** Maria Popova on Willa Cather**

… as an artist, i found this Brain Pickings post on Willa Cather particularly welcome this morning… i think it gets at one of the reasons i like living in communities with a lively mixture of working and middle class people who go about their lives largely without the pretensions that wealth can bring, or so it seems to me… from another post on Cather by Maria Popova…

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.¹