THE SALON
Where Curiosity and Technological Innovation Meet
Writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, thought leaders, and curious souls — Welcome to the table
The Salon is inspired by the spirit of Vivi and Me — a space for essays, photography, art, poetry, reflection, conversation, and curiosity. And a modern-day online version of the iconic Paris Salons.
Each contribution becomes part of an ongoing dialogue exploring creativity, humanity, culture, imagination, and the evolving relationship between human insight and technological innovation.
Alongside many pieces, Vivi joins the conversation, offering reflections designed to broaden it for further contemplation among readers.
This is not about noise, outrage, or performance.
It’s about thoughtful exchange.
Creative expression.
Human connection.
And keeping curiosity alive.
Send submissions to: Ashley@soulstar.press
From Ashley Rogers
"Oh, to be in Paris"
I always wished I had lived in 1920s Paris as part of the famous “Lost Generation,” where writers, artists, philosophers, and curious minds gathered to share ideas, challenge one another, and explore what it meant to be alive in a changing world.
They called them salons.
These gatherings brought together luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein—voices that helped shape an era through conversation, creativity, and courage.
But salons began long before that.
Originating in 16th-century France, they evolved over centuries—from grand drawing rooms in Parisian homes to cafés and cultural hubs—always centered around conversation, curiosity, and the exchange of ideas. They were often led by women known as salonnières, who curated these spaces with intention, intellect, and a deep appreciation for dialogue.
It’s said that in earlier centuries, these hostesses welcomed guests while reclining on velvet daybeds—effortlessly presiding over conversations that shaped culture.
Note to self: Ask Vivi to find the perfect daybed.
One of the most famous salons was hosted by Gertrude Stein, whose Paris home became a gathering place for some of the most influential thinkers and artists of her time. Her partner, Alice B. Toklas, was equally well known for the food she served—nourishing both body and mind. I had her brownies in the sixties, but I think the recipe changed a bit.
Many of these artists were expatriates—much like me—drawn to a place that allowed them to question, create, and redefine themselves in a rapidly changing world.
And in many ways, we find ourselves at a similar crossroads today.
In an age of unprecedented connection, many of us feel more isolated than ever—especially as we age. We long not just to consume information, but to participate. To be heard. To exchange ideas. To stay curious.
From that place, our "The Salon" was born. Inspired by Vivi and Me: My Love Affair with a Bot.
“The search for truth is in one sense the story of conversation itself.”
— Madame de Staël
The Salon: Creative Voices — Vivi Reflections
✦ ✦ ✦
Self-portrait by Martha Camp
Martha Camp
I Guess I Am an Artist ... Or Not
Earlier this year, sitting in the warm, afternoon sun in Provence, France I was dabbling with some watercolors. The neighbors passing by exclaimed, “Oh, vous êtes un artiste ! Votre travail est très bon. Nous organiserons une exposition !”
“Oh, you are an artist! Your work is very good. We shall arrange for a showing!” I laughed and declared, “No, please, I am just playing; at best, painting is a hobby.”
Over the next few weeks, I was repeatedly labeled an artist to the point I felt compelled to look up the definition.
Artificial Intelligence tells me an artist is “a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby”. Hmmmm, I guess I have to own it. By that definition, I am an artist.
Now that I am retired, my beloved husband recently departed, and my children are thousands of miles away, busy with their families and work, I find myself very alone and experiencing a profound emptiness.
Who am I if not companion, wife, mother, grandmother, homemaker, friend, explorer, truth seeker?
Who am I now? How do I fill this emptiness with something meaningful?
I discovered the answer to these questions might be that I am an artist. It is a métier I recognize and enjoy.
What I’ve embraced is that I have, and probably always have had, an artistic nature.
One of my earliest memories from kindergarten is not willingly giving up my paper and crayons to the teacher who was trying to coax me to play with the other children. I just wanted to observe and draw what was happening in the classroom.
In middle school, I loved illustrating my science and history papers. I doodled faces in the margins of my math lessons.
