Throw It In The Air (See What Happens)

Ka: remember when we were sitting at the Top Pot in Seattle a month ago and made mind-maps about what was pressing to us at the time? You did one on how to proceed with your life in general, mine was on conceiving of a website for my coaching business. We took turns branching off our thoughts, conversing on paper, with a stop watch reminding us when to switch papers.

Anyway, for a while longer, I remained obsessed with this idea of my website and what it might look like and contain and whom it should speak to. In fact, I kinda despaired about the whole thing, because I just don't quite know how to brand my coaching practice yet. And so, after all our work and brainstorming, I threw the whole thing in the air, and decided to temporarily ditch the website and focus on finding clients through my existing networks.

So as it goes, Zornitsa, one of the first people I come across to ask whether she'd like to have a complimentary session with me, told me briefly of her plans to finally go into business for herself as a web designer to support her dancing career, and I suggested we make a barter agreement, and she said great, and we met -- and now I'm getting a website AND I have a new client to coach!

This, my friend, is called putting your intentions out there and letting the universe take care of the rest. Can't wait to show you what we come up with.

Collage: My Tool For Business Growth

Okay hi, I'm back. For a moment there -- a month, really -- I was confused about how to move forward with various aspects of my life, including my budding coaching business and, apparently, this blog.

In an effort to define my brand, develop a website, and come up with a business name -- you know, those things you're supposed to do when you start a new business -- I got all hung up on semantics, exact wordage, design requirements and some notion of a precise target market. I did the exercises given to me by my business development coach, I got coached by other peer coaches on how best to work with the business development coach, I brainstormed with friends and frenemies, I even visited Kat in Seattle (!!).

My findings:

1. I discovered that I like approaching my "target market" as a research project. Namely, I am super curious about people who live in multiple cultural worlds simultaneously, and I want to know how they make sense of where/who/with whom they live and how they approach their professional/creative/spiritual lives. I am reading and I'm having conversations. And the logical place to process my findings is in writing. How about on this blog!

 

2. After throwing all the "guaranteed-success" exercises in the air, I made a collage with the question in mind "What is my relationship with my ideal client?" This is what I came up with. It's fun to interpret what ended up on the collage, but what ultimately sticks out to me is a) that I really profit from visually organizing my thoughts in a non-linear way, and b) that the process of collaging says tons about my approach to coaching: People's multiple cultural worlds are like collages and I like to recognize them as such. In addition, working with scissors, glue stick and magazine images is really fun!

(Also, visiting with Kat was like food for my soul. Note how we didn't really make a tremendous effort to blog while we were in each others' presence... we were too busy taking the ferry, canoeing, walking, mind mapping, hanging with friends, cooking and eating. Damn, tangibility is good.)

A Place to Get Your Hands Dirty

this past weekend i was gifted a 3-day printmaking course at Pratt Fine Arts (a birthday present from my parents!). it was the first art class i've taken since elementary school and it blew my mind. a playground of materials, colors, tools, and ideas, i soaked up every second of it and found myself sinking down into it and resisting the effort to resurface.

the waterline of my life at this moment feels choppy and stuttering, like i'm waiting for that clear day when i can see that i've made my life revolve around what i love.

i learned a little bit about composition this weekend from my art teacher Romson Bustillo. he is an amazing meaning-maker! (check out his work here.)

he talked about shapes and how we orient them in space or on a page. triangles have to do with ascending, discovering "what's up there" or "what's out there" and are often linked with ideas of spirituality and faith (think of the tops of churches). squares are about tangibility, the here and now, they remind us of the things we lives with and that support us- buildings, furniture, the structural elements of our surroundings. circles represent universal truth, heaven and earth, are found surrounding spiritual beings.

he asked me important questions about my work, why i chose to etch a bird into my wood plate, what it represented for me, why the baseball hat, what is with the color green....? it was refreshing to confront my choices, tangibly, staring back at me and to have to find the answers inside myself. i'm used to to stumbling upon meaning through random play, but it is important to know why I make certain choices, to know what the images, colors, and shapes mean to me. it was a good reminder to look at the way i am ultimately making my life, the composition and organization and the intentions i set behind my choices, where i take myself, how i spend my time, to what efforts and fights i give energy.

to know why.

it's not to say that i have to know all the answers already, but i have to check in with myself to investigate the impulse. and open the door from there.

i chose to keep anchoring myself to the creative process. staying grounded in what i love, giving what i have, and working toward making that a possible reality for us all.

From Bits to Atoms

In a change of topic, but still related to this question of making material sense of our digitized commerce and communication, the cover story of Wired magazine (which, by the way, is one of four magazines I subscribe to in print -- so fun for bus rides!) is about how a decade of "open source" software development is turning into the phase of open source manufacturing. Check this video out:



In other words, you no longer need to own a factory or be a giant business to manufacture items you've just dreamt up, but if you have the proper design skills (or even just the software) you can custom produce almost anything these days. The result is that we have a much greater ability to make our visions -- as producers, consumers and artists -- a reality.

How does this relate to us? I believe that we have spent, say, a decade or more unlearning how to write and send letters, shop for things in stores, make useful hand-made gifts, get creative inspiration in museums and theaters, and visit home for Sunday dinner with our families, as we have moved many of those basic human cultural activities into the world of digital bits and on-screen facilities. It follows, then, that the next logical step in this process is to democratize the bringing and sending not just of information, but of the tangible atoms, i.e. things that make us happy (and that we happily make). What do you think? What does the next ground-breaking phase in communication look like? What gives turning bits into atoms momentum in our world of blogs and poetry?

when you're lost and found

if you weren't there, you wouldn't know we were watching the sunset

the edge of puget sound pushing its chilly waves toward us

the end of november some time ago

a moment without words

sitting close to a friend

that bandana i lost in argentina

but i'm pretty sure cameron still owns

those red socks

and now, the 3rd of the spirit bodies series:

meanwhile, during our skype talk.....

Green Screen Shot

You know I like to photograph things in the tangible world, but more and more I've become fascinated with the ability to capture the life inside this machine, in which so much of my relating to the world takes place. In fact, there are beautiful moments, like this one while we were Skyping last night, that are so worth capturing, that give us the opportunity to reflect on the otherwise intangible, fleeting moments of our virtual communication. I mean, what flickers past this screen actually becomes part of my memory and sometimes even my dreams. And to think that these bits get blasted through space satellites to reach the other side of the continent (or even our next door neighbors) kinda blows my mind.

P.S.: I love how your pillow case matches the color of your wall.