This is a week for imagining things.

Why? Mostly just because. Any week is a good week for imagining things.

Imagination is a thing that's downplayed when maybe it should be revered. 'It's "just" your imagination'. It's fanciful and frivolous and fantastical and also the most powerful thing we own.

I like thinking of imagination as a place. It's a place we can visit.

Everything starts there.

You’re doing it right, this human thing, and you did life right, today.

Recently I had the great pleasure of talking with my friend and colleague Kellie Stirling about grief. It was a rich and rewarding conversation - I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

You know that song from the Sound of Music that goes:

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start?

Sorry (not sorry) if you now have that stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

She has a point, though - the beginning is a very good place to start. Another good place to start (I think maybe the best place to start), is right where you are. When I think that thought, I feel light and hopeful. Beginning right where I am means that I must be in the right spot to begin, and that feels freeing.

When you’re stepping into using art and creativity to heal or to grow or to manifest what you want in your life, how do you know where to start? “Make something” could mean literally ANYTHING (that’s part of its magic), so how do you choose where to focus?

One of the best ways to start exploring the healing and growing and manifesting potential of making and creativity is to hire an art therapist! We’re basically your guide on the path - it’s our job to create a way in for you.

Spontaneous gestural drawing is one of my favourite things to fill my art journal pages with.

That’s a lot of big words - what do they mean?

It's a way of making an image that encourages stepping away from our thinking mind and letting a different part of us choose colours and marks.

Instead of thinking about what colours, and what shapes, I like to let my eyes go a bit soft, a bit blurred, and instead FEEL the colours and shapes. What colour jumps out at me? Start with that. What shape feels nice to draw? Draw that.

I don’t have a 10 step process to anywhere.

My lack of answers sometimes dismays me.

I want to be able to tell you - here’s the path. Do these ten things, one after the other, and then you will arrive, and live happily ever after.

Alas…

Life, relationships, healing and growth don’t really work like that.

Know what they DO work with, though? Curiosity.

One of the reasons I think grief is so hard is because it’s kind of sticky. It sticks together with other things, and sometimes it’s hard to untangle them.

Here’s one way to tend to some of the sticky, tangly emotions when they show up in our lives. I hope you find it useful.

Really, grieving the end of my morning coffee is perfect - it’s perfect because everything ends, specially cups of coffee, and it’s a strange idea that some grief is more valid than other grief, that there’s things that are acceptable to grieve for and things that are not.

It's a strange idea that grief is for special occasions and is not our constant companion, that it's not a very human thing to feel, that it should be avoided if possible.

We have forgotten how to feel it. We have grown afraid.

Imagine if, when someone is grieving, we collectively knew what to do. Imagine if we had the kind of culture who gathered round grief, made space for it, gave time to it. Imagine if we had the kind of culture that wasn’t afraid of it. Imagine if grief was acknowledged and shared. Imagine if we knew how to move with grief, to move it through our bodies and our hearts, and to let it change us, soften us, open us into love again.

Trees (and the rest of nature) have no concept of progress. They grow because the conditions are right.

What if we did the same? Instead of trying to force progress, instead of frantically reading more self help books and beating ourselves up for not healing fast enough, what if we recognised that perhaps right now the conditions aren’t right for us to be where we’d like to be?

And instead of forcing ourselves, we started creating the right conditions for us to heal, grow and thrive?

Know what’s missing lately?

Silliness. Absurdity. The whimsical and strange.

Not as a way to bypass the weight of the world, not as a way to stick your head in the sand or your fingers in your ears singing ‘la la la I’m not listening’ (although - good strategies, sometimes necessary).

But as a way to help us stay human, and to resource us for the hard times.

What if (see what I did there) we stopped playing the what-if-anxiety game, and instead learned to transform it into what-if-curiosity?

What if (see? I’m doing it again…) we stopped using ‘what if’ to keep ourselves small and safe, and instead used ‘what if’ to encourage ourselves and each other out of our comfort zones, to expand our horizons, to explore what might be possible?

What if the hardest part of doing anything was making the decision to do it? And what if every decision you made was the right decision?

Grief isn’t just sadness.

It contains a whole world of emotions, in so many different flavours. Sadness is one - and rage, anger, frustration, ‘it’s not fair!’ and railing against what we can’t change. Numbness and shut down, depression and dissociation. Sometimes guilt. Helplessness, hopelessness. Sometimes grief is a howling whirlwind, sometimes it’s a soft and tender melancholy. Grief is raw, and real, and very human.

And many of us (most of us?) are afraid of it.

Imagine we're in a boat, and it's taking on water here and there - maybe we pass through a big storm, maybe it rains, maybe we hit something and end up with a hole, maybe it's wear and tear over time. If we don't bail it out and keep the water low, we're going to end up with wet feet.

Grief is kind of like that. If we don’t take the time to tend to it regularly, we might end up drowning in it…

Have you ever tried to read the story of your own life? Our life stories are written in our bodies - the tension we carry, our smile lines, our gestures and the ways that we move.

It’s a different kind of language than the one we’re used to hearing. It speaks in sensations - in tightness and ease, in tingles of energy, in freezy feeling states, in warmth. As we become more and more fluent, deeper and deeper subtleties arise. It’s endlessly fascinating! At least, it is to me - I love what happens when we learn to attune to ourselves so deeply.

Leave no stone unturned.

Sounds like a serious undertaking, turning every stone.

Every stone, turned with anticipation of finding whatever it is that you’re looking for. Treasure? Frogs?

How many stones will it take?

When we’re small, we base our understanding of who we are and how we should behave by noticing the world around us. If we don’t learn to question this understanding as adults, we can end up feeling out of place in one or more areas of our lives, of not feeling authentically ourselves, in a way that’s hard to define.

Once upon a time…” are magic words to me - I find myself leaning in, eyes wide, ready to suspend my disbelief and enter a place where the normal rules don’t apply.

In stories, there’s so much possibility. Anything might happen at any moment. Talking rabbits. Magic carpets. Star crossed lovers finding and losing and finding each other again. Ordinary people overcoming extraordinary odds and discovering they’re not so ordinary after all.