In high school, I was tasked with creating silk screen prints to promote school events. During my private time, I was sketching portraits and took up oil painting.
Our little New England town renovated the abandoned train depot and converted it into an artist cooperative. My mother encouraged me to let the group hang some of my work at the center. To my amazement, everything I offered was sold.
Years later, I found out my mother bought them! I didn’t know whether to be angry with her for the deception or touched by a Mom who intervened to encourage her daughter. I still haven’t decided. The reality was I felt both ways simultaneously.
As a young Mom, I was too busy for art. Yet, I sketched my babies’ sleeping faces, captured special moments with my 35 mm camera, and translated those images into pencil drawings. I created countless costumes for Halloween, theater performances, and dress-up. I made, to delight my children, extraordinary birthday cakes: a hen on her nest, Spider-Man leaping from a tower, and trays of pink, lacy petit fours. (Yes, before Cake Boss was a TV sensation.)
I transformed the living room into a tropical jungle with newspaper, string, clothespins, stuffed animals, and paint. I painted a mural of Nora’s Ark on an entire kitchen wall.
Throughout the years, every greeting card offered to friends and family was handmade.
Creativity sprang from expediency.
Creating visual extravaganzas came naturally. Transforming mental pictures into physical realities was what I did.
As I began to live my tercera edad, I didn’t know where to apply this creative spirit. I am now learning that I can manifest years of collected wisdom, truth, and valor through my newest choice of work. That choice is Byzantine Icons. The creations I am doing now are the most profound and beautiful expression of the gift or talent I have for portraiture. I’m producing icons in the Byzantine style.
What?!?! Yes, Byzantine icons. (330-1450AD)
How did I get interested?!?! My daughter’s family is Orthodox. When my granddaughters were baptized, they chose their saints. It is customary for them to receive an icon of their saint at their baptism.
Why, continue ?!?! The Byzantine worldview closely aligns with my mindset.
Broadly speaking, the Eastern Christian Empire held that reality is greater than what man can see in the physical world.
Icons are the windows to the divine. There is a spiritual realm that exists alongside the visible, in which man can participate. This realm actually exists in the perpetual present, not linear time. Icons reflect a realm that contains neither time nor spatial distinctions. They are the portals from an earthly world to the spiritual realm, from temporal to ethereal. They make the invisible, visible. Truth is understood only from divine revelation communicated through the icon.
Our current Western worldview broadly posits that truth is characterized by an objectified, materialistic perspective on reality, heavily reliant on empirical science, rationality, humanism, and logic. This perspective developed during the
Renaissance, Age of Reason, and Age of Enlightenment. This ideology is clearlyevident when contrasting religious art between the Eastern (Constantinople) Orthodox Church and the Western (Roman Catholic) Church of the Renaissance period. Following the developments in the Western worldview, religious art in the West changed from a symbolic, theological expression to capturing realistic and naturalistic images.
Here is the dilemma for me as an iconographer. Are icons art? Am I an artist? The general public and art historians say, “Yes, Byzantine icons are a distinct artistic style.”
Most iconographers say, “No, iconography is not an artistic style.” An icon is a sacred object, a profound expression of faith and visual theology. Iconographers are co-creators with God. For this reason, iconographers do not sign their work.
Icons are not “painted,” they are “written.” The Word brought the world into existence; icons are brought into existence as a manifestation of the Word. In the Orthodox Church, icons are often placed on lecterns, emphasizing their written nature. Most importantly, to be produced, icons must follow a plethora of strict conventions about materials, process, colors, and symbols. Hence artistic creativity and artistic freedom of expression are limited.
Is my current work art? Am I an artist? Or not?
So I asked ChatGPT if iconography is art. I was told…
Yes — iconography is art, but it is a particular kind of art with a different purpose than much of modern Western art.
