others in the long run. “The process may be a series of incremental changes, but when the process becomes a practice—a way of engaging with the world—there’s no doubt that it ignites revolutionary change,” she writes. In fact, if we all confessed our concerns about our perceived flaws and took the risk of being vulnerable with others, it would probably increase the sense of our shared humanity and lead to more connection, a sense of safety, the freedom to be creative, and more harmonious relationships in our homes, our workplaces, and our communities. That really would be a revolution. ... posted on Dec 26 2015 (17,712 reads)

do we feel shame and how does shame change us? According to Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston, shame is an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” It’s an emotion that affects all of us and profoundly shapes the way we interact in the world. But, depending on how we deal with it, shame can either shut us down or lead us to a new sense of bravery and authenticity. Brown’s research involved interviewing thousands of people about difficult, sensitive experiences in their lives, in order to uncover common themes around shameful experiences. Almost single-h... posted on Feb 25 2016 (20,735 reads)

Bateson, and her phrase is "composing a life," which is very — I hear echoes of that with what you’re saying. And as you’re saying, you had a reconfigured physical self, but you were composing a whole. Right? Your life as a whole, yourself as a whole. DR. MILLER: Yeah. That language resonates with me. I like that very much, the word “composing,” and I like its overlay with music, which has always been important for me. But, yeah, and seeing it as a creative enterprise, as well as an adaptive one, was really very rich, and it was really like an excuse. I wasn’t — I was sort of a melancholy child — my internal world was a little ... posted on Apr 4 2016 (25,808 reads)

struggle at a time “when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make.” We no longer have Baldwin to awaken us to the gravest perils of our own era — one in which the poetic spirit isn’t merely neglected but is being forced to surrender at gunpoint. To produce poets, in this largest Baldwinian sense of creative seers of human truth, seems to be among the most urgent tasks of our time. The mastery of that task is what the poet Jane Hirshfield examines in her 1997 essay collection Ni... posted on Sep 6 2016 (10,941 reads)

day, and then suddenly there's an important meeting around what's happening with—let's say—profitability—or let's just say a strategy for a new initiative. Maybe there need to be more ideas put on the table so you could invite everybody in the room to do more listening and even put a structure into the room where each person takes a turn saying what they think the best strategy is and even maybe structure somebody else reflecting what they heard them say. A creative process or a strategic process might be a moment when we decide to do more listening. It might be that in the evening when we get home after a long day of work that that transition into kind ... posted on Oct 29 2017 (15,002 reads)

asked Simon & Schuster, the publisher who did Leonardo da Vinci, to “do it all on art paper and not one of these things where you put the things in the center.” I want it throughout to be that heavy quality, coated, color images because I wanted to show that paper is actually sometimes good for transmitting information. Grant: You’ve picked a lot of original thinkers throughout history. Why da Vinci? Isaacson: You’ve written a lot about innovation and creative leadership, and you’ve seen the patterns. It takes me a while to see the patterns. I started with Ben Franklin, then Einstein, then Steve Jobs. The pattern after a while wasn’t th... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,462 reads)

task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1964. “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” I have thought about Sontag’s prescience again and again in my decade-plus on the internet, watching creative culture reduced to mere “content” as the life of the mind and world of substantive ideas collapse into an abyss of marketable sensationalism and cynicism; watching the cowardice of clickbaitable outrage eclipse the courage — at this point a countercultural courage — to create rather than tear down, to refuse to flatten life’s... posted on Oct 21 2018 (4,211 reads)

mouth and hands, but no head?  So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. And what has happened? An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. This is what Honey Bee Network is about. And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the fie... posted on Sep 3 2021 (3,814 reads)

this deeply moving episode, Fill to Capacity podcast host Pat Benincasa speaks with writer and life coach Jennifer Bichanich. Jennifer opens a window on her experiences with profound loss, including losing her beloved husband when the church they were remodeling went up in flames. Despite immense grief and despair, Jennifer found ways to rebuild her life and discover her own creative resilience. Working with a shamanic energy healer, delving into art therapy, and joining the Modern Widows Club, she found community, healing and the possibility of creating something beautiful from the ashes of her life. This podcast explores themes of grief, healing, and the power of creativity in navigatin... posted on Nov 20 2023 (2,565 reads)

2008, an interviewer admitted to Alfie Kohn that she considers herself a competitive person. “As long as you acknowledge that’s a problem to be solved; it’s not a good thing about us,” he responded. “People say to me, ‘Oh I’m really a competitive person,’ not realizing that it’s as if they’re saying, ‘I have a drinking problem.” Competition, which Kohn defines as any situation where one person can succeed only when others fail, seems to be something of a state religion in the United States. But Kohn is convinced that we’ve all bought into dangerous myths about the value of competition in our personal lives, wor... posted on Sep 23 2011 (18,364 reads)

the Amazon rainforest has to do with the Kaisut Desert and Fifth Avenue luxury. On the heels of this morning’s homage to where children read and learn comes a curious look at where they sleep. That’s exactly what Kenyan-born, English-raised, Venice-based documentary photographer James Mollison explores in Where Children Sleep — a remarkable series capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms. The project began on a brief to engage with children’s rights and morphed into a thoughtful meditation on poverty and privilege, its 56 images spanning from the stone quarries o... posted on Sep 9 2011 (44,632 reads)

his or her addition? So privately I went through a very difficult time. That being said, as you rise in business, as you get out of the lower level staff jobs and the quantitative analysis, and you get into the higher level of problems, I felt that I had an enormous advantage over my colleagues because I had a background in the imagination, in language and in literature. This is because once you get into middle and upper management, the decisions that you make are largely qualitative and creative. And, most people who do really well in the early quantitative stages are grossly unprepared for the real challenges of upper management, at least in marketing which was the industry that I w... posted on Jan 28 2013 (14,801 reads)

don’t mean love, when I say patriotism,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her classic 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. “I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.” In some corners, patriotism has a bad name. “Patriot” is mildly defined in my desktop dictionary as a “supporter of one’s own country”—and yet my thesaurus suggests the word “patriotism” can be synonymous with jingoism, chauvinism, nativism, and xenophobia. Particularly during times of war, patriotism does indeed seem to go hand-in-hand with dehumanization of outsid... posted on Jul 4 2013 (20,147 reads)

speak about. It’s one of the most interesting and important things you’ve discovered in these years of speaking seriously with artists. RW:  Well, you’re right. There’s a real joy in the discoveries I make. What have I discovered over the years?—and it’s been over 20 years now. One thing that becomes much clearer is that there’s a commonality among artists. And I’m sure this is true for everyone who has something to do with the creative process itself. The creative process, clearly, is some kind of fundamental fact that probably hasn’t changed in millennia. The Greeks even had gods, the Muses, who stood for these heigh... posted on Apr 3 2014 (21,205 reads)

interested in the artist who is awake, or who wants desperately to wake up. […] I am trying to make a call, with this book, to you young brave hearts who would like to find new collaborations with scholars, with businesspeople, with human rights workers, with scientists, and more, to make art that seeks to study and inform the human condition: art that is meaningful. Portrait of Anna Deavere Smith by Mary Ellen Mark for NPR For artists and creative spirits alike, Smith argues, the issue of confidence is as important as it is messy — and it’s also often a placeholder term for something far more crucial in the dogged pursuit o... posted on Jul 26 2014 (11,784 reads)

yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude.” “One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her journal. “People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger,” the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky admonished the young. And yet despite the vast creative and psychological benefits of boredom, we have grown so afraid of it that we have unlearned — or refused to learn altogether — the essential art of being alone, so very necessary for contemplation and creative work. The great French artist and dedicated diarist Eugène Delacroi... posted on Jun 24 2015 (13,665 reads)

unexpected invitation to Betty Peck and her daughter Anna Rainville’s home for an intimate conference on education, specifically on Waldorf education, is what led me to Ida Oberman. There were a few of us at the gathering who were not especially knowledgeable about Waldorf education, but Betty and Anna have always liked expanding the circle. For decades, Betty Peck’s weekly salon has been a meeting place for a wide range of creative individuals from a variety of perspectives in the thick of Silicon Valley culture. This particular gathering was more focused than Betty’s regular salon meetings and no less interesting for that. It was a chance both for new conn... posted on Aug 24 2015 (7,562 reads)

Center for Healthy Minds Another day, you might have found students in pairs holding Peace Wands, one with a heart and one with a star. The child with the heart wand speaks (“from the heart”); the other child (the “star listener”) listens and then repeats back what was said. When there was a conflict between students, they used the wands to support the process of paying attention, expressing their feelings, and building empathy. Our Kindness Curriculum combines creative activities like these, as well as books, songs, and movement, to communicate concepts in a way that is understandable to four year olds. Our instructors taught the curriculum with active part... posted on Feb 10 2016 (32,155 reads)

have no choice but to express their lives,” Anne Truitt wrote in her penetrating reflection on the crucial difference between being an artist and making art. This creative inevitability is at the center of artistic endeavor and has been articulated by a multitude of humanity’s most celebrated artists. “Every good artist paints what he is,” Jackson Pollock asserted in his final interview. So why, then, do we so readily reduce works of art to objects and commodities, forgetting that they are at heart transfigurations of lived human experience? My recent conversation with Amanda Palmer about patronage and the future of a... posted on Jun 26 2016 (12,031 reads)

outmoded way of knowing, and to an ethic that is essentially destructive to community. I want to make it clear that these new epistemologies do not aim at the overthrow of objectivity, analysis, and experimentation. Indeed, the feminist thinkers that I know use those very tools in their writing. But they want to put those tools within a context of affirming the communal nature of reality itself, the relational nature of reality. So in these studies, objectivists modes are used in creative tension with their relational counterparts. For example, the mode of objectivity is held in creative tension with another way of knowing, the way of intimacy, the way of personally implicatin... posted on Nov 13 2016 (12,769 reads)