goethe

To encounter beauty daily through art, music, and poetry, then use the encounter as material for an act of creation.

Each week, select three sources of beauty: a piece of music, a poem, and a work of visual art. Spend 15 minutes each day with the same three, returning to them until their details become familiar and their patterns visible. At the end of the week, create one thing in any medium, a journal entry, a sketch, a song, a poem, a paragraph, a voice memo, that draws from all three. Then choose three new sources and begin again.

In 1786, Goethe abandoned his position at the Weimar court and traveled to Italy under a false name. For two years he immersed himself in classical art and architecture, sketching ruins, studying Renaissance masters, walking through landscapes that had shaped Western beauty. But Goethe did not merely absorb. He wrote, sketched, and drafted throughout, treating every encounter with beauty as raw material for his own work. He returned to Weimar transformed, and his later advice was specific: "One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture." The Plus Behaviors reading (teaching; not recovered as Goethe’s words): Goethe did not mean as luxury. He meant as fuel.

She goethed her morning by listening to a cello suite, reading a Szymborska poem, and a Hopper painting, then writing one paragraph that wove all three together.