Originally published on Morality Park There will have been a night that sat on a house with no fence where the stars came in A night made of lightning, like a flash that tore from between two legs, switched off the lights, and crowded the walls with neighbors like a speakeasy, a room with a [...]
Tag: art
Patchwork
I don’t contemplate trees or the latticework of a banana peel like a tulip lined fence under the bark of a dogwood preparing to burst its flowering buds in the wake of a blue bird’s wing I don’t like structure or formalism or heavy expostulations or connect-the-dots 1-2-3 like academics and paper hangers do abab [...]
On Creativity and the Sacred
I've spent a great deal of time on this blog talking about rituals--those humble, self-created ceremonies I intentionally build into my daily routine for the purpose of enhancing my life. For making me feel more alive, more deeply connected to the world around me, and more firmly rooted in myself. These rituals, which are little [...]
The One-Two
It never occurred to me that the personal-growth-related phenomena I have spent so much time learning and writing about here on The Used Life may, in fact, have part of their origins in perception (of all things). Indeed, it wasn’t until I began reading Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, only late last week, [...]
Pendulum
I arrived at yoga class this morning with the hopes of losing myself in the pause. Of immersing myself in the kind of restorative quiet that is often necessary for the achievement of insight. For the mental clarity required to imbue this post, with which I’d been struggling for the past few days, with meaning, [...]
In Terms of Life and Death
I'm not sure when exactly I began thinking of creativity, generally, and of the dynamics of creative living, in particular, in terms of life force, or energy. Those activities and attitudes that are life-giving versus those that take it away. Indeed, I was, you might say, "smacked over the head" with an aha moment recently [...]
On Play
I was fascinated to learn that Carl Jung discovered the therapeutic benefits of creativity by, himself, re-enacting a form of childhood play. An attempt to uncover the roots of an early psychological conflict. To be sure, such a desire to experiment on oneself, to delve into one's unconscious so rigorously and imaginatively, requires a playfulness [...]
