malvasia bianca

I’m only a sixth or so of the way through The Process of Creating Life, but the ideas there are really getting my brain racing today for some reason. He gives these beautiful little examples of evolving living structures step by step: looking at those, you (or at least I) say:

• What a great paradigm shift: don’t think of creating something by putting it together from the outside, instead create something by growing it outward from its center(s), with every step a living collection of centers on its own.
• Those examples look really simple; maybe I could do something like that?

And right now (literally right now, today, this hour) I seem to be swimming in ideas that are pushing in that direction: I’m also reading the Presentation Zen book (which is full of wonderful ideas on a topic that, frankly, I spend very little time on these days, which perhaps has the benefit of making me more receptive to ideas out of the blue), I spent the last two days at Agile Open California, I was listening to a podcast on interactive fiction on the way home; invitations to creativity are all around us, if you just stop and listen for a second.

Which is all well and good, but how to harness it? Not in the abstract: how should I personally harness it?

Hmm, here’s a question: forget creating a living structure externally, the living structure that I’m most directly involved in is my own life. What are my life’s Strong Centers, my life’s Levels of Scale, my life’s Boundaries, my life’s Good Shapes, my life’s Echoes, my life’s Roughnesses, my life’s Voids, my life’s …? And how can I nurture and grow these centers, enriching them, giving birth to new ones, while helping to also enrich the centers around me?