Sparks to light your wild idea
Finding Allies: Even the Color Blue
"We have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky." - David Whyte When Aloneness Sucks There are moments when you're going after a wild idea when it feels as if you are slogging it alone. After all, most of the time, when we're gripped by the energy - the daimon, as the ancient Greeks would say - of an idea, we're there in a dance with the idea and ourselves. The rest of the world often looks upon us with disinterest, sometimes benign and sometimes destructive. Part of going after what we dream of [...]
On the Power of Symbols: Notre Dame
On the Power of Symbols: Notre Dame The Fire at Notre Dame Like millions of people, I am viscerally feeling the loss of the Notre Dame fire. I felt that throb in the solar plexus of a heart hurt, a soul hurt, when I saw the first pictures of the spire engulfed. I stand at a distance from Notre Dame as a place and as a religious structure. And yet, I felt gutted as the fire gutted the cathedral, just as so many others are around the world. I got into a conversation on social media (not a fight; I was [...]
Fear and Sailing into Infinity
Fear and Sailing into Infinity You’re Going to Feel Fear One of the big rules of going after your wild idea? Fear. You’re going to be scared to death. You’re going to not sleep at night. You going to either – or maybe even both – stop eating all together or eat so much that you think you’re going to weigh twice as much as you did when you started the project. You’re going to wonder if you are galactically stupid to have tried this, you’re going to wonder if this was an absolutely catastrophic mistake. I had moments where I [...]
Break the Stick: About Rules and Wild Ideas
Break the Stick: Rules and Wild Ideas In the course of creating Spillian, I’ve found myself regularly chanting particular ideas like a mantra - an idea about whatever it was we were trying to make happen at that time and how to handle its complexities. These burbled up from somewhere, maybe from my toes, maybe from the ground I was standing on, maybe these incredible stone mountains we’ve landed on. Going after crazy wild ideas often isn't easy. So I would hold this idea, whatever it was - a lesson, a plan of attack, a way to approach a problem, a bit [...]
Ideas: Inspiration and People I Love
Finding Fuel In an era that can feel overwhelmingly dark and frightening, with catastrophic climate crisis no longer an abstract concept maybe on the distant horizon, leadership that does anything but lead, and a sense that we're all running harder and faster to simply try to stay in place, I look for people and ideas and organizations that offer a different story. Amazing things are happening out there. And they feed us, with a sense of possibility, and with ideas that can spark our own. We are so not living in a vacuum, ever, but instead are always dancing in [...]
Seeking a Wild Idea
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." – Lewis Carroll Almost fifteen years ago, I finished a crazy idea of getting a big old doctorate in mythology, and then got another one off the ground with the birth of a family resource center in my community. And then I decided I was bored. So I invited (okay, dragged and browbeat and lured) my [...]
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