Sew Like the Wind

Photo by Felix Clay, from The Guardian
Irish poet Seamus Heaney died yesterday. The New York Times has a nice obit. Here is a line from it that really struck me as being great advice for anyone in the arts:
In the 1984 collection, “Station Island,” he wrote: “The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”
As my favourite time of year for working approaches, I think I should pin that up above my sewing table.

Comments

  1. Oh, Heather, yes, a wonderful quote. I have pinned it up too.
    Happy season-turning. I am liking it...

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  2. Yes. "Don't be so earnest." I need that admonition quite often. . . especially when admiring others' (seemingly perfect) work in light of my own obviously imperfect (but just as necessary to my own well-being) stuff.

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  3. I copied this quote into my journal.
    Thank you.

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  4. He was fantastic wasn't he? I have a quote of his up on my kitchen wall, that I used to have up in my old studio. It's from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, where he says poetry has; 'that power to persuade the vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunter-gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are credible'. From Jan, hunting and gathering X

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