Posts tagged Creativity

Here is an idea for a way to share the gift of story this season. It works well in the cozy circle of family that many of us won’t have in person this year. But it also works beautifully in a Zoom gathering!

“Story Seeds” is a game anyone can play that makes spontaneous storytellers of us all. I often play it in my workshops where there are several people, but you could play it with just two people if you don’t have a whole group nearby.......

Patience was never my forte. My fuse shortened even more after I had two daughters who were ten months apart. It seemed that there was never enough time and there was always something spilling, or someone was spitting up, screaming or both were running in different directions. What happened moment to moment was rarely in the schedule I had set up in my head. Stopping to wipe erp off the shoulder of my navy-blue pantsuit before going to work really slowed me down, not to mention made the glam factor impossible.

It’s true, though, that people can change. I had done a seminar that revealed to me in a profound way this fact of life: no matter how I think things should be, whatever is going on is what is going on. Though so ......

There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger.

The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.

- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Traditionally when we think of courage, we think of a warrior’s courage – bold, fearless, and bigger than life. It’s the James Bond kind of courage, the bungee jumper flinging himself off a bridge, or the kind of courage I mustered when I led a horse packing and storytelling trip in the Wyoming Rockies with seasoned guides Val the Singing Cowboy and his wife Cindy. I had gathered ten participants, and with a total of nineteen horses packing over narrow trails with 5,000-foot drops, we were about as far from civilization as you could get.

You need ......

Since I’ve been in New Mexico, I’ve had time to rekindle my interest in mosaic art. What began in Arizona at my women’s retreats doing mosaics on old horseshoes, has grown to a broader interest in using mosaic for decorating my southwest home, the now painted in rusts turquoise, golds and soft creams. So last November, with a little time on my hands and a creative itch wanting to be scratched, I took an indoor mosaic class at an art center in Albuquerque. In June I took an outdoor mosaic class with an eye to transforming an outdoor dining table into a work of art. Little did I know that going from an eight by eight inch practice patio block to a twenty-eight inch square table top would be a big leap of faith. I had a ......

My friend Pat works with a group of engineers. Never having worked in an engineering firm before, Pat thought that engineers developed products by perfecting an idea into a precise drawing which was then made into a perfect prototype and, from there, put on the market. Now, after seeing the experimental methods that are basic to creating new products—oh, maybe this material, oh, that didn’t work, let’s connect the fastener to the plate, what about not using a plate?—she finds the process more random, more exploratory. “That’s how my life has always been,” she says. “I’m an explorer meandering forward and discovering random opportunity.”

We are constantly creating ...

Many clients who come in for coaching report that they feel a little deadened, overwhelmed or burned out and wonder why. With very little probing, it often becomes clear that they have become separated from their creative soul. After all, it is a busy, productive world we live in, and art, music, dance and dreaming don’t seem to fit.

I’ve been coaching for a long time now, and I’ve found that creativity and coaching go hand in hand. I’ve always been interested in the creative arts, but I, too, wandered away from the joy and aliveness playing with paint and sound and movement and words can bring. I rediscovered my creativity through Julia Cameron’s wonderful book “The Artist’s Way”. Her ...

I visited the doctor this week for my annual physical. The check-in nurse saw my journal. “What are you writing?” she asked. “I’m writing about going sane,” I said. It took her a moment. “Oh. As opposed to going insane. I get it.” And she proceeded to tell me how so many more teenagers are coming in with depression. “I wonder if it’s all the bad news about the war and the economy,” she mused. “Maybe,” I answered.

But I really think it is a direct result of the constant stimulation that kids—and the rest of us—are expected to handle.  Always available by phone, text or email: immediate response required. Days filled with non-stop activity. Pressure ...

Discovering our purpose can seem like an enormous burden, a significant thing to contemplate.  But if we are passionate about something, we can more readily come to know our purpose.  We live our purpose as a natural expression of the passionate self.

Passion is visceral.  When our bodies are alive, we are alive. According to Angelis Arien, anthropologist and storyteller, questions indigenous healers ask a person who comes to them complaining of dis-ease are: “When did you stop singing? When did you stop dancing?  When did you stop being enchanted with the stories, especially the stories of your own life?” Certainly, alienation from our own passion and purpose is a critical dis-ease.  Singing, ...

In my Horse Wisdom for Writers workshop, the horses help writers get down to telling their real stories. Not necessarily the pretty ones, but the ones that need to be told. We do an exercise in the round pen where we ask each participant to take a turn standing in the center with a horse at liberty and talk about what they are burning to write about. Once they get clear about that, they are to free ask the horse to move forward as a metaphor for getting their story out onto the page and into the world.  In one class, several people had worked with Desi, a lovely gray Arabian mare, and Desi had done her job of reflecting back to each writer whether she was interested in what they had to say or not. She showed each writer how well they...