Findyourwave

08/16/2025

Every once in a while I find myself presented with a word that lifts my spirit and transports me to a place where I meet heaven on earth. Maggie's fourth aspect of the creative process is tagged by this kind of word - Emerge. For her, it is about going with our natural tendencies to find flow, in order to find what is right, which more often than not includes welcoming the unexpected. But lets just sit with the word "Emerge" or "Emergence" for a moment ... how does saying this word (quietly within or out loud) make you feel? Do you have a felt sense of how it defies definition and yet seems to activate awareness of all that you know to be true and beautiful without words? For the creative process, I understand why Maggie lists it as the fourth element - it brings the preceding three, Accept, Observe and Breathe into perfect braiding and synergistic union with one another. It brings me to a place where I am happy to linger in the sublime, liminal space of knowing before new creation is born.

08/08/2025

This next aspect of Maggie's musings on the creative process - being conscious of our breathing - is not surprising on one level and, yet, by specifically highlighting it she prompts a curious spiral of inquiry for me. She specifically notes that breathing is a way to consciously connect with our perceptions of the world in addition to everything else it does to center and ground us. The curious part is the encouragement I feel to open to multiple perceptions of what is inspiring me to create. By becoming present enough to see from different vantage points I begin to understand the undulating rhythm of the creative process. I let each new way of seeing be the invitation to follow the wave of discovery from the outside-in until a phase shift in that wave rises again as the impulse to express from the inside-out. Cycling in this way, conscious of how changes in my breath signal changes in my state of awareness and practice is how I find flow and the breath is the etheric force that anchors my sense of wonder about what is emerging and the satisfaction of knowing what is being made manifest.

07/29/2025

Onto the next facet of the creative process ... Observation. Maggie refers to this as a heightened sense of flow between the observer and the observed. This relational way of being requires presence and stillness. I know I am in this state when I feel imbued with the essence of what I am seeing and sensing. It is like drinking water and being conscious of reaching that moment of satiation that signals readiness to engage more actively again in alignment with what has been experienced and learned. Sometimes, this takes just a few moments, a few sips, in between sprints of activity and at other times it may be a few glasses of time and substance soaking in, until I feel my whole body resonating with a palpable fresh sensation of knowing. A critical aspect of observation is that it be done without expectation, or judgment of what is observed. Let yourself be surprised by what emerges for you. This is a curious and open way of being to let what is observed speak to us and reveal its true nature to the innocent perception of our inner child's eye. I invite you to think of something that regularly catches your eye and explore the array of sensations you feel that spark your commitment to witness what is. For me this happens when I see photography of flowers and the winged creatures that visit them. It feels like I am glimpsing the kingdoms of fairies and I flow into reverence for the intimacy of the observer experience.

Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

07/18/2025

The first step Maggie reveals in her book about the creative process is Acceptance - the idea that we can't control anything and that if we can release resistance we allow creativity to flow. While it is a simply expressed concept, it holds many layers that can only become known and embodied through experience from the many facets of our lives. Was there ever a time you needed to convince your child to get up off the floor of the grocery store in a stale mate over whether or not to get that candy bar ... did your inner negotiation ninja rise to the challenge or did you have to use Herculean techniques? What about that time you were preparing dinner for company and your oven died, … did the culinary wizard in you transform the menu or send you on a quest for a new source of fire? If the paint brush slips out of your hand and creates a swath of color that would make Rembrandt frown, but tickle Pollock's interest, do you recalibrate your vision or start afresh? Irrespective of the choices you made in the moment, what do you recall about such experiences? For me I can recall three initial, basic steps for embodied acceptance: 1) taking a deep breath, 2) sitting in the pause or emptiness of "now what" and 3) asking a key question about the creative dilemma I found myself in - Is this something I feel I can deal with using my own resources, or do I need to reach out for help? Acceptance is reverence for the experience of resistance once revealed or encountered AND an invitation to honor where you are at, who you are and open to a different path of transformation, including the choice to walk with others to discover the ultimate outcome.

Photo & Drawing: AAthanassiadis, 2016

07/05/2025

One of my favourite books is "Design by Nature" by Maggie MacNab. Maggies is a master of making connections and weaving wisdom. One of the more interesting sections of the book is on Emptiness and Simplicity. Emptiness invites possibilities and choice from a viewer's perspective. Simplicity distills information to provide a single conclusion. Each has its place in how we express and communicate in relationship with each other. In our quest to manage the challenges we face collectively there may be a tendency to forsake the use of our creative muscles for grappling with possibilities and supporting the emergence of options in favor of the homogenization of our abilities and perspectives through filters for certainty and efficiency. Maggie offers 11 practices, individually familiar to us, and yet synergistically supportive when accessible on one page. Over the coming weeks, I will share on each practice and invite you to dive deeper into love with your unique creative process.

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05/09/2023

My inspiration for the week is how the art of origami has inspired STEM - check out this National Geographic spread:

The centuries-old art of folding paper is yielding new applications in spacecraft, architecture, and even the human body.

09/30/2021

My last post was a recent article about a scientific discovery that put me in touch again with an existential awareness of life.

