And we two, share together the story unfolding, with hundreds more. Barely a book club now, more like a constellation of bright, wandering, wondering stars. Gladsome and mysterious. Those were the words Tolstoy used today. He was speaking of stars, but I am looking at leaves, and thinking of readers reading, all around the world. I want to cry, but I laugh instead.

Simon’s lead is what the Substack community is all about. Please join in.