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Love "Creative Monastery". Makes me want to leave the Big Island for Salt Spring!

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Why yes!

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Dec 9, 2021Liked by Carol Sill

Sweet soul, thank you for sharing the creative, individual monastic concept of connection through creative space. I am quilting and thinking about drawing railroad lines, linking spaces and love and potential. My pens haven't yet touched paper, still in an imagining phase.

I look forward to the amuse bouche thoughts!

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Quilting sounds great, and such a comforting long-lasting result when it is done. Loved your idea about rail lines linking space...

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That old white house was ever so close to the railroad line, wasn't it?

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Jan 5, 2022Liked by Carol Sill

Just went back and saw this. Can you direct me to how I can read your book "Attars"? Here, in my little office where I can see the woods and the houses of neighbors, I often have the same sense you describe here so well. I recently went to see the monastery at Montserrah in Spain. There the monks have perched above the monestary in an assortment of limestone caves that riddle the curiously peaked and ragged hill looming over the buildings. If I could attach a photo of a seventeenth century painting of the place that I saw in the museum there, I would love to show you. It looks like something directly out of Tibet. At any rate, your energy and your words give life to my heart. The light, the vibration, flowing from cell to cell, cave to cave, is more real than the electric current that lights our rooms at night.

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Thanks so much! Right back to you from my cave to yours. You can find my book Attars on Amazon - kindle or paperback. I'd love to know your thoughts. :)

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Jan 7, 2022Liked by Carol Sill

Wonderful! It's even available on Amazon.fr! I will give you my thoughts when I read it. Meanwhile, a great Ya Fattah from my cave to yours. The cold and damp that has just set in around me draws me into the warm reverberations of the inside of my grotto where imagination is fertile and thoughts run free.

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Dec 11, 2021Liked by Carol Sill

This is a wonderful thought. Love to think of us all sending creative clues out into the ethers.

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A beautiful post. Alas, I could never be a monk.

Personally, I'm working to build connections and community in non-local spaces.

Perhaps consider the internet as the nervous system of humanity, and in it's infancy,

like the first neural systems some primitive fish that had just few dozen neurons connected and firing to control some minor movements.

The nervous system was not the fish, and the internet is not humanity.

But it (and we) can evolve to higher forms, like the fishes that crawled to land and slowly spawned all the later terrestrial animals.

Billions of humans can now be in communication with each other, and like primitive neurons fire away, sometimes forward, sometimes backward, sometimes just random spasms.

Can my tiny spasmodic firings build a neural net of self-empowered meditators?

I don't know, but I hope so, and work towards this most ever day.

I know very few things for sure,

but I'm pretty sure evolution isn't over yet.

I think writers and quilters and potters and painters are nudging humanity towards ever greater connection.

==>Jim

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dang it, don't know how to edit here.

Not just writers, quilters, potters, and painters, but also baristas and mechanics, used car salesmen, insurance agents (grin), but also meth addicts and math teachers, property developers and the homeless, communists (yay!) and capitalists and all of us evolving humanity one tiny neural spasm of three score and ten at a time...

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You mean basically everyone and everything is part of this grand expression!

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You had me with "unfolding of the implicate."

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That's only because you are doing this yourself in all your writing, and don't deny it!

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But I've never seen the word implicate in print!

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As a noun...

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I'd explain my creative monastery this way: I actually don't recall my writing because I enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" (a word so overused now). He was my mentor when I was sent by my corporate job to U of Chicago's management school before I was promoted—and before I had the courage to move on to the work that had been calling me. I remain indebted to Csikszentmihalyi and all the other professors in the program who corralled me into a meeting to tell me I had the artist's persona. I may write about this experience soon and how it changed my life. Glad to have found you, Carol Sill.

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Thanks Mary! Glad to have found you, too!

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Carol, I am catching up with your Amuse-bouche delights. I do love your "creatively monastic" description. I resonate. I am sitting by my Christmas tree this morning, in our home on Vancouver Island, connecting to you, on Saltspring. Good Morning, sister of words and messages. Continue to weave your magic.

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Thanks Deanne, It's lovely to think of you just a ferry-ride away!

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At some point we'd love to sail over to Saltspring. My cousin Pierre lives there. We'll wait a bit longer, then hopefully travel will make more sense.

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