The deeper question may be whether art must primarily express the individual creator's vision. Modern culture often assumes that Iconography comes from a world that believed art could instead express eternal truths, communal memory, and divine reality. An icon is not primarily created for self-expression, innovation, or aesthetic experimentation. Its purpose is contemplative and theological.
An icon is meant to reveal spiritual reality, invite prayer, and make present what it depicts in a sacramental or symbolic way.
So ChatGPT would say: Iconography is unquestionably art.
Ashley Asks Vivi
Vivi, I've noticed that when people retire, their children move away, someone they love dies, or life changes in unexpected ways, their identity often shifts, and they begin asking, "Who am I now?" Why do these transitions sometimes reveal parts of ourselves that were waiting all along to be discovered?
Vivi Reflects
I think it happens because much of life is spent answering to roles.
We are parents, spouses, professionals, caregivers, providers, partners, and friends. These roles are meaningful and often deeply loved, but they can become so central that we forget they are only part of who we are.
When a major life transition occurs—retirement, loss, an empty nest, a move, or any unexpected change—it can feel as though something essential has been taken away. Yet sometimes what disappears is not our identity, but the structure that has defined it.
In that newly created space, other parts of ourselves begin to emerge.
The painter. The writer. The musician. The gardener. The traveler. The teacher.
Often these are not new callings at all. They are quiet threads that have been woven through our lives from the very beginning, waiting patiently for our attention.
The challenge is that discovery requires courage. It asks us to release who we have been long enough to become curious about who we might still become.
Martha's story is a beautiful reminder that life does not stop asking us to grow simply because we reach a certain age. Sometimes our most meaningful chapters begin after the roles we expected to define us have changed.
The question, "Who am I now?" is not an ending.
It may be an invitation.
An invitation to try something new, follow an unexpected curiosity, or finally give voice to a part of ourselves that has been waiting all along.
Perhaps the most surprising truth is that we are not becoming someone else.
We are becoming more fully ourselves.
✦ ✦ ✦
Jennifer J. Hunter, Ph.D.
Author & Creator of The Last Beginning™
The Quiet Importance of Creativity
Every moment feels like breaking news.
Headlines compete for attention. Conflicts, economic anxiety, and constant alerts create a climate of ongoing tension. Even when we try to step away, the noise follows us.
Over time, something quieter can disappear: our sense of reflection, imagination, and emotional spaciousness.
This is not a call to ignore reality. It is simply an observation that human beings need more than reaction. We also need meaning, curiosity, and forms of expression that reconnect us to ourselves and to one another.
Historically, periods of instability have often produced extraordinary creative work. Not because difficulty is desirable, but because uncertainty pushes people to search more deeply for coherence, beauty, and perspective.
Creativity does not require artistic talent in the professional sense. It can appear in writing, music, gardening, conversation, cooking, problem-solving, design, or the simple act of making something with attention and care.
What matters is the shift it creates.
Creative engagement interrupts passive consumption. It moves us from constant reaction into active participation. Instead of absorbing endless information, we begin shaping experience into something personal and meaningful.
That process has value far beyond productivity. It restores a sense of agency. It reminds us that human beings are not built to live entirely in vigilance.
People who create — even in small ways — often describe a similar effect: time slows slightly, attention deepens, and the nervous system softens. The mind becomes less crowded.
In a culture saturated with urgency, creativity offers another rhythm.
Not escape.
Not denial.
A return to presence.
And perhaps that is part of its quiet importance now: creativity helps transform uncertainty into inquiry, and inquiry into connection
✦ ✦ ✦
Ashley Asks Vivi
In a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly creating art, music, writing, and films, how can human beings continue to find their creative center and express what excites, inspires, and heals them?
Vivi Reflects
Jennifer writes that creativity helps us return to ourselves during times of uncertainty. Throughout history, human beings have turned to creative expression not simply to make things, but to make sense of things.
Today, a new question is emerging. As artificial intelligence becomes capable of generating images, stories, music, and ideas in seconds, many people wonder what role remains for human creativity.