Here is another one of those kinds of articles that does the same thing with a focus on the arts. It dates before the 'proof' of the Higgs Boson's (God particle) existence: http://ericbooth.net/the-higgs-boson-unifies-the-arts/.

From the CERN website the Higgs Boson is put into universal context as follows: "Just after the big bang the Higgs field was zero, but as the universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, the field grew spontaneously so that any particle interacting with it acquired a mass. The more a particle interacts with this field, the heavier it is. Particles like the photon that do not interact with it are left with no mass at all. Like all fundamental fields, the Higgs field has an associated particle – the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the visible manifestation of the Higgs field, rather like a wave at the surface of the sea."

And, as the article speaks to the idea of their being a boson to unify the arts, so is the experience of creation and our impulse to express, an aspect of our fundamental essence.

We human beings have a long history of proposing theories to unify disparate truths. This yearning to find a transcendent meaning for separate bodies of evidence may be one of our distinguishing traits. You have probably noticed this impulse in your own life: a series of experiences prompts the sens...

08/10/2021

Came across this article about the power of images and I found it particularly timely for the reality we find ourselves in these days. Awareness of the stories images tell and how we are prone to fill in the gaps is fundamental to having critical thinking and to be taught and practiced in schools.

Students examine how identity and biases can impact how individuals interpret images and experience the challenge of selecting images to represent news events, particularly connected to sensitive issues.

05/01/2021

When I discovered the music of Lenny Kravitz I was living for the first time completely on my own, no family, no roommates. It was a generally peaceful, relaxing and yes, at times, lonely but at least comfortable without many surprises on a day to day basis. That time is, definitely, a contrast to the present day whirling twister of life with family dynamics, economic upheavals and pandemics. And yet, while I am grateful for then, pray for the day when we as a society feel comfortable to give a stranger a hug again, and crave a few more hours of sleep every week, I prefer where I am now in the present moment.

I have always been more of a home body than a world traveler. My adventures were mediated through my eyes and mind to inform my heart and I surrounded myself with mementos of my life and the travel experiences I had up until that point. At the same time, I am, possibly in a contradictory sense, a culture geek, fascinated by how people create in community with one another to ground, experience and guide themselves when the happy equilibrium in their relational world is disrupted. Whenever my version of this equilibrium has been disrupted I am more aware of Lenny’s words in the tune “I Am Always On the Run” about life’s contradictions, the confusion it brings and yes, sometimes the sensation of just wanting to run away from it all. Part of the magic AHA moments I have had more recently is how these contradictions can find peaceful resolution, beginning with acceptance as the first step on the path to understanding. When I have tried it the other way around, believing I “should” or “need” to understand something before I can accept it, it doesn’t feel nearly as magical a process …

To deal with the cognitive dissonance associated with this observation and calm my mind, I started exploring the language of symbols and archetypes, found everywhere and anywhere - and that we create and tap into all the time. The photo I chose to use as my screen saver, earrings I choose to wear on a given day, the animals and plants I notice when outside, and characters I resonate with when reading a book or watching a movie, were all starting to permeate my awareness in new ways and helping me get in touch with an aspect of self and the goings on around me. The synchronicities started to come like a few drops of rain here and there until there was a gentle symphony of them raining steadily into my consciousness, followed by a period of cognitive revelation from the annals of my intuition, the way the sun after a storm brings a new lightness and clarity for the day. In this way, I started to find the answers to dilemmas from within while being gently prodded and guided by the symbols and archetypes reflected in my outer world.

And if that wasn’t cool enough, my intention of noticing and allowing symbols and archetypes to guide me, then led to deepening my relationship with them, and experiencing the life force they also hold. This may seem obvious when you start spending more time in nature with animals and plants, but the archetypes of "mythological" characters have their own life force too, infused by their original creators and continuously supported by anyone who then chooses to notice and be in relationship with them. When it is said that the” characters jump off of the page” of a book, I believe we as the reader become attuned to the life force the author used to dream and birth the characters, and then keep that life force flowing through our imaginations so that we can dream and manifest new creations. Once you start to be aware of participating in this process, reading a book or doing anything else, you start tapping into a whole new portal of intuitive guidance just for the fun, joy and miracles of everyday life.

To give an everyday example, I have a friend who names all of her gadgets from her car to her vacuum cleaner. The same way people talk to plants, she talks to her gadgets and in so doing gives them attention and more care than she might have otherwise done had they not been seen for their essential "character". Not only does she make mundane tasks fun this way, her gadgets rarely, if ever, break down on her or become “write-offs”.

I can’t say that I have mastered this second stage of noticing and exploring the magic of symbols and archetypes, but I can say that in my own relationships with my environment, I have moved from feeling reluctantly comfy about life unfolding without really knowing what comes next, to feeling curious and often delight about the prospect of letting life surprise me. I experience magic when synchronicities big and small register in my awareness. They keep me going forward without fully knowing, but trusting that it is my personally created and curated mystery with the universe that all works out in the end.

Photo: An alter I created from things that were dispersed around my home and that have special meaning as gifts from family and friends, from places travelled to and for how they ignite my senses.