Hi, everyone! Forgive my belated response – it’s been a busy couple of days in my world.

This is a fabulous conversation – I’m reading and need to cogitate a bit to respond thoughtfully.

in the meanwhile, here’s an exercise I did for coaching clients a way back, on getting to know your “Fear Monster” – enjoy if you’re inclined! (James’ thoughts on getting to know your fear and Stephen’s thought on dragons prompted this!)

https://leighmelander.com/gift/

I’ll be back later tonight! 🙂

Hey, Stephen!

Glad to see you’ve started with an easy question! (LOL) But it’s a wonderful one.

First, I think many, if not most, of us struggle with whether or not we can define ourselves as creative. And I think that’s rather tragic, actually, because I think human beings are, at their essence, creative creatures. We’ve just been taught that it’s something unique and and somehow exotic, and I think we suffer as individuals when we’re denied an acknowledgment of our creativity, and I think our cultures suffers as well.

(This is one reason why, BTW, I think that seeing the hero as a creative figure and using these metaphors when connecting to our own sense of where this mythic structure sits in our lives is a valid lens – as a global community we NEED creative heroes who are willing to bring the boon of ideas and insights back to us.)

Your question is reminding me of Michael Meade’s work on genius, both The Genius Project, where his foundation is working with kids and schools helping to tease out how our educational systems can help young learners see themselves as creative, and see their own genius as something that resides in their own uniqueness, rather than something unobtainable outside of them. It’s well worth reading Michael’s book The Genius Myth. (More here on that: https://www.livingmyth.org/shop/the-genius-myth)

So, I think folks might peel this open from several directions to find … I think the best guide here is the approach that gets that little tingle of “oh, yes!” excitement in your belly.

Here are just a few thoughts about how folks might do this:

• Creativity as an idea: it’s not just sitting in the arts, or writing, or crafts. It’s everywhere. It literally means “to bring into being.” So – what do you bring into being? Ideas, projects, people, relationships, businesses, dinners, gardens…??? We all do this, but we do it in different spheres. So I think step one is to take a moment and really reflect on what we are creating in our own lives, with as encompassing a reach as we can. When I’ve felt like the least creative person on the planet, I’ve actually spent time writing down lists of what I’ve made – even really small things, in the last day or week. I think this helps us reframe ourselves as creators – I think we often don’t see what we create – and starting to list them changes our understanding of how we are doing it all of the time.

• Thinking about your therapist story and words vs. image, Stephen, of course Hillman’s “stick with the image” line pops into my head. He was speaking about dream work – how to climb into dreams without artificially ascribing meaning to them in an ego-based way – and his advice was to always go back to the image itself. I think this is true in waking life, as well. So, with this in mind, one exercise could be to land on image – it could be a piece of art, or something you see out of your window, or something you dreamt, or merely imaged, and just keep exploring it intuitively. What does it open for you? And how? What stories does it bring to the surface? What experiences? How does it make you feel and how does that connect to other stories in your life or in the world? Where are the metaphors in it that resonate for you? As you begin to create those connections, you are opening up a door into a creative process. You are literally ‘making meaning’ in this moment. A creative thing – bringing meaning into being.

• Ecstasy of being (which is truly one of my favorite images of Campbell’s!)…I think this might be another really interesting way to open this up: what are the things that bring forth that sense of exquisite life and possibility and  enchantment for you? This can be, again, really anything! What’s something that takes you out of yourself? That you lose a sense of time? How do you open yourself up to that experience? What’s enticing and what’s scary about it? What keeps you from it? And what might it bring back to your life, your understanding, your work, and what you bring to the world?

An example in my world: I love Ralph Vaughn Williams’ piece The Lark Ascending beyond all measure. Listening to it is an ecstatic process for me. If I really listen to it, I am streaming with tears by the end – both because of its beauty, and this flow of utter yearning. Do you know the Welsh word, ‘hireath?’ It translates basically to a nostalgic longing for a place which can never be revisited – and that is what this music does for me. It connects to memories of my childhood when I first heard it, going to England at twelve with it swirling in my brain, and spring and my birthday – the light of childhood March days in Pennsylvania as spring was unfurling at the end of March. I make a promise to myself that I’m going to listen to this at some moment each year during my birthday – a little ritual so I can open myself up to what I most yearn for. And every year, I both look forward to doing this and find reasons to put it off – a small version of refusing to answer the call – because it is both glorious and also can be terrifying. I get afraid that it will be too much, and will break me open in a way I can’t manage. That’s never happened, and I always walk away from it feeling more vast, but I’m always afraid it won’t! But each year that I do it, it unfurls a new set of ideas and images for me to pursue and share.

Hope this is helpful, and would love to hear what other people think about the heroic journey into creativity? (And a willingness to be foolish as we do?)

Thanks, Stephen!

Leigh

Oh @sunbug, you just made my day…week…month. What an incredibly lovely thing to write. I am verklempt. Thank you.

You completely got what I was thinking towards – and I love your insight about Cunneware and ‘kenning.’ Beautiful.

I hadn’t read Parzival in a while before I began to work on this essay, and I was reminded as I was reading how much I truly love this story – because of this interior work that Parzival does, and the compassion in it. There is such hope in the work.

Thank you!!

James, thank you so much for your evocative post!

First, I love your description of Tony Bennett and Lady GaGa – it was a genuinely moving performance and interaction, and you’ve cast it in a light I hadn’t thought of. Beautiful.

To your question about play and healing –  three ideas are emerging for me.

First, I am really intrigued with all of the ways that ‘play’ emerges in our thinking and language – as you say, artists play – and I love that musicians play instruments. And beyond our sense of ‘being playful’ – I think the image of play as movement – you leave some ‘play’ in things so they can function properly – like a wheel, for example. It’s leaving a bit of freedom – if it’s locked down too tight, it won’t turn.

Second, glimpses of the layers of play in the word’s etymology:

Middle English pleien, from Old English plegan, plegian “move lightly and quickly, occupy or busy oneself, amuse oneself; engage in active exercise; frolic; engage in children’s play; make sport of, mock; perform music,” from Proto-West Germanic *plegōjanan “occupy oneself about” (source also of Old Saxon plegan “vouch for, take charge of,” Old Frisian plega “tend to,” Middle Dutch pleyen “to rejoice, be glad,” German pflegen “take care of, cultivate”)

So much there! I’d love to hear what pops out for you in these various roots, and how they dance with each other.

And third: some of David Miller’s thoughts on the constructs of play from his book Gods and Games: Towards a Theology of Play (republished by David Kudler’s Stillpoint Press in 2019). The paradoxical quality of how David understands play really sings for me – and I think can open up the idea of play as a healing process in some interesting ways.

As he explores the mythology of play, David divides play into four categories, with subtitles both amplifying and refracting his message: Aesthesis: nonseriousness is the highest seriousness; Poeisis: fiction is the highest truth; Metamorphosis: change is the highest stability; Therapeia: purposeless is the highest purpose.

To me, this gets at the heart of what matters about play, and gives some guideposts to how it might connect with healing. I think this is exactly how children embrace play, instinctively. You mention dreams and play – I think this is what dreams do for adults.

I think, too, that opening ourselves to these paradoxes can be a powerful way to think of play therapy. In some ways, I think the paradoxes here are akin to the ‘play’ in a wheel – we can’t lock it down.

So, in a praxis way, I think if we embrace things that encourage us to play with/in these categories – whether it’s making, or gaming, or skipping, or simply inviting ourselves to frame our experiences in the moment in one or more of these ways, we can find some deep healing.

Thank you!