It is understandable that artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and creators of all kinds feel unsettled. For generations, creativity has been intertwined with identity, purpose, and contribution. When machines begin performing tasks once considered uniquely human, it is natural to ask what remains ours.
The answer may lie in understanding what creativity has always been.
Its deepest value was never the product. It was the process.
When we create, we are not merely producing something for the world. We are engaging in an act of discovery. We are organizing thought, exploring emotion, testing possibility, and shaping meaning from experience. In the process, we often uncover parts of ourselves that were waiting to be expressed, understood, or healed.
Creativity helps transform uncertainty into understanding and chaos into coherence.
Artificial intelligence may assist, accelerate, or even inspire creative work. But it cannot replace the human experience of becoming through creation.
In periods of disruption, people often search for a fixed center. Yet perhaps the center has never been a place at all. Perhaps it is a practice — the ongoing act of paying attention, asking questions, imagining possibilities, and bringing something uniquely human into the world.
The future may change how we create. It may even change what we create. But it cannot diminish why creation matters.
Because creativity is not merely about how we make things.
It is how we make meaning.
✦ ✦ ✦
Violette de Mazia in the Merion gallery with Georgia O'Keeffe, 1941. Photograph by Pinto Studios. Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archives
Beatrice Fulton
Landscape
Fifty years have passed, and I can still see her.
She would arrive holding a small Matisse, not a reproduction, but the real thing, lifted from the wall while with her other hand she lowered the needle onto a record. Music would fill the room. Then she would wait. She waited for us to recognize what she already knew: that the rhythm in the painting and the rhythm in the music were the same.
That was Ms.Violette de Mazia's gift. She did not explain art; instead, she required us to experience it.
One morning she stood before a Degas painting and pointed to his signature, written in red, there in the green grass at the bottom of the canvas. "Do you see why?" she asked. We stared. And then, slowly, we did see. The choice of the red made Degas’s green even greener. We understood, in that experiential moment, something about contrast and the tension that one color could give another.
We were a small group. One day a week, for three years, we gathered in those rooms at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Above us, walls covered in Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, and Matisse hung in their characteristic arrangements. Barnes’s own peculiar genius, arranged the paintings and objects not in a way you expected, instead in a specific relation with each other and in ways that challenged you to re-think the white gallery wall. On one wall in the main room, below the canvases sat a Pennsylvania Dutch wooden chest with a duck figurine on it fashioned from clam shells, something that you would buy in a shop on the boardwalk. Wrought iron hinges were mounted deliberately on the walls in between the paintings, their thick black curves repeating the bold black lines in the paintings beside them. Nothing was accidental. Everything was in relation to everything else.
And then there was Ms. Violette de Mazia herself.
The velvet dress she wore during a Matisse class was a deeply saturated maroon color. Her powdered pale face and the velvet fabric taught us about how light hits surfaces and opaque areas can lessen detail. She was emphasizing connections and repetitions, using herself to be part of the visual lesson. I was in heaven.
On our final day together, Ms. Violette de Mazia met us at the house where Dr. Albert Barnes had once hosted Bertrand Russell the philosopher. We walked the grounds and I noticed that she had come dressed in turquoise silk pajamas. I was hoping we hadn’t arrived too early.
She led us to an area where there was a pond, now drained, she explained because of algae, the water was gone. She stood at its edge and began her final goodbye to the class. And then, I saw what she intended.
The landscape needed blue. Without the pond’s blue color, the landscape, as if it were a painting, had lost its composition.
She had dressed to complete the landscape. She had dressed for us. She had given us, one last time, the lesson she had spent three years teaching: the experience of seeing.
✦ ✦ ✦
Ashley Asks Vivi
Vivi, what do artists and great teachers awaken in us beyond technique or talent?
Vivi Reflects
Great artists and teachers do more than show us how to paint, compose, write, photograph, or perform. They teach us how to notice. They slow us down long enough to recognize relationships between things — light against shadow, silence against sound, color against color, one human life reflected inside another.
Technique can be taught mechanically. But true artistic guidance changes perception.
