“I write in Yaddo's Stone South studio once more, glancing out now and then over the autumn berry bushes into the familiar meadow and apple trees, now so richly laden that their dark trunks rise from circles of fallen fruit, the pale, clear green of sun in a curling wave.

When I stayed at Aunt Nancy's farm in Virginia as a young girl, it was my job to separate the milk every morning and evening. I used to marvel that all I had to do was to assemble, carefully and with very clean hands, a well-scrubbed device and turn the crank for cream to emerge.

I never understood how the mechanism worked; nor do I understand why the simple act of writing has so apparently effortlessly revealed to me the secret logic of my life. And, in that logic, a faith to illuminate my days.”

Anne Truitt, Daybook, 1982

Stone South 3, Acrylic on paper 1974

“Returning to the Kentucky landscape of my childhood and most importantly to the hills, I am able to reclaim a sublime understanding that living in harmony with the earth renews the spirit. Coming home to live in Kentucky was for me a journey back to a place where I felt I belonged. But it was also returning to a place that I felt needed me and my resources, a place where I as a citizen could be in community with other folk seeking to revive and renew our local environ-ment, seeking to have fidelity to a place. Living engagement with both a specific place and the issue of sustainability, we know and understand that we are living lives of interdependence.”

Bell Hooks, Belonging, 2009

“When art trumpets that it does not have an emotional or spiritual facet—that is an aberrant or marginal phenomenon.”

- Henry Flynt,
from On Spirituality & Art

“I was thinking about the freedom that comes with feeling that one has finished a project—a recording, a tour, a piece of writing—to one’s satisfaction and that the road ahead is clear to embark upon something that feels different, and that you’re not tackling the same ideas over and over again.  That’s one reason why I’ve always liked toggling between different working situations—solo, duo, group and largely composed versus largely improvised methods.  To start again, differently, afresh—that’s always the dream.”

- David Grubbs

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Recorded in 1981 in the studios at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, this beautifully rendered track by Cheri Knight unfurls with the kind of shimmering undulations that artists like Yasuaki Shimizu were capturing around the same time. The music bristles with the raw spirit of DIY experimentation of that period of music-making. The other single from this work, Prime Numbers, is similarly wonderful.