HeyJaredThe Life Boat
Weekly letters from a windswept island in the North Atlantic. Nature, art and books that help us stay buoyant. Keep creativity afloat with subscriber co-working. Climb aboard.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest issues
Creativity is a path to freedom (opens the original)
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Hello friendsI’ve been deep in painting lately. In the studio I’m finding a focus born of deadlines, yes, but also something deeper. Maybe it’s the unsettling times we are living through. I am leaning into repetition like prayer. I live at the tip of one tiny brush.I recently re-read an essay by the artist Richard Wright that I found a while back, that articulated something I’ve been feeling my way towards:“Painting is an act that connects reality and consciousnes
The quiet exhilaration of being alive (opens the original)
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Hello friendsAutumn is here, heralded this week by a sequence of gales and heavy downpours that left the roads and fields covered in glittering sheets of water. On my daily walks I am buffeted and drenched then blow-dried by turns. The blustering wind is a constant companion, as it will be now for most of the winter. I stride downwind with seven league boots on, feeling superhuman, the bionic woman! Then I toil back upwind enfeebled, puffing hard, as if swimming against a rip tide.<a class="imag
Strange Beauties (opens the original)
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Hello friendsI’m back in the studio again after several weeks of visitors, absences and travels, some for work, some for pleasure, some to reconnect with friends and family, all good, all part of the extravert, convivial season that is Summer. <img alt
Did you say it’s made of waves? (opens the original)
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Hello friends,I’m on the road today, so I write this in a bit of breathless rush. I’m on my way home from taking part in an Open Studios at the Hugo Burge Foundation in the Borders (a mostly rural region between Scotland and England). The Foundation is a fairly new organisation that’s doing some wonderful work supporting artists, craft makers and writers, working with educational institutions and charities to improve access to creative learning and craft apprenticeships, and also growing fresh,
Retreat to move forward (opens the original)
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Hello FriendsI’ve been away on retreat. I briefly left my island for another one, Holy Isle, the one in the Firth of Clyde, a tiny island lying just off yet another island, Arran. The damp, ferny, yeasty smells, the whine and tickle of midges, on calm August evenings in the West of Scotland took me right back to childhood weekends in Aberfoyle. All very different from Orkney’s more Northerly air, with its salty, mineral chill, its muscular gusts and sulphurous whiffs of seaweed.<a class="image-l
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