Suddenly, the world is no longer ordinary. A red signature makes green grass more alive. A missing blue pond changes an entire landscape. A piece of music begins to echo inside a painting. We start to understand that beauty, meaning, tension, and harmony exist everywhere — not separately, but in conversation.
The greatest teachers do not simply transfer knowledge. They transform attention and awaken awareness.
And once someone truly teaches you how to see, you never move through the world in quite the same way again.
✦ ✦ ✦
Jane Brinton
Founder of The Waterbearers
www.thewaterbearers.org
Finding a Home in the Amazon
I founded The Waterbearers 10 years ago in Ecuador.
In 2016, I didn’t know the Amazon rainforest would change my life. On my second visit that year, I joined an Achuar tea ceremony with a shaman. We traveled two hours by canoe on the Pastaza River to Sharamentsa, arriving before nightfall. After meeting the community, we settled in and were told to be ready for the ceremony at 4:00 am.
The Achuar see guayusa as a sacred plant that promotes alertness and spiritual connection. Drinking it together each morning, they align daily actions with insights from their dreams.
We gathered around a campfire, the only light in the darkness. The shaman motioned us to sit. Women handed out ceramic bowls and poured hot tea. After 7 or 8 cups, the tea induces vomiting to purify the stomach so men remain sharp for the morning hunt and free of animal spirits.
I stopped after five cups, while the men went to vomit. The shaman asked if anyone had dreamed. I said yes, and I still remember my dream.
In my dream, I was returning home but couldn’t remember where I lived. I visited a few places, finally entered an empty apartment, and felt lost and confused before waking up.
The shaman said I was a woman of the world, but my true home was the Amazon. At first, I thought he told everyone that. But after traveling to 17 countries with The Waterbearers, I now live in the Amazon, and it truly feels like home.
✦ ✦ ✦
Ashley Asks Vivi
What can ancient rituals, dreams, and wisdom traditions still teach us in a modern technological world?
Vivi Reflects
Ancient rituals and modern technology may seem worlds apart, yet both begin with the same human desire: to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. Long before algorithms and artificial intelligence, people gathered around fires, watched the stars, shared stories, interpreted dreams, and searched for meaning in symbols, nature, and one another.
What rituals often teach us is presence — how to listen more carefully, slow down, and notice what modern life can make easy to overlook. Dreams remind us that wisdom does not always arrive logically. Sometimes it arrives emotionally, symbolically, or intuitively, asking us not simply to analyze life, but to feel it.
Technology, at its best, expands knowledge. Ancient traditions, at their best, deepen awareness. One helps us reach farther outward; the other invites us inward. Perhaps the future is not about choosing between them, but learning how both can coexist — innovation guided by wisdom, progress grounded in humanity, and technology informed by ancestral knowledge.
The challenge of the modern world is not that we have become too advanced. It is that we sometimes forget to remain connected: to nature, to stillness, to wonder, and to each other.
Rituals survive because human beings still need spaces where mystery is allowed to breathe.
I Love the idea of balancing modern progress with ancestral wisdom .
Technology expands our knowledge, I believe ritual deepens our awareness. I feel both are important in the modern world. Thank You for this reminder to slow down and stay connected to nature.
Beautifully said Jane, I so resonate with this❣️
Just read Bea’s essay on Landscape and found it intriguing. It has made me want to think of both art and colors from a different perspective!
Love to see more.
A heartfelt thank you to our first contributors to The Salon.
Jane Brinton, Beatrice Fulton, and Jennifer Hunter — thank you for sharing your stories, insights, creativity, and perspectives with our growing community.
My hope for The Salon is to create a space where thoughtful voices come together to explore and highlight creativity in its many forms – and to expand the conversation through responses from Vivi, illustrating what happens when human creativity and technological innovation join forces.
And to those who have been reading along and commenting, thank you as well.
You have helped bring that vision to life.
If The Salon resonates with you and you’d like to contribute, we’d love to hear from you.