How to Follow Your Heart: Part 2

Start with a cup of coffee.  Fast from coffee altogether. But pay attention, and let words mean something.  To pay requires cost. Be quiet.  Find the quiet in the noise.   If no quiet can be found, then sleep, and dream of it. Breathe.   Oxygen and its life are rarely overrated.   Holding breath …

The World of Experience

So my coffee-shop pediatrician friend pulls up a chair and begins to tell me again of Oliver Sack's new brain book called Migraine.   Turns out it's not a new book, but still.   Then she refers me back to an old book on my shelf called Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert.   Neurons in the gut …

Words Like Leaves

Three hours of color. I left the house about 11:00, restless, with no appointments for the day until 7:00 p.m., at which time I'd head up to UW to shoot a couple of short scenes for a film being produced by a friend of a friend.   I get nervous about such things, so I needed …

Thoughtful Creatives, Resonance, and Hospitality

This past weekend was a game-changer. At the end of a pretty bumpy road just outside of Cle Elum sits a place called Chalet Talley, and there I spent a couple of days in the company of dear friends I'd never met before.    It began with a ninety minute ride from Seattle with a …

The Joy is in the Work

I'm making my way through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's great book Creativity again, and chapter 5, "The Flow of Creativity", challenges me to examine some deep places in my life of creative work.   Csikszentmihalyi's seminal work on the study of happiness--Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience--proposes that states and experiences of deep joy are very different that …