A god can create a world only by listening.*
James Carse

Pay attention to the world, and train yourself to notice what others miss.**
Rohit Bhargava

What are you listening for? –
Deeper sounds that
are laying down a path for you
to journey to places, through
spaces, others are unaware of,
So you might lead us there.

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2019.

Somehow, whatever creative powers we have in our work are intimately connected to our ability to remember who we are amidst the traumas and losses of existence … there are tremendous forces at work upon us, trying to make us like everyone else, and therefore we must remember something intensely personal about the way we were made for this world in order to keep our integrity.*
David Whyte

Our hope lies not primarily in human reason and scientific analysis, but in the untamed regions of intuition and human imagination within us.**
Philip Newell

For a moment, forget
the technologies, the titles
and positions,
All the possessions, and
feel your wild and prime connection with
the world from which you have come and to which
you shall return;
Feel the wonder snd power of this,
Remembering
there is something more you want to bring.

Please don’t forget.

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

It’s one of the first questions I silently ask myself when meeting a new client: “What does this person do so well, so naturally, so easily, that they don’t even realise it’s a gift?” I’ve never met a person who doesn’t have a gift.*
Katherine Morgan Schafler

A brilliantly dramatised protagonist is clear yet more complex than anyone you know.**
Robert McKee

It would be a delightful way to spend an hour,
With a coffee, and
perhaps a piece of cake,
Exploring together the wonders of
your gift –
A holy and wonderful thing.

*Katherine Morgan Schaffer’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Robert McKee‘s newsletter: How Complexity Can Captivate Your Audience.

In Greek the word for ‘the beautiful’ is to kalon.  It is related to the word kalein which includes the notion of ‘call.’  We experience beauty, we feel called.*
John O’Donohue

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

These tribes believe that people who are born without hearing their birth song soon struggle throughout their lives, because they are untethered and don’t comprehend where and how they fit in the world.*
Jacqueline Freeman

In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance.**
Steven Hayes

There was no birth song
sung over the traveller,
Not by their mother,
Nor their family –
None had been caroled over them at their beginnings,
They did not know this was even a thing –
And so it came to pass that the traveller set out
upon their journey bereft of soul melody.

For many years the traveller journeyed ,
Often silent, though
sometimes humming
a delightful tune, or
an earworm of a lyric fixing them upon
some unconsidered possibility, until
the insistence of the everyday ordinary meant these
would slip away, and the silence return.

Occasionally, they would come upon others
who were singing a full melody, prompting
the longing to find their own song –
One full of hope and telling tales
of exploit and meaning;
The more they allowed this desire the day,
The longer the tune and more the lines,
Until they had captured a song for the journey.

Perhaps the universe had gifted this,
Or maybe it was god,
But in singing it they knew themselves
a troubadour, that
life is for finding the song, and
maybe the richest of ballads come
with time and openness and
ceaseless wandering.

*Jacqueline Freeman’s Song of Increase;
**Steven Hayes’ The Liberated Mind.

The way to maintain one’s connection to the wild is to ask yourself what is it you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is between things that beckon us and things that call from our souls.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.**
John Stuart Mill

There will be those who –
Even with the best of intents – will tell you,
You should do this, but
you are a living thing, impossible to
categorise,
A wild thing, with a growth all of your own
to discover –
A must waiting to be manifested.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Mary Midgley’s The Myths We Live By.

Play to keep playing.*
Seth Godin

Whoever must play cannot play.**
James Carse

Play comes from within –
When we are told to play
it becomes seriousness,
And seriousness does not allow the
freedom that play easily produces,
The freedom required to help us
navigate the complexity that
seriousness-alone struggles with:
We cannot analyse our way through
this level of complexity,
but we can play with it.^

*Seth Godin’s The Practice;
**James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
^Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation.

For the one who believes it, a blessing can signal the start of a journey of transformation.*
John O’Donohue

An artist knows the aesthetic choices only come alive on paper. As a writer, it’s your job to write draft after draft, to improvise, to play one beat against the next, toss ideas around in your imagination and then write them down.**
Robert McKee

A blessing is
encouragement, permission,^ and
grand hope that may be
all a person needs to set upon a journey
of actioning their dreams,
finding themselves transformed in the process –
So it is for me, I think.

We do not have to be a writer
or artist to appreciate that drafts are how
we move forward –
If we wait for the perfect there will be
no forward momentum –
so we explore, experiment,
Fail, and try again and
again.

You don’t need my blessing –
But you have it:
Bless yourself.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Robert McKee‘s newsletter: Why Creativity Takes Work;
^Or the promise not to put up barriers

That we might awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit and light.*
John O’Donohue

It is about waking up to a knowledge that is deep in the very fabric of our being, and it is about living in relation to this wisdom.**
Philip Newell

Some sleep, or sleep-walk, through life,
Others awaken to the possibilities of
their singular life, presenting themselves with
options, choices, decisions – a freedom to go
where they want;
They travel to the deep-rootedness
of their being:
To find the roots of our responsibilities
we must go to the roots of our abilities,
a journey into a core sense of ourselves
where we can put together an understanding
of how we are made,
why we have the responsibilities we have, and,
just as important,
the images that formed us in our growing.^

When a person comes to this
later in their lives
there is often a great deal more to discover
than they know –
They have done much of the hard work,
perhaps unknowingly, and now have
the possibility of curating:
that is, to select, arrange, and enhance
their story, which is also
their soul:
Today it appears more important
to remind man that he has a spirit,
that he is a spiritual being.^^

Waking up will not disappoint us.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: In Praise Of Earth;
**Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
^David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^^Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul; written in 1952, hence the use of male gender.

Each new day is a path of wonder, a different invitation.*
John O’Donohue

We feel most comfortable when things are certain; but we feel most alive when they’re not.**
Tania Luna

Clarissa Pinkola Estés raises the two
critical questions:
What am I really?
What is my work here?^ –
Though I would open them
to the influence of the future,
As well as the past and the present:
What am I really becoming?
What is my work becoming?

When our future rearranges us then
our past becomes the fuel for
our art and artisanship.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments;
^Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves.