Nine doorways into your intuitive creativity.
Parallel play in community!
If you enjoyed the piece about parallel play last weekend, this one is to share some ideas for ways you might like to build it into your own life.
I hope this post inspires many more ideas…
Here are nine invitations that echo different ways of being in the world. Each offers a different doorway into parallel play.
Some are parallel because you can easily invite another person in, to share it alongside you, but we can all approach them as opportunities for playing in parallel here so please feel free to share about this in comments or chat where I will put up some threads!
When choosing, go with the ones that feel alive to you….
Walk alongside a friend.
Arrange to meet someone you’re already comfortable with, for a walk where conversation is optional. Wander at your own pace, stopping when something catches your attention so that your proximity to one another is elastic. You might want to arrange how you will transition out of this at the end, by meeting for a coffee or setting the location to reconnect in your usual way.
Follow a thread of curiosity.
Offer yourself an hour learning about something that is intriguing to you. Follow your nose with this. Make it the opposite of doom-scrolling, so that your curiosity leads the way and makes connections.
A misguided walk.
Go somewhere familiar you like, without deciding exactly what you will do when you get there. Choose a starting point based on an attraction that you feel. Imagine you are creating your own deep map of this place. when something makes a strong impression on you, you might like to take a photograph as a souvenir of the moment.
Create a sundial
Find something that casts a shadow and track it at different times of day. Make a circle for it and turn it into a temporary kind of clock.
Notice what your body notices.
Spend a few minutes outdoors paying attention to your sensing. Feel the breeze, hear the sounds. Take in your patch of sky. What is newly being in your square mile this hour of this day?
Offer something to the outside
Begin a new thread of correspondence with the wider world. Create and fill a bird table. Tidy up in a littered community space. Place a painted stone where someone can pass and discover it.
Make something at a shared table.
Sit with a companion or two or three, each working on your own writing or making. Simply enjoy the company of others absorbed in their own creative process.
Become a different pair of eyes.
Borrow the perspective of another being for a little while. This could be a character from a story, or a creature much smaller than you, or one that can fly or burrow. Every so often, imagine into what it sees as you go about your busyness.
Trust when enough is enough.
Like Jelena with her collages, whatever you’re doing, practise stopping at the moment you hear the inner voice that says, it’s finished. See what happens when you honour that knowing instead of looking for perfection or a more external-referenced kind of completion.
Consider what your doorway into your intuitive creativity had to offer you, and be kindly present with any emotion that is stirred. You might like to journal to digest the experience, or simply breathe with it.