When I have built up a thundercloud of comparison, criticism and control, I take myself to the woods. Hug a tree (for real!). Lay down in the dirt (getting dirty is good!).  Let the stream sing me into deep rest. This is my invocation.

An invocation to restore creative joy

Before I create, allow me to be part of creation - to be re-created with the sweet breath of the wind and the spark of warmth from the sun above and the fire that burns deep in the heart of the earth. Let me rest until the birds visit me with their songs. Let me feel the patience of my  being in the stones polished by the rain. Let me rest until the rest is done.  Let me rest until I can feel the flames of the wild fire at the core of everything licking me tenderly - tickling my desire.

Then let the fire of my desire turn into the dance of wild play.  Let me laugh spontaneously at the miracle of life. Let me climb the trees under which I once rested. Let me smell every flower that has burst into bloom on the forest floor. Let me throw away any attempts to control and become a full participant in love. Let me transcend effort, striving and ambition and unleash freedom, imagination and the wilderness within. Let me dare to love first and dare to love more.

Let deep rest and wild play lead me into harmony with creative rhythms. Let me be receptive, responsive and attuned. Let me abandon the tensions that keep me stuck seeing the small bits and raise me up and let me see the wholeness. Let  creative joy inhabit me as much as I inhabit it. 

deep rest + wild play = creative joy

Hallelujah and Amen

Imagine the revolutionary artistic fire of Frida Kahlo combined with the push-the-edges business savvy of Tom Peters and add a dash of design, Tufte-style, and you'll begin to have a sense of the poetry and practicality that Danielle LaPorte brings to this book.

The words of the great humanist philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, in his Plato commentaries, seem appropriate here, "Just as there are three main powers in fire - heat, light, and fleeting subtlety - so there are three similar powers in the soul’s essence: the power of life, of understanding, and of desiring …. At different times the soul brings forth its variety of seeds more or less in profusion."

Danielle is bringing forth her seeds in profusion. Danielle is a fire that brings the heat, light and subtlety of her words and vision to bear upon the soul's essence of life, understanding and desiring. She roots her seeds in the field of her own entrepreneurial experience, but I assure you the wisdom in this book can be transplanted to any fertile ground from creative pursuits to relationships to working "for the man".  What Danielle does in this book is no less than to reclaim entrepreneurship from those who would frame it as merely a transactional economic activity to instead treat it as an art of the soul.

Danielle doesn't just want you to succeed in business, she wants you to transform your life.

She shares her own vulnerable moments and how they led to more clarity: So I admitted it, "I'm a humanitarian." And then I put a fine point on it: "Who happens to be an entrepreneur."

She highlights the tensegrity of opposites: Wisdom comes from embracing contrasting experiences. Lucky breaks and pounding the pavement. A winning streak and the dark night of the soul. Selling out and taking a stand. Wanting it all and walking away.

She composes soul sutras worthy of printing and framing: Keep breathing. You're on the verge of a miracle.

One of my favourite parts of this book is the section on time. Danielle challenges common approaches to time management and turns us on to how ridiculous that concept is. The result is a sense of freedom from the rushed, harried approach to life and a settling into responsiveness and rhythm.This book is full of powerful instances like this where she lights up her fierceness and shines it on conventional wisdom.

As she dances with the mysteries of human life, work and longing, the reader is treated to passionate manifestos, intense love and liberating turns of imagination.

It needs to be noted that this book reflects Danielle's insights not only in what she says, but also in how she says it. This is not a linear how-to book (though it can be read that way and it does contain great advice) but rather it plays with format, pacing and language so that instead of being a single lane experience, it's a book that invites you to rise above the road and fly in circles around and back and forward, making your own unique connections. And in so doing, find your own way. That's ultimately the heart of Danielle's message.

This book is a steal retailing for under $15 online! You'd be crazy not to buy one.  I've already bought and given away a few copies - and I'm going to randomly give away a couple more in the next few days to my newsletter subscribers. If you are already a subscriber - great! If you'd like to join us and maybe win a copy - sign-up on the right side bar.Winners have been chosen and notified.

Extra treat: Listen in on a conversation Danielle and I had and hear her rif on the difference between excitement and enthusiasm.

Starting today and during the rest of March,  I'm going to highlight what some of the contributers to that ebook have been doing in the past couple years.

