Holy Moly Thank You All for making my last post’s thread so rich in experience and story. We who live in a place other than where we were raised are a beautiful community with rich voices, varied takes, profoundly meaningful experiences, and a vulnerability that is almost inexpressible, it’s so tender.
A warm welcome to all of the new Baur Studio subscribers from around the world. Your voices and thoughts are important and needed. Thank you for being here, for subscribing, and I hope you’ll find yourself in the words here and talk to us in the comments.
I keep coming back to the word community. Also creativity and self awareness. Because taking on the world in a real and intentional way requires becoming self aware, so we can access our creativity. And to do that, a community helps immensely.
I would love for Baur Studio to be the community for manifesting creative, extraordinary lives.
A special thank you to
who wrote this wonderful post and included Baur Studio.Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week here on the Stack:
Mika is such a star. Here’s a wonderfully written post, about being brave enough to suck. I love it. It is just so good and validates what I know to be true.
Do you know
? If you want to explore writing from the inside out, there is no place else to be other than with Jeannine and her community. She’s starting a new writing intensive in August (on my birthday!). The cost of a subscription for her newsletter is nothing compared to what you receive in this BOMB of a community. Join us, won’t you? It’s magical.This gorgeous post about the restoration of the Grand Hall of Detroit’s Michigan Central Train Station by my friend Dana McMahan.
weighs in with this wonderful post about true wealth.Feedback is important. I read and respond to comments and love the dialog with my readers. Hitting the 🧡 or sharing/restacking helps the post be read by as many people as possible. Thank you so much.
People sleep walk through large swaths of life. They eat what they do, furnish their houses like they do, have the relationships they do, and do the work they do because that’s what’s done. Fitting in is important for most people. Church expectations, school expectations, family expectations, social expectations that lead straight to mediocrity become the overriding substance of our wild and beautiful lives.
It’s about external expectations versus our internal wild and beautiful lives.
America is a hotbed for external expectations, but it’s unsustainable. It’s expensive, outdated, unhealthy. Mediocrity isn’t even achievable anymore for the majority of working people. Middle class, single family suburban developments, the sought-after lifestyle of the last two generations, are decaying at an alarming rate. There’s no money to handle 50 year old infrastructure problems. Attention was never paid to the reality that homes and roads need investment to stay useable. There was never long term planning. Low density suburban housing removes land from the agriculture base, taxes road systems because of long commutes and contributes to endless pollution levels.
That’s just one example.
The problems of the post-capitalist American lifestyle are endless. The next two generations have many seemingly insurmountable problems to solve because we’ve handed them a real mess.
But we can’t process it; it’s all too bizarre and already out of control. Instead, we continue mindlessly on a path having little or nothing to do with deeper self awareness of who we are or what our actions cause. Continuing mindlessly down a path already proven to be a failure is a choice. A bad one.
The only thing that can save us is waking up.
Self awareness is a topic
writes about eloquently in this post. This passage stuck with me:It's amazing to discover how much of what we believe we have chosen for ourselves actually was decided for us by parents or societal influences in a way that has flown mostly under the radar for us. Even when we think we understand what happened, I can promise you that it's usually only the tip of the iceberg.
Underneath our conditioning and trauma, we find what some people call the True Self or authentic self. Others believe this part of us is our 'soul' or ‘essence.' But you don’t have to believe any of this to connect with this part of yourself that exists outside the demands and dictates of ego.
We’re conditioned by trauma to stay in situations that are bad for us | others | the planet and keep us from moving forward. Lifestyles that are comfortable and predictable (not to mention socially acceptable), we subconsciously dial up the fear of change, staying put, for better or for worse.
Gathering courage to change and become aware of who we truly are will take our most carefully laid plans, etched in normalcy and predictability, crumble them up and toss them in the trash can.
But trauma doesn’t just have a negative side that keeps us locked in. It can also expedite massive change. The choice of what we do with our trauma will determine how epic our lives will be.
