My favorite story is a beautiful one

An invaluable tale for leaders and dreamers, hopeful outsiders, stifled insiders, budding pilots and budding mystics. It is the story of a seagull who believes there is more to life than scavenging, sets out to follow his dream and creates so much more than he ever could have imagined. Fear, failure, shame, dedication, passion, wonder and glory are all present in this gorgeous story. It is desert-island, time-capsule worthy.

To purchase the book from Simon and Schuster click here. To read it now, click here for the virtual book (cool!) or here for plain text.

Transcendence, Part 1

I'm reading a fascinating, scholarly account of the eccentric artistic temperment in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower's Born Under Saturn. The book is 300 pages enumerating the oddities of artists from Greek and Roman antiquity through the French Revolution.

I'm especially interested in the idea that in order to tap into the artistic element available in man's existence, perhaps these artists had to, or found they were only able to, access it by consciously or unconsciously altering their existence as compared to that default of ordinary men.