Apologies for the delayed newsletter! All I can say is that heat waves and house guests have slowed my pace. I’ll release this one to everyone to serve as my weekly article as well. Thank you for your support of my mission to raise Creative Intelligence bit by bit everywhere I go. Please enjoy this issue and share the Creative Archivery Roundup (C.A.R.) newsletter with others who may benefit.
Share Creative Archivery with Laurie Pearsall
1 ∴ One Teachable Moment
Encounters with learning from lucid living.
A few weeks back I was immobilized by a misaligned pelvis that trapped a nerve in my lower back. It got so inflamed that the pain emanated all the way around into the inguinal ligament.
It was an uncommon pain, like my right hip was in a bear trap.
I have my reliable methods to ease pinched nerves out of distress and get mobile again. This one was a doozy, though. Imagine the plastic hook on an old school Barbie leg that’s become detached and you just can’t fidget the rubber band back in place.
On day two I was in tears on my hands and knees. I had busy days ahead so I groped for my phone to reach out to a bodyworker I know to see if there was any way a last minute weekend house call could be arranged. Yay! Faye was coming at noon the next day. An older iteration of myself would have waited till Sunday night to even make the call, if at all.
Twenty-four hours after her visit I was right as rain. Free again. Incredible. This was also new. Generally a massage therapist or physical therapist, or even a desperate cortisone injection would still require me two or three days of rest to be moving properly again.
It’s as though Faye’s sensory powers and tactile training give her X-ray vision. She combines traditional deep tissue massage with essential oils, foot reflexology, fascia release and other specialisms. She doesn’t have a set formula but rather works through touch, and your collaboration - directing deep breathing to find the source of the problem and the points further way where it can be activated and released.
A week later I was dancing in the dark with a seventy-five year old friend who had just returned from a month long Qi Gong retreat in China. Before we got to dancing, gesturing her hands like pulling taffy, she described how the ancient practice taught her to visualize vital energy moving through and between the spaces in the body - in between skin and bones, muscles and tendons, and ligaments. She reminded me not to treat the body as a closed container but an open conduit.
The teachings … :
A. Asking for help. Especially early on, rather than suffering through days of pain to the point of desperation. I took the immediacy of the healing as a reward for taking better care of my needs. There was also something to allowing the collaborative, healing touch of another to support me and trusting the pain could be released.
B. Making Space. Taking a cue from Qi Gong and a wise friend, I chose playful movements over being planted in a chair all night out of fear. I got up and raised my arms over my head and began to sway and gyrate joyfully next to her. No hint of pelvic misalignment or pinched nerves. Just freedom born of making space for pain, healing, and opening a channel for Faye’s and Silvia’s knowledge and energy to intermingle with mine.
2 ∴ An Object lesson
Something tangible to study.
Letters and correspondence. This selection is a bit ‘meta’. That is to say the object lesson is about object lessons. The tangible prompt for contemplation is LETTERS. I came across an article, Intimacy in Expansion, that outlines the early stages of an aesthetic discovery project called Amor a Fazer Arte a Fazer Amor (Love Making Art Making Love / #LMAML) led by ‘caremaker’ Andréa Adão, based in Portugal.
The article is full of ideas to contemplate and prompts to act on, so do have a look and scroll down for actionable suggestions. What stood out for me were the following statements on the relationship with the object itself - letters - and the process of making them:
“When the primary focus is on the object, on the piece itself, there seems to be greater freedom and lightness in the act of handing it over, of letting go.
When the primary focus is on the content and format of the delivery, there seems to be more difficulty in taking the steps to send it.”
-Andréa Adão
Reading this helped me immediately with a coaching client, who is at the often apprehensive starting phase of a project. A fixation on finished products can really gum-up the creative process. Of course, setting guiding questions and intentions is necessary in any generative process, yet, once this is established, the exploration process must be liberated.
A slow and openly objective interaction with the ‘object’ is necessary to allow the material and the meta-physical to take on a life of their own. Objects become the mode of communication. It seems to me the act of exchanging handwritten letters does just this. We are literally sending them out into the world to intermingle with a curious reader, regardless of the banality or depth of the story shared.
See the Your Turn to Play segment below to experiment with analog letters.
3 ∴ The Nature of … Recursive thinking
Something ephemeral to contemplate.
I am one of a collective of like-minded ‘misfits’ who flocked around an article, If You Think In Systems and See Patterns that Others Don't, This Is Your Moment, that made parallel systems-thinkers feel instantly seen. Author Judy Grupenhoff is a computer scientist turned human systems coach. A clue for her way of interacting and understanding the world via multiple streams of information grew from her study of recursive code in a computer science LISP program (short for List Processing). I won’t even try to summarize it here. You’ve got to read it. It deals with simultaneity and a reflexive process of identifying the intersections within paradox and across separate systems.
This article is rich with correlations to the more expansive cognitive approaches that are a must in the exponentially complex world we move in. (Read: finally, the freaks and geeks shall inherit the earth; winking emoji.)
“Computer science. Consciousness research. Wisdom traditions. Energy healing. Psychology. Nutrition and mind-body wellness. From the outside, these looked like completely different explorations — a resume that couldn’t make up its mind.
But for me they were never separate. They were different facets of the same unified system. Each facet internally consistent. Each one describing a different aspect of the same underlying reality and the rules to work within it. And I was always less interested in what any single facet could explain than in what lived in the connections and overlaps between them.” - Judy Grupenhoff
In the above quote I could replace computer science with Art Education.
I’ll venture a guess there are a lot more folks out there who have seemingly disparate interests and capacities that intersect in as-of-yet unexplored ways.
To me this investigation is the essence of Creative Intelligence.
Inspiration gathered from reading, art, music, conversations, and research into all things Creative Intelligence.
Or didn’t see. This past month I went on three blind dates in one week. Not romantic dates, just basic human connection encounters. Even if a touch of social uncertainty pops up, I find comfort in the eye contact and engagement with the new person’s stories.
Authors: Collaboration between a ‘connector’ who shared a contact, an individual or a social media platform, and two will participants.
Materials: WhatsApp messaging, café americano, active listening and compassionate inquiry.
Myself howling like a wolf.
I was in the audience at a fellow multi-disciplinary mentor’s improv event called Y Mi Papá también (And My Dad Too). To weave a spontaneous narrative, Víctor used objects that had belonged to his father, collected on a recent trip to Columbia to attend his father’s funeral. He used the piano and audience contributions to flesh out the ambience - a mix of humor and good grief.
When Víctor passed the mic to me (a lint roller) to reflect on the passing of my own father, I reported a memory of a wild sound that rose up from my body at two separate but unified moments, fifteen years apart:
When I got the call from sister that Dad was gone, curled on a couch 6,000km away from the hospital where my mother and siblings wept, I heard a wolf-like howling rising up out of my body. It was detached yet perfectly familiar.
It was the same howl I released during the birth of my daughter many years before. My father told me after the challenging birth that he was pacing the hospital corridors from a ‘safe’ distance but heard my howling anyway. He felt helpless to reach me and hold me in that moment.
I’m thankful to Víctor and the medium of improv comedy for enabling this visceral cry of birth and death to rise up and join poignant forces in the air of the dark theatre.
I’ve been chipping away at John Cleese’s autobiography So, Anyway. It’s a comprehensive and generous gem of a book for anyone who loves learning and comedy. He writes in detail about the nature of his formative education and how it fed - or stymied - his creativity. This passage is about the liberation of having turned eighteen allowed Cleese to have a break from the rote-learning grind …
“Moreover I was now encountering a new feeling of spaciousness, due to being free, for the first time in years, from the pressure of exams. I have always noticed that any kind of pressure narrows my awareness and stunts my curiosity, because once I apply my nose to the grindstone I find it difficult to stick it up in the air again to smell the flowers. Of course a degree of obsession often produces the best work; but it does not produce the best life.”
Stir up your dormant Creative Intelligence wherever you go. Try out activities and journal prompts that accompany the fortnightly Creative Archivery Roundup collection.
When was the last time you wrote a handwritten letter?
I dare you to intercept awkwardness with compassionate outreach. Write a ‘love’ or ‘hope’ letter to a stranger and leave it somewhere to be found - possibly under the receipt after you pay a bill; or slip it into an anonymous mail slot, pocket, or grocery bag. Be sure to keep it unsealed so as to make it feel safer to peek inside.
Write For You on the front. No need to sign it; From Me will do.
Share your random act of letter writing in the C.A.R. Newsletter chat!
Following on from the idea of the teachable moments this month,
Write or think about a time when …
You reluctantly asked for help and then found instant relief in collaborating on resolving a problem with someone else lending a hand (or two!).
You ‘made space’ in your body or mind to express yourself physically or verbally, releasing concerns about getting it right or being observed.
In either or both scenarios, reflect on what you could do to in the future to reduce the hesitation before taking action.
I’d love you to participate in the comments in our community of emerging and fully immersed creatives-in-waiting seeking life-work alignment.
Join Subscriber Chat and let us know how you get on.
Take care!
Love, Laurie
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