In 1992, we experienced the magnitude 7.3 Landers Earthquake, a driving force for moving from Southern California back to the east coast. A little after 5 am on a late June morning, walls slanted, bookshelves crashed, cracks popped from the ceiling down an interior wall, and the bed landed with a thud in the middle of the room. Outside, near the beach, transformers and wires from the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station snapped and danced. We didn’t find our cat for over a day; she squeezed into a wedge behind an Ikea closet unit, terrified for her life.
If I were to pinpoint crucial moments when I knew things would change, the Landers quake is one of them. A lot of manifesting happened after that. The move back east set into action events that brought about our leaving the US and was precipitated, in part, by an earthquake that could have killed us.
My commercial interior design career blossomed during our years in Southern California. I loved living there in many ways. But Cali was a learning experience, not a permanent place. California got me away from family, friends and most importantly my own paradigms of who I was. The earthquake brought Cali to an end for us, and that was ok, because I had discovered so much about myself there. I left California confident that I could do just about anything.
Then couple of years later we moved to Germany and the walls slanted and the bookshelves crashed all over again. When you choose to live a self determined life, you get used to slanted walls and crashing bookshelves and start to see them as something other than just traumatic.
Understanding the meaning of creativity at soul level is the greatest gift I’ve received. Creating is so important. Living outside of my comfort zone has taught me why that is.
Creating is what is going to lead you to your wild-hearted self.
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Moving someplace new and starting over with nothing familiar was ground zero for my personal growth. And ground zero, when alternatives are few but possibilities are endless, is a very intimidating and scary place.
Harnessing fear and walking through it. ← Tough as it gets.
Creating something where there was nothing. ← Not easy.
Learning who you are from what you created. ← Profoundly enlightening.
Allowing who you really are to manifest. ← Worth it all.
I’m not saying that you have to leave the comfort of your native country to find out who you are. Not at all. There are many types of ground zeros for personal growth. Many.
But you do have to leave the cushy featherbed of your comfort zone.
Let’s move out of lives that hold us hostage. Abusive and abused lives. Unhappy lives. Situations where our energy is being depleted for causes that simply are not worth it. Lives that require us being one way to the outside world, and another inside of ourselves. Let’s recognise mediocrity for what it is - and decide if that’s what we want our lives to be about - or not.
Choosing extraordinary is complicated. Difficult. Challenging. It’s living on wits and sometimes balancing everything we are on the head of a pin. It’s not for everyone and that’s why you can look around everywhere and find almost everyone not doing it. The question is, what is it you want - for yourself?
We get to show up.
We get to leave mediocre behind.
We get to manifest extraordinary.
I look forward to your thoughts and hearing about your process in the comments. Let’s help each other live extraordinary lives.
Love and light,
Diana
This is all the things I need to hear and right on time! But it feels like the gentle wake up call on a yoga retreat. And I do relate to Cali being the place of self discovery and growth but also a catalyst for leaving the place itself. It is just too much in all the ways but somehow not enough for what I needed when I left. I needed safe and stable when I left. I moved there in my first marriage and left because it was not the nurturing place I needed when that marriage ended. The house we lived in last burned in a wildfire recently— decades since I burned that marriage to ashes when I finally realized how abusive it was. My child and I ended up where I grew up, but the choice was intentional this time. Choosing the place I’d wanted to flee asap as a young adult was humbling, but made me see the qualities that made it a good home for me as a child. Another happy personal earthquake in the form of a new husband uprooted us again. I love hearing more of your origin story and can’t wait for August in Writing in the Dark- I hope your lovely readers here will come play with us!
There is much to consider here. I can look back and see ways in which I have started and restarted and restarted again, and ways in which I have not. There are ways in which I am tied to places I am now that I will not sever, even though I would like to move, and so I have been thinking about how we can find the extraordinary no matter where we are or what we're doing (or have to do). Leaving the US or my particular place in it is not an option for me (because of the people I will not leave), so I'm thinking about how those of us rooted to things we cannot leave (people, places, physical limitations, etc) can still transform our circumstances. Can find the extraordinary within situations that are/seem mediocre at best.