“When you look out his [Scott’s] window he’s painting for you.” – Eric Fischl Scott Avett is a visual artist, musician, and songwriter. No amount of descriptors quite do him justice. Scott’s work was met by my ears before my eyes. His songs slip into the ear stream, reverberate off the rib cage and remind the heart it was born free. Scott’s paintings hold your gaze in absorption, jostle you awake, and drop you off a block later. In our conversation today Scott and I talk about creativity and contemplation, mysterious inputs that need to be absence of the thought …
Tag: New Seeds of Contemplation
James Finley on the Healing Path
“The beauty and illumination of Jim’s language, whether he is writing about trauma or God’s presence, open the heart. To read this book is to be changed forever.” — Bonnie Badenoch(Author of The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships) I was overly giddy, strangely nervous, but above all grateful to be in conversation with Jim about his breathtaking new book, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation. Each page is a thousand pages deep, that is how Jim walks about the world, drawing from the depths and teaching with winsome grace, poetics, and …
A Revelatory Elegy of Unknowing with Todd Davis (author of Coffin Honey)
Reading Todd Davis’s gorgeous poems, you can’t help but feel that the capacities of human vision, and also our appetite for exactly this way of seeing and naming have been mysteriously, precisely increased. – Jane Hirshfield The poems of Todd Davis sharpen a reader’s spirit and focus, on the bloodstained teeth breaking apart the day-to-day doldrums and on the mythic imagination necessary to bear witness to this daunting moment in our species, on our planet. Todd Davis and I spoke back in 2019 about his book Native Species and he has read his poems in the last two years on …