Wild New World

I took a writing class with writer, psychologist, and coach Martha Beck, Wild New World. As Beck explains, “All of us have patterns where we’re trying to live our best lives and we make the same mistakes over and over. Wild New World is about changing that.” Broadly understood, the Wild New World is about moving between our inward and outward self, our left and right brain, our thought and action toward our best lives. This class has been about practicing the principles of wordlessness, oneness, imagination, and forming in the pursuit of thriving in the Wild New World.

Inroducing Myself to the Wild New World Community

I am a writer living in Atlanta working through the feelings around a professional transition that started almost 7 years ago. (Amazing how days crawl and years fly.) Currently, I wade through the waters of many years of attaching my identity to the credentials I have gained, organizations for whom I work, financial independence, hustling for the next thing, and knowing my primary work is service to others. I blog daily and have been working on a book on gratitude since 2016. I turned 50 in October of 2021, and the Stillness and Questions live simultaneously as I swim in the Beautiful and Hard. That is the creative space I am in as I enter the Wild New World. Looking forward to learning from one another.

Wordlessness Reflections

I started this course curious about practical magic and sense making in this utterly confounding time. From the professional to the individual to the social to the global, I am too often pulling myself back to my breath (wanting desperately not to lose it to begin with). I enter this week feeling reminded and connected to old questions. I completed my Ph.D. in August of 2003 looking at the concept of wide-awakeness in the classroom of two high school drama teachers. (Wide-awakeness is the existential phenomenological concept of being in and of an experience.) My research qualitatively looked at the ways in which the practice of high school drama teachers created powerful encounters with the arts, thereby cultivating a capacity for wide-awakeness in young people.

At this point many years later, looking at creating a wild new world, I return to those questions. I was a high school drama teacher myself before graduate school, after having been a life long performing artist. I realize that my right brain has always been my refuge. I have always found solace and comfort in creating. I have always gravitated to creative people and spaces. I have always created systems that provide opportunities for others to create wide new worlds.

My initial question for this course has exploded (or perhaps it has clarified, kind of like Dorothy learning she had the answers she sought all along.) It is freeing to consider that I have studied the power of the right brain, and written about it a great deal, yet perpetually approach solving “problems” with my left brain. How freeing to think that through practice, and science, I can continue to connect what I know with what I actually do and how I live. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Weekly Wide-Awake: Wordlessness

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