Category Archives: Creativity/Spirituality

Musings/thoughts/questions about creativity and spirituality

September 2011 Soul and Solace

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Follow the Learner

A Spacious Place is founded on what we call our six “Playground Principles.”  Read an overview of “Follow the Learner,” the second of our six “Playground Principles,” below.

2. Follow the Learner: A Spacious Place sets up an environment rich in choice-making opportunities. Participants feel safer and more valued when they are provided with a range of choices for creative/educational/spiritual exploration. We invite participants to choose activities based on their interests.

We seek to avoid the “My Way or the Highway” approach, in which the guide communicates one “right way” to do art, to express learning, and/or to think about things spiritual. Instead, we favor an egalitarian approach that recognizes the worth of all people and that honors the unique shape of each human heart.

Our symbol for “Follow the Learner” is a set of paper dolls. Rather than favor a “one-size-fits-all” approach, in which every participant, like a paper cut-out, is taught in the same way, “Follow the Learner” seeks to provide an environment adapted to each participant’s learning and creative needs.

Do you take creative risks? Would you like to challenge others in their creative process? Then you are our kind of people and we’d love to hear from you!

August 2011 Soul and Solace

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Experience Over Expertise

A Spacious Place is founded on what we call our six “Playground Principles.” We’ll employ the next six “Soul & Solace” columns to give an overview of each principle.

1. Experience Over Expertise: A Spacious Place employs attentiveness and encouragement while avoiding “dangerous praise.” Dangerous Praise robs the participant of power while placing too much power in the hands of the guide. Dangerous praise includes flattery, condescension, and shaming. A Spacious Place also avoids comparisons, which can create disharmony and can discourage participants from taking creative risks. Last, A Spacious Place focuses on the person and on the creative process, rather than on the finished product. While we hope participants will create art that delights them, our primary focus is on the person doing the creating. Why? Because we believe each person is creative and because we believe the act of creating can both empower and transform.

Are you willing to take a creative risks? Would you like to challenge others in their creative process? Then you are our kind of people and we’d love to hear from you!

July 2011 Soul and Solace

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Extreme Drought

Texas is dry. Acutely. Meteorologists tell us we are in an extreme drought. Listless plants, beaten by a merciless sun, drop their leaves in surrender; their once regal green pales to a dead yellow. Then, a few weeks ago, a couple of clouds drifted by, spat out a few drops of rain, and cruised off. I stepped outside afterward, and radiant green greeted me. The plants held their heads high.

We’ve not seen any rain since then, but the plants still retain their green. Hope is powerful stuff.

In seasons of extreme drought—from the trauma of divorce to the tedium of thankless work—we can stand under water, absorbing hope through every pore.

What do you experience as “extreme drought?” Where, how, when do you find hope enough to hold up your head?

June 2011 Soul and Solace

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On Parade

While strolling through Austin’s Old Pecan Street Festival, we happened on a strange parade: three children, stair-stepped in height, marching single file through the crowd, heads down, hands holding foreheads. Those are some very worried children, I thought—until I saw the steady drip, drip of clear liquid between the largest child’s fingers. The three were applying ice cubes to their foreheads—Texas heat, meet the ingenuity of children!

How did this “mobile cooling unit” idea come into being? Was it one child’s brainstorm? A group inspiration? Had one of them “applied” the method successfully in the past? However the idea was birthed, all three knew—and literally applied—a good idea when they heard one.

What powerful, imaginative ideas surround us! This month, let’s be inspired by inventiveness. Let’s scope out great ideas. And let’s take it one step further: let’s put feet to inspired ideas and take them on parade, whether we’ve iced our foreheads or not!

Where do you find great ideas? What do you do with them?

May 2011 Soul and Solace

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Ode to the Weed

I’ve taken xeriscaping to the next level: zeroscaping! The practice is due partly to my finding lawn work only mildly preferable to being staked out in the desert and consumed by ants, and partly to my rebellion against The Man determining that grass is a more suitable ground cover than, say, dandelions.

In my view, the dandelion has a great deal to offer. Dandelion clocks—what a delicious name!—look like bubbles on stems. Pick one, blow on it, and send its downy parachutes riding the wind. Dandelion flowers, their color warmer than sunshine, homier than butter, bounce on their stems, smiling up at us. What welcoming flowers! And, if they can escape being “pesticided,” the leaves are edible. And we need never sod, because hearty dandelions find a home wherever they land: in cement cracks, in arid soil, even riding in the beds of trucks! In all seasons, in all landscapes, the dandelion offers herself for our delight.

In May, let’s delight in what we find delightful. Take pleasure in what is. Maybe to blow on some dandelion clocks and watch with wonder as their tiny parachutes ride the wind. What delights you?

