Creative Sparks
Creative Sparks provides tools, guidance and soul inspiration about once a week to:
Ignite and sustain your creativity • Identify and realize your heart’s true dreams • Live a life of passion, purpose and deep play
We are soul-crafting here. Join us!
Subscribe to Creative Sparks!
You'll receive juicy doses of inspiration and ideas to nourish your artful, soulful life.
Some Song or Something
Rumi writes of ecstasy, of being used by the Divine, being sung through, the longing to be used in such a way, to praise the Divine. I am not in ecstasy, but I long to be used nonetheless, to be sung. We all do. To feel something greater than the small, worried ego,...
Waking Up to the Inner World
In my last essay I talked about one of the most fundamental skills for artists and for artful living, Coming Alive to the World, the skill of waking up through our five senses to the sensual, physical world around us. In that essay, I gave you a number of fun, simple...
Coming Alive to the World
As a poet, as an artist, one of the core skills we need to develop and cultivate is a radical attentiveness to the world around us, an awakeness to our senses and the sense impressions all around us. We need to sharpen our senses to a keenness that hears, feels,...
Prayer
“I can lean the flame in my heart into your life and turn all that frightens you into holy incense ash.” —Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky The poem is a prayer— tendril, wind machine, shimmer, plough— how we cling to the words, little paupers, poor...
Time to Forgive
(This is one of my journal musings followed by a valuable life practice added to the end. Hence, the intimate, personal style of the beginning.) Time to forgive the horrors of the past, the wounds I carry: CalArts, my parents, an unforgiving world, our sick culture....
Stopping Efforting, Finding Ease
Stopping Efforting, Finding Ease I am exploring stopping without stopping, letting things move in me that have no name, watching the mind's hunger for fear and control, tuning again and again to the body's language, the quiet of the heart. What does it mean to stop...
The World as Art
This morning dried flowers scattered on the porch. One yellow dandelion pokes through a hole in the side of a metal can – humor irony beauty reclaiming the world once again – so simply. The day is cooler but has the warm dry smell of summer. The wind an...
The Grieving and the Dying
The grieving and the dying just go on and on. It’s amazing what a life they have, this life of loss. Neither right nor wrong, this fucking heart. Who knew the story would be all about pain? Who knew you'd be asked to give everything, then give more?...
Winter
All night the ravens releasing a black crying. They seem to hold worlds we can never touch. Something akin to wisdom. Not perfection. That doesn’t have any life in it. It’s the woods where the breathing moves where Night well, you know. At some point you...
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You'll receive juicy doses of inspiration and ideas to nourish your artful, soulful life.