Brené Brown

Brené's visibility has taken off in the last couple of years. It's been so cool to watch. Her TEDxHouston talk on Vulnerability went viral, she did a series for PBS on The Gifts of Imperfection and published a book of the same name. Finally, the people at TED realized they had to get her up on the stage at their main event and she just spoke at the TED conference at Long Beach last week.  They haven't posted the video of her talk up yet, so in the meantime, let's listen to her Houston talk again:

Shilo Shiv Suleman

This young Indian woman's career has also blossomed in the last couple of years. You really need to visit her website to see all the things she is involved in. Notably, she became a TED Fellow, completed a gorgeous interactive book, Khoya, for the Ipad. I downloaded it as soon as it was available and was captivated for over an hour playing with it. She recently spoke about it at the TED sponsored conference in India, INK:

His love was his greatest gift to the world.  He didn't invent anything, he wasn't the icon of huge company and the world press did not take note of his death.

He was no Steve Jobs. And I am profoundly grateful for that.

It seems that now that the initial reaction has passed and people have had a chance to read the biograhy of Jobs and see what was sacrificed on the altar of his success, they are thinking about their own lives. And I am profoundly grateful for that.

I believe the things that will really change this planet for the better are going to come about when we remember to love. Cause love is the ultimate launching pad, and your most successful launch should always be your children.

Here are some examples of dads remembering to love:

For a long time, work was my only thing. I worked evenings, weekends, and Christmas. At those rare times when I wasn’t at work in body, I was there in spirit, unable to speak or think of much else. I wanted so badly to climb the mountain that I stopped asking why I was doing it.

I admire Steve for the mountains he climbed. At the same time, I wonder if he missed the whole point, becoming the John Henry of our time. He won the race, but at what cost?

Me? I may turn out to be a failure in business, but I refuse to fail my kids.

From the blog Deliberatism

Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn't sustainable for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks...You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I'm downright religious about it. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

From Jeff Atwood

In the last several years, the company has been successful enough to generate a substantial amount of capital. And with it, I have been fortunate to bring in people with great talent. And so I started thinking of all the amazing things we would do. I would put in crazy hours to do it, of course, but we would go and do amazing things.

Then Steve Jobs died.

And suddenly I realized something. What is the objective here? My oldest child just turned 15. My other two are no longer little either.  And I have been missing out on them. And my wife.

For all the success and amazing accomplishments of Steve Jobs, in the end, nothing could save him. Death can come at any time.  And I realized that if I found myself on death’s door, I would regret deeply not having spent more time with  my kids when they were…well, kids. 

From the blog JoeUser.com

All the above examples I found on Jason Kottke's blog:

Since Jobs died, I've been pushing a little less hard in that direction.

Four is hardly a trend but it is interesting that the death and biography of the greatest businessman of our generation -- someone who was responsible for so many world-changing products and ideas, who shaped our world through sheer force of will & imagination, etc. etc. -- is inspiring some people to turn away from the lifestyle & choices that made Jobs so successful & inspiring in the public sphere and to attempt the path that Jobs did not.

And then this morning I read Jonathan Fields' post about Entreporn:

I’m not any better than anyone else. I don’t live anywhere near a charmed existence. I have bills to pay, struggles, emotions and challenges on many levels. I work hard. Really hard. But I work even harder to align my time and energy with what I claim to hold dear in life.

Because I can always start a new company, but I can never relive moments in the lives of my wife and daughter.

I'm seeing more dads like this and fewer dads like this.

I'm declaring it a movement.  And I'm saying my dad started it.

Or a puppy cut back on tail-wagging for fear of it being too much?

When we are not editing who we are nor trying to cover up who we are with some persona that we know not to be true to our hearts, there is no need to take on an attitude of lowliness or meekness. There is no need to puff ourselves up and then put-on a pretense of humility. As Golda Meir once said. "Stop being so humble, you're not that great."

When we are fully ourselves - full of ourselves (who else are you going to be full of?)- humility becomes a put on. Not necessary.

Own your you-ness. No need to play small and no need to play big. Just play.

Stop editing yourself out of existence and calling it humility.

Wag your tail or rattle your tail. Throw back your head and laugh or hiss. Do what you were put on this earth to do. And don't be humble about it.

xox

I have one picture of my husband and I holding him, swathed in a hospital green blanket. We named him Vincent - after Van Gogh.  I feel about Van Gogh the same way Alice Walker does - "If there were any justice in the world/I'd own Van Gogh's starry night." 

