Be a provenance of something gathered, a summation of previous intuitions, let your vulnerabilities walking on the cracked sliding limestone be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty for understanding what’s about to happen.” ~ David Whyte, excerpt from “The Seven Streams” Every morning when I sit for meditation, get out my laptop to…
The Empath’s Guide to Protecting Creative Energy
If you walk in the mist, you get wet.” ~ Dogen, the great Zen master I threw up every day before school when I was in the first grade. I was painfully shy, very much an introvert, and afraid of just about everything and everyone. Oddly, though, I loved school—listening to what Ms. Brown was…
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The Trauma of Unused Creativity
He sat across from me in the booth, tucked in the far end of the diner. He pushed his salad around with his fork as he spoke, keeping his gaze from meeting mine. “I wake up, and it starts. I’m pretty good about getting going and getting busy before it really lands. When I get…
The Art of Idea Capture
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” ~ David Lynch, Catching The…
Connecting Creativity to Your Driving Force
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” ~ Excerpt from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver The room in the Palm Beach Convention Center, filled…
Claiming Your Creativity (and Identity)
I suddenly realized that one of the core competencies of being human was that we were the only corner of creation that could refuse to be ourselves. The Kingfisher doesn’t get to choose to be a crow. And the mountain is just a mountain, and the cloud is just a cloud. The tree is just…