April 2011 Soul and Solace

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Getting Hit

Thanks to the ingenuity of a neighbor, at this time of the year our community receives “hits” from the Mafia Bunny. A few volunteers begin the “hits” by filling baskets with goodies and, when no one is looking, depositing them on the doorsteps of unsuspecting neighbors. Those neighbors tie yellow ribbons on their doors to signify that they’ve been hit, then refill the baskets with goodies of their choice, and “hit” other unsuspecting neighbors.

Two years ago, Easter was a hard season in our home: unemployment, illness, and broken hopes had pretty thoroughly vanquished us. We awoke one morning, opened our door, and found ourselves “hit.” I watched my husband’s eyes light up and I felt a resonant light in my own. That basket was much more than the trinkets nestled inside its cellophane grass. For us, it was a basket full of hope.

What if, as our spiritual practice this month, we “hit” some unsuspecting persons with gifts of hope? It could be a handmade card or some home-baked bread, or a bottle of water for a guy standing in the heat. And if we can do it on the sly—get away with our “hit” unseen and unsuspected—so much the better!

Have you experienced being “hit by hope?” We’d love to hear about it!

 

March 2011 Soul and Solace

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The Power of Apology

When I was a kid, my dad apologized to me. I don’t remember what he did that prompted the apology, only what that act meant to me. I suddenly knew myself as someone who mattered: someone who mattered to my dad, who mattered as a full-fledged human being.

Making a sincere apology requires incredible strength of soul. It’s much easier to buy people off with praise or presents. I may find myself forgiven even if I never apologize, though I may not again be trusted. Actions that are not owned are, after all, more easily repeated. Conversely, a sincere apology can deepen not only the recipient’s self regard, but also my relationship with the recipient.

What are your experiences of apology—either giving or receiving one? Did the apology alter the relationship? If so, how?

February 2011 Soul and Solace

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Am I Creative?

A grandfather watches patiently as his granddaughter lifts fallen cedar bark into the nooks of two cedar trees: places the bark, steps back, places another strip of bark, steps back, studies her creation, rearranges it. For the child, this moment is All.

In his yard, another child hoists curved PVC pipe to his lips and exhales, creating a poignant, otherworldly tone. Exhaling, he moves the tone up and down the scale, absorbed in the magic he is creating.

These children never ask themselves, “Am I creative?” They might as well ask, “Does my heart beat?” “Do my lungs exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen?” They are, naturally, creative. We all are.

We express our creativity every day:

  • in how we guide children through the rough waters of human growth;
  • in the charts or graphs we prepare to communicate concepts;
  • in the ways we adorn our living space or our bodies;
  • in handmade gifts we create, from a PB & J sandwich to a CD mix of special tunes; and
  • in the ways we show love for other creations/creators, to name just a few.

How do you express your natural creativity? We’d like to know!

January 2011 Soul and Solace

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Personal Mandalas

According to Joseph Campbell, every world religion employs the circle as a metaphor. Inspired by the mandala-making practice of the Tibetan monks, we began the new year by creating personal mandalas. We kept our guidelines simple, so each person could follow the leanings of her soul ( “soul” understood as the whole of us: our total being).

Personal Mandala Guidelines:

  1. Employ a circle to depict your soul; you might include your values and how you hope to live into them, and/or how you embody the physical elements, and/or how you see yourself connected to all that is;
  2. employ symmetry in your design; and
  3. employ symbols, feeling free to create your own. You may wish to choose a visual metaphor for your soul and place it in the very center of the circle. What describes you?

To begin, we viewed mandalas from a number of traditions (found on an Internet image search) and then set about creating our own, using a variety of arts materials: a practice that I expect will take at least the entire month. I’m finding mandala making a challenge that I both dread and anticipate.

Wish to create a personal mandala as your new year’s practice? If so, we would love to see it! Share your mandala (and a description of it, if you’d like).

December 2010 Soul and Solace

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Tuning In

As I slid into a fast-food restaurant booth to do my daily writing, the intro to “I Love You Just the Way You Are” sifted down to me from the overhead speakers. I paused, drank in the melody, the lyrics, the way Billy Joel’s voice crooned “don’t go changing” and then intensified to sing of “unspoken passion.” The music first claimed me, then began to work transformative magic in my dry and weary soul. It opened me to a reality within my daily reality: to a world deep and true and hopeful.

This month we can gift ourselves simply by tuning in and attending to the magical alchemy of music: to guitar riffs and violin solos, to heavy backbeats and to airy melodies, to major chords and to minor. We can treat ourselves as we ride or drive, as we vacuum or launder, even as we (shudder) shop.

What’s your experience of music? What kinds of music do you enjoy? Why?