So we named our baby Vincent and placed him among the stars. Tonight, right after posting this, I will go out in the dark but clear night and find my Vincent dancing. Singing to me of light from up among the constellations I have made of my beloveds who have left this earth.

Stars tell us of the infinite, the visionary, of something in ourselves that is starlike, star stuff. In loss, we look up and find in the beckoning incandescence of a single star the longed for soul of the departed. - from The Book of Symbols

It's not unusual for my clients to express some fear that it's too late for them.  That they are too old to find their calling, to follow a passion or even to change old behaviours.  I get it - I'm certailnly not a stranger to that place. 

A confession: I, the dedicated yoga student and teacher, took a week intensive with Jill Miller in January 2011 in California. My dad had just died in Dec 2010, so I spent every savasana of this intensive with a face wet with silent tears. Then I came home from California and dropped my yoga practice cold. For a full year. I have no idea why. It doesn't really matter. I did the occasional downward dog here and there, but I did not once roll out my mat . Not once did I do an intentional yoga practice. I thought maybe it was over. I thought maybe I would never do yoga again.

And then early this month, Feb 2012,  I just got up one day, dug my mat out of the closet, rolled it out and started to play with poses. I have no idea why. It doesn't really matter.  I've been having so much fun. I've lost some poses - I used to be able to just pop up into headstand - not now. That's OK. I feel like I needed that space to come back to my mat in a fresh way. I've given up muscling through poses and I'm working with them from instinct instead of force.

My role model is Vanda Scaravelli and her concept of allegrezza. She came to yoga in her mid 40s and practiced for the next 50 years. I am 45 - I realize I've only just begun. I can't wait to see what the next 50 years bring. 

The daughter of artistic Italian parents, wife of a professor of philosophy, and an accomplished pianist, Vanda Scaravelli was accustomed throughout her life to meeting creative artists, intellectuals, and literati. The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti came to stay at the Scaravelli's villa overlooking Florence every year. When Scaravelli's husband died suddenly after World War II, she soon began spending summers with her children at a chalet in Switzerland, where she hosted Krishnamurti during his lectures there. B. K. S. Iyengar would come every morning to teach him yoga; he introduced Scaravelli, then in her 40s, to the ancient discipline, and "a new life came into my body." Thus began her ongoing exploration of what she called allegrezza, "the intelligent heart." - Phil Catalfo

Allegrezza. I wrote the word on a big sheet of paper and hung it in my office. What a gorgeous word. What a gorgeous idea. What a gorgeous example Vanda is. 

Vanda's wild wisdom from her beautiful book Awakening the Spine:

There is no beauty without love and there is no love without beauty.

What is beauty? Are love and beauty interconnected? Does beauty derive from love? Or does love derive from beauty?

You will discover the amazing transformation in a person when she is loved, she blossoms, becoming more beautiful each day.

When we love what we are doing there is beauty in it and even the more insignificant work becomes attractive.

Love has no barriers, it is like a pool spring, pouring water endlessly. And it is perhaps this absence of limitation that gives wings to fly.

Beauty is the absence of a definite determined action, the freedom from slavery to an already formed ideal that drives us in a particular direction eliminates all other possibilities to wander among the many adventurous, and sometimes dangerous, roads. Beauty gives also the pleasure to uncover and the luxury to lose.

Watch Vanda's beauty at 85 - "flowers blossom in spring, and then they blossom again in autumn".

It's never too late.

This is it: commit to having a (minimum) 5 second kiss with your partner. Everyday. And count the 5 seconds fairly - you know, like you used to do for hide-and-seek. 1, 1000, 2, 1000 etc. Or set the timer on your phone if you are the geeky type. After a few practice sessions you'll get a feel for how long it is and you won't have to count anymore - which will allow you to be more present in the experience.

Even your response to the idea of doing this practice can be revealing.

The exclusive focus on verbal communication as the path to strengthen relationships has left big huge gaps and has hung many relationships out to dry. Communication skills alone will not save a relationship. There is a deeper connection that needs to be nourished. That's what this practice is for.

I'd love to hear from you if you try it - let me know how it goes. If you're already doing this and more - I'm guessing your relationship is already pretty damn fantastic.