The Joy of Life (1936), Max Ernst

Yesterday I spent the afternoon smelling fragrances at my neighbor’s house. Her husband died almost two years ago. He was a radiant weirdo with a wry sense of humor who would openly state his likes and dislikes in such a firm and unwavering way that even his biggest grudges sounded righteous and reasonable. Whenever he a…

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Zoomorphic Couple (1933), Max Ernst

I had a dream last night that my friend had a device in her kitchen that she used to clean things. The device was a huge, made of shiny white metal, bigger than a fridge and a stove combined, with an oblong, pill-shaped compartment in the middle. There were pieces of fruit in the compartment. I was going to clean the f…

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Reply to Red (1943), Yves Tanguy

The trees are still today, still under still white clouds, and the cicadas have returned. And when they rub their wings together in a swampy chorus, I see that I’ve been guided by discernment and control, withdrawing and reconnoitering, waiting for reinforcements, waiting for clarity, waiting for divine intervention.

But t…

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One Year The Milkweed (1944), Arshile Gorky

Last night I had a dream that I was in a play. I was hoping for a big part but instead I had one line, written in all caps on a piece of white cardboard, no context provided, no script available. My line was:

A NEW SWELL, AT LEAST.

My character was a nameless woman standing next to a man with a name. I was a wife…

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Nymphéas (1915), Claude Monet

The war with Iran is back on again. Supposedly Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this anymore. Wasn’t that the idea? But more importantly:

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Poplars on the Bank of the Epte (1892), Claude Monet

For years, the world was a mystery to me. People were living puzzles. I was always digging for more clues. I wanted to understand myself, analyze every scrap of information, dig through every layer of meaning, get to the bottom of every riddle.

Now I know too much. I’d like to know a lot less.

I have a n…

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Boats on the Beach at Étretat (1885), Claude Monet

Someday, if we play our cards right, we might finally have the money and the energy to fixate on what we don’t have yet. It’ll take hard work and focus, but eventually we’ll have the luxury of considering all of the luxuries that will never be ours. That’s when we’ll finally have space and time to reflec…

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Still Life with Bottle, Carafe, Bread and Wine (1862-3), Claude Monet

On the front page of the New York Times yesterday morning, I discovered photos of black and white coral, dying under the oceans thanks to climate change. I looked closer and the coral was moving. It wasn’t coral but clouds of white and black smoke from bombs dropped on villages in sout…

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Still Life with Pheasants and Plovers (1879), Claude Monet

No one ever tells you how something gets made, not in a way you can understand, no details from the day that the soul of the thing finally took shape, how they welcomed the light to move with the shadows, how they felt when the light finally wandered in, how small and reverent they became when ob…

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Still Life with Apples (1898), Paul Cézanne

I have this affliction where I want to start with something new every morning: a new idea, a new shape, a new point, a new wave, a new point-wave, radiating from the center of my nervous system, a broadcast from the metaphysical radio tower at the center of my psyche. If I’m tired of the Terry Gross character i…

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San Mateo Apóstol (1610-1614), El Greco

I’m driving through Spain in the springtime and each day is a pastoral fantasy: olives and cows, grapes and green pastures, rocky bluffs and winding rivers, hillside towns with cathedrals at the top, pointing up at God like an NBA player, mad props to the man who makes it all possible.

You might believe in God if yo…

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Low Tide at Pourville, near Dieppe (1882), Claude Monet

Hello digital nomads. How are the hinterlands of your phones these days? Are you finding new oases where you can rest and restore your spirit? Or are you high and dry and huffing your own supply?

I’m off the juice for the moment. It took a solid four years to get clean. Ah, but I used to relish the s…

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Path in the Wheat Fields at Pourville (1882), Claude Monet

Greetings, forever lovers, shit shovelers, and puppy mufflers! I’m here to tell you more about my new lifestyle of prudence and forbearance, two words I never use for a reason: I hate to hold back, and I hate to restrain my desires, I hate to say less than I want to say, I hate to eat less than I…

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Spring (Fruit Trees in Bloom) (1873), Claude Monet

Greetings, eternal infernal lovers and lovies and loveless mother-shovers! It’s me, your forever fair-feathered bad-weather friend and diurnal mistress of the blight! I’m back from a long, sluggish descent into anxiety and milkfat to tell you what I learned in my travels, so pull up a comfy chair and hav…

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Étretat in the Rain (1886), Claude Monet

Today I was driving in the rain behind a Volvo with two matching red bumper stickers, one next to each tail light, that said:

PLEASE BE PATIENT, NEW DRIVER!

I immediately thought about how it must feel to be a teenager whose parent insists on putting not one but two bumper stickers on their car that yell “PLEASE BE …

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Sailboats (1864-1866), Claude Monet

I feel good today, I feel right, I can eat the shallow ice on the gravel driveway, crunch it between my teeth, rocks and ice, like an extra crunchy slushy. “Extra crunchy, please,” I tell the slushy man, and he hands me a snowdrift in a triangular paper cup, white slush with tiny gray nuggets that taste like skinned kn…

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The Break-up of the Ice (1880), Claude Monet

It’s very winter. Can you believe how winter? I have been wearing socks and soft pants for a month now. We were snowed in two weekends in a row, and there’s still snow on the ground three weeks since the first snowfall. “I didn’t know it snowed there,” said one of my friends from LA. She hasn’t visited yet and…

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A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur (1865), Claude Monet

Negative emotions are good for you. Without anger and sadness and spite, what do you become? Some kind of weird, cheerful earthworm. Nobody needs that unless they’re living in a Richard Scarry book, in which case they require a little worm buddy to help them stay calm while navigating a maze of pi…

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Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monet

Now that we know that our world was fully shaped and sorted by so-called honorable men who sit on their hands as men and women and children are pulled out of their cars and their houses, shot in the face and dragged face down across the pavement, now that we can see how spineless these heroes of Western democracy …

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Argenteuil, Late Afternoon (1872), Claude Monet

If you look into your heart, what you’ll discover over and over again is a love for magical strangers. They seem to wander into your life out of the blue, but the truth is that most of what you encounter there was invented from the ground up using only your mind. You made them to make sense of the magical s…

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