inside the under
exploring the aliveness that moves in us and around us… that we might better understand how to allow this to live into our life and work, inside and under everything we do
Introduction
Welcome to Inside the Under. I use this site as an invitation and a space of encounter, to join with me in exploring one of life's most fundamental areas of learning and discovery; our capacity to listen inwardly. I call this getting inside the under; a way of entering into a deeper understanding of our innately creative center, there where lies an aliveness that expands in connection with the world around us. As we grow our capacity to listen and follow its impulse, we feel ourselves to come into alignment with our greatest potential and the gifts we have to share.
The other offerings you will find on this site include writings, webinars, and presentations by guest speakers intersecting a diversity of disciplines ranging from the arts to life sciences, ancestral ecology, identity reflections, and more.
You’re the Host
In designing this website I first thought to title this section “Your Host", as this is a term I’ve used in settings where, underneath the professional language, there is a simple role that I aspire to embody; simply to be a good and gracious host. This means I welcome you into my home and spirit, and that it is my duty and pleasure to attend to you with great consideration such that when you leave your spirit feels uplifted and renewed.
However, as typos happen, the cosmos decided to place an “a” in the middle, resulting in: “Your a Host”, which sounds like, “You’re a host”...
I thought, Yes, brilliant! Indeed, you/we are a “host” to an infinite number of experiences. We are a host to heartbeats, breaths, wishes and fears, dreams and nightmares, delicious moments and terrors”. And so, rather than simply correct the typo, I decided to embrace its curious humor and share it with you here - as in the scientific sense of an organism being a host to bacteria, parasites, and other life forms that live upon or draw their sustenance from another. I mean, who among us has felt that certain thoughts, fears, or preoccupations have acted upon us without our permission, to continuously suck life from our body and soul? They show up without invitation, like a heartbeat and a breath, but perhaps less friendly. And we, invariably, become the host to this messy aliveness. And so it comes to us, this challenge; how might we feel most alive within it? Instead of resistance and a panicked need for control, can we open ourselves to a different way of seeing, one in which the world might begin to reveal to us other sides of a story we have yet to know, another story of ourselves?
In this spirit, my intention is to offer myself to host you, with a creative engagement intended to support your own capacity to host your life in the most enlivened way possible, for both welcome and unwelcome guests. It’s not about an imagined and projected happiness or success of being a complete person, a whole island unto yourself, but about deep, meaningful, and playful involvement, which is unavoidably interrelational. In this thing called life. 99.999% of it is out of our control, but the little piece that is ours, this is where the magic happens.
* Image to the right from the performance of This.Now., 2016.
Costume design utilizing large-scale crotchet works by Ramekon O’Arwisters
*Included in the above photo collage are images by photographers Anastasia Kuba, Marc Hors, and Robbie Sweeney
Story-making Creatures…
making and remaking our world
We are story-makers, sense-making creatures. Making sense of the world is what we do from the moment we wake up on every ordinary day. It is the very thing that gets us through the day, because if we couldn’t make any sense at all of what moves in us and around us, we would become immobilized. It is our creative gift, born into each and every one of us…
Creativity is, in fact, Everywhere
Contrary to the popular notion that creativity is a particular talent on short supply, in reality it is in motion everywhere, in everything, at all moments in time. All living organisms and the elements are continuously engaged in creative acts of being that alter the collective course of our planet in every second of day and night. And we, being the peculiar human creatures that we are, cannot help but create experiences in every waking moment and even as we sleep…
Story-making Creatures
Story-making Creatures…
making and remaking our world
We are story-makers, sense-making creatures. Making sense of the world is what we do from the moment we wake up on every ordinary day. It is the very thing that gets us through the day, because if we couldn’t make any sense at all of what moves in us and around us, we would become immobilized. It is our creative gift, born into each and every one of us. However, most of us aren’t aware that we are using it. As we make sense of ourselves and the world in our own personal way, we do not see that we’re doing this, rather, we believe that the meaning we have made is a factual reality that stands outside of us. This is how our inner story or narrative becomes the reality that we live.
Personal transformations are characterized by a substantive shift in how we make sense of the world, of ourselves and others. Something shifts inwardly and suddenly we see the world differently. We understand it differently. And because we are seeing and understanding life in a different way, we feel different. Life itself feels different. Even more surprising is when we then discover that the world begins to behave differently towards us.
Inside the Under is simply a combination of words meant to remind us that the real story is in that which gives birth to all that we feel and experience - all that drives us, runs from us, haunts us, gives us hope, makes us numb, brings us life, fills us with desire, bores us, and dares us to continue forward - all this, born of the creative generative force of life itself. It is what makes us story makers, whether we like it or not.
If we feel a desire to live more fully, more in alignment with that which pushes from within us, then we must begin to see that we are the ones inwardly creating the stories that we live each day. We are archetypal creators, each one of us, along with the trees and fishes, and worms and bugs, and all the microbes invisible to our eyes. Altogether we are what we call “planet earth”, remaking itself each day through the interwoven combination of our tiny contributions and subtractions. To feel enlivened entails feeling this connection, to feel and know that that which is in us lives in and around us, an unnameable creative power. When we discover this, our stories begin to change on their own.
Creativity is, in fact, Everywhere
Contrary to the popular notion that creativity is a particular talent on short supply, in reality it is in motion everywhere, in everything, at all moments in time. All living organisms and the elements are continuously engaged in creative acts of being that alter the collective course of our planet in every second of day and night. And we, being the peculiar human creatures that we are, cannot help but create experiences in every waking moment and even as we sleep. Just as our bodies continually generate new cells that make and remake the organs and tissues that give us life, we are continuously generating inward experiences that express themselves as our emotional, intellectual, spiritual and kinesthetic selves.
As simple as direct as this may sound, the process goes on unseen within us, with us mostly entirely unaware. Most of us grow up under that assumption that life happens to us, and that what we feel and experience arises as a direct response to the people and events around us, albeit with some influence of our personal interpretation. But when we discover that we can step into the artist-production studio of our experience and witness how our felt experiences are being generated from within, a whole new world of possibilities opens to us.
This does not mean that, upon realization, we will magically become masters of our destinies able to achieve our heart’s desires. But it does mean we will begin to see more magic in life itself, and what this does is to show us that aliveness is generated not through mastery but through participation and connection. Participation and connection, inside and under, all the time, is what makes the world. Whether in birth or loss, the participation and connection is never broken. We just didn’t see it before, but when we do, our stories change.
