The People

Musician Amanda Palmer’s
Heart Opening TED Talk

I am drawn to two very different kinds of people, people who live at the center of things, and people who live at the edge. Those at the edge have always frightened and fascinated me. They are the authors of innovation, not because they seek to innovate, but because the distance they stand from the center affords them a different kind of sight. They see possibilities in things that others might dismiss. I have seen with this same kind of outsider’s eye while also craving an insider’s sense of balance and place. Lately I’ve made peace with these hungers and embraced the decidedly ordinary parts of who I am: the me who wants to say something new and offer something of value, but who also wants to connect and find the places where I fit in this world. I thought of these twin hungers of mine, to be ordinary, to be extraordinary, while listening to musician Amanda Palmer‘s TED talk on The Art Of Asking, which is really a talk about human connection, the kind of deep human connection we all long for and too rarely experience.

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Happy Birthday, Paul Newman

by Paula Puryear

Paul Newman

Today is Paul Newman’s birthday. He would be 88 years old. We remembered him by looking back at the New York Times obituary that paid such beautiful homage to his life in 2008.

Newman is an icon and exemplar of The Fully Realized Life. Here are a few highlights from Newman’s fully realized life:

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Waris Ahluwalia’s Iconic Life

by Paula Puryear

Waris Ahluwalia has followed the rhythms of his own peripatetic life, and landed on the shores of some enchanted land, where you can do anything you fancy, and all of it seemingly well. All of Ahluwalia’s wandering and exploration have turned him into a sort of “renaissance adventurer,” one who, on the one hand, makes glorious, luxurious, bohemian jewels and, on the other, stars in movies both big and small (from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited to The Inside Man). He collaborates thither and yon with this one and that one (like the panty line he did for Yoox.com or diamond collaboration he did with Forevermark), gets profiled in the grooviest online places (mrporter.com, theselby.com, thesartorialist.com and the list goes on), and shows up at so many creative happenings that you can get a creative royalty contact high just from perusing the photos of his gallivanting about.

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Jessica Chastain’s Dream Come True

by Paula Puryear

One night in November, Jessica Chastain sat at Charlie Rose’s table, along with David Straitham and Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, with whom she’s appearing in The Heiress in a limited run on Broadway, and talked about the play, her life, and the last two glorious years, which have brought her a fame that she wears like her own skin, like it was always meant to be there, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Chastain, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award this past winter for her work in The Help (and who will almost certainly be nominated again this winter — this time for Best Actress — for her work in this year’s Oscar buzz-worthy Zero Dark Thirty — told the story of her grandmother taking her to see Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when she was a child. There was a little girl on stage and her grandmother told her “This is their job. This is what they do. It’s professional theatre,” and Chastain says, “As soon as I saw it, it wasn’t ‘that’s what I want to be when I grow up,’ it was ‘that’s what I am.”

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Tata Harper On The Farm

by Paula Puryear

Tata Harper lives on a 1200 acre farm near Middlebury, Vermont, with her husband Henry, their three kids and a menagerie of rescue dogs, cats, sheep and goats. They grow most of their own food and they also grow some of the ingredients for Tata’s eponymous, natural, Tata Harper skincare line, which is also manufactured on the farm.

Growing up, Tata was passionate about math and science. She loved experimenting and figuring out how things work. Little surprise, then, that she became an Industrial Engineer. Tata’s career path changed in 2004, when her stepfather was diagnosed with cancer and advised to avoid conventional products because of the toxic chemicals they contain. Tata, whose grandmother introduced her to homemade skincare as a child, did what she does. She started experimenting. For five years, she worked with a team of chemists, biologists, agriculturalists and aromatherapists from around the worlds. The result? A line of luscious, texturally rich, wonderfully (and naturally) scented products that deliver results.

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