After an endless year of waiting, the 5th annual Create & Incubate Retreat came and went — it wrapped up on Sunday.
I swear, those five days are the most wonderful five days of my year, and they just keep getting better each year.
And they seem to go faster each year, too.
I wait forever for the retreat to come, and then it’s finally here, and I’m immersed in magical creative energy, and laughter, and generosity, and warm-heartedness… [Read more…]
I woke up at 5:00 am three days in a row this week. Which would be great if I’d gone to sleep at 9:30, but I didn’t.
I was obsessing on my iPad till midnight.
I don’t know about you, but five hours, even six hours of sleep is not enough for me.
I’ve been staying up late, even though I know it’s going to bite me in the butt the next day. And then I’ve been popping awake really early and my spinny, thinky brain won’t stop spinning and thinking, and I can’t get back to sleep.
I’m in an insomnia fugue.
I go through these every [Read more…]
Coming home from a retreat is always a bit of a shock to the system.
I just spent five days immersed in creative play at my 4th annual Create & Incubate Retreat, wrapped in the most loving, supportive community of creatives a person could ask for.
How does one even start trying to describe something like this?
Here’s what I’d like to share about it.
You know how I say if you do something enough it becomes normal? Well, the first time I ran my retreat, I carried an undercurrent of tension and anxiety the whole time.
How would it go? Would people like it? I was super anxious about making sure everyone was happy.
It was my first time leading a group in what I call “catalyzing sessions,” but what are essentially improv games, and I was anxious about that. Would they participate? Would they roll their eyes?
The whole thing was a big experiment. I wanted to create the retreat that I wanted for myself — creativity, community, courage, compassion (which, btw, are the official theme words of Life is a Verb Camp, which you should totally come to in November! I’ll be speaking this year, and it’s happening over my 50th birthday, so I’m treating it in my own mind as a big birthday and life celebration!)
Anyway, I wanted to create the retreat I wanted, because I knew it would be wonderful… but would other people feel the same way?
Would people even come to something that wasn’t a structured workshop or conference? Would they even get how valuable it is?
I understood, because I’d been going to creative retreats for years. I knew how special it is to gather with other creators simply to create.
I knew how energizing it is to be in a room together, each working on our own thing.
I knew how inspiring it is to see what everyone else is up to.
How amazing it feels simply to be in the company of other people who get you, and who will encourage, support, and champion you.
[Read more…]
I’ve shared before that I’ve got this great daily routine going: I write, draw, meditate, stretch, do a little professional development, and work out — all before I get to work each morning.
But last week all that went completely to hell.
Don’t worry, I was expecting it. In fact, it was by design.
Yes, I knowingly and intentionally wreaked havoc on my morning ritual!
My morning routine went to hell because I was in Florida at Heroic Public Speaking Live, a conference for speakers and aspiring speakers.
Each morning I had to [Read more…]
I’m dying to tell you all about this weekend’s Create & Incubate Retreat (the Second Annual!), but where to start?
When an experience is so rich, it’s like poetry or music or art: there’s more going on than can be expressed in regular words.
We had a conversation about just that at the retreat, in fact, when someone was expressing self-consciousness about her painting. She has never thought of herself as an artist, was exploring with paint for the first time (at the “Creative Sandbox” table I set up, with bottles of acrylics, brushes, and paper from my studio), and she had a hard time seeing what she painted as “art.”
The rest of us could see it, though. [Read more…]
