The Joyful Practice Podcast

this week’s episode: We discuss the story of Cerridwen & Gwion , who inspire us to ask: What is transformation? Is it Making Something Happen? Or is it attuning to reality and allowing it to change you? In this episode, we discuss time, darkness, and repetition as elements of the creative process. links & resources * The Scrap Heap essay : Transformation as Terror: Revisiting Cerridwen for Hallowe...

This Week’s Prompt an invocation: and an invitation: message in a bottle: an invocation and invitation for incubating the tender foundations of the future an invocation: in this time of harvest, may you gather seeds of inspiration: ideas, insights, creative experiments. colors, textures, words & sounds. the voices of elders & children. the wild. may you follow the threads that pull you towards the...

We were busy preparing for Olympia ArtsWalk this week and so we thought we’d try an experimental format. In this episode, we discuss one of our shared principles:the Brain is an Organ in the Body What do we mean by that? It’s one of the few principles we’ve never discussed. (music by Andriig ) Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

an equinox prompt Darkness is good. light is good. Darkness holds us. Today we stand on the in-between, a quarter point, a balance. Tomorrow each day is a step towards dark. towards the rainy season, the gray season, the cold season Slow down. (how?) Rest is creative. (but how?) What if it IS that easy? What if you learn to rest by resting. Today is a day of balance. Autumn is the season of in-bet...

These are show notes for the podcast + a tour of the images that Sarah and I discuss, all of them drafts of our book cover for The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times . A note about audio: Sorry for the background feedback on my audio this week. I’m learning. It was a mistake to record with a window open—one that I couldn’t fully correct with editing tools. The above images were o...

This week, as Sarah and I tackle layout for The Joyful Practice Handbook , we’ve discovered we have a problem: we have too many pages! These the pages were once I made about a year ago, trying to envision what the book’s front matter might look like. But the book’s style has evolved since then. So I thought I’d share them is as a sort of UN-preview. Here’s a taste of what’s not in the book What is...

This is the audio for this week's Prompt Portal. To see the accompanying video and images, click here . This Week’s Prompt: (I said the words leggy mint while recording and now I can’t stop saying it.) leggy mint: a slow housekeeping prompt what is a space in your life that wants attending to? move slowly through that space and center pleasure. clear what you are called to ask: what feels alive? w...

this week’s episode: We start by talking about rabbits and aspen groves and seasonal cycles, and work our way to laughing about teenagers. Jenn tries to use the word copium, and if her 13-year old found out she’d never hear the end of it, but it’s okay—he doesn’t listen to the podcast. We get into the nitty-gritty of trying to sort out a personal ethos on where digital tools do and don’t belong in...

this week’s episode: Ideas, art forms, cultures, bodies of water: when two or more things converge, they meet in the estuary — a place of ingenuity, adaptation, and abundance. In this week’s podcast, we consider estuaries as a metaphor for collaborations and creative disruption, specifically, the analog+digital estuary where we hold experiments in turning our analog creations into digital images....

this week’s episode What is a threshold, and how is it different from a portal? How might we use the energy of the threshold to carry us into the portal of creative transformation? These are the questions that guide this week’s conversation. Maybe a threshold is the thing we must cross before we enter a portal, and a portal is what channels us towards creative growth. Thresholds offer a choice: ca...

this week’s episode This week, we’re talking about the Joyful Practice principle: We seek connection to the collective unconscious through collaboration with: friends, strangers, ancestors, dreams, chance, landscape, & the natural world. Its a big topic, ya’ll. Collaboration is expansive. How do we collaborate with our creative intuitions, with our surroundings, or with the fears and ideologies th...

this week’s episode We begin this week’s podcast with that mindf**k of a question: If the brain is an organ in the body, then why do we behave like the brain and the body are separate entities? (Although we don’t once mention Plato or Descartes, they sure are haunting the first half of our conversation.) Other questions we get into this week: What does it feel like to listen to the body’s feedback...

this week’s episode This week we get curious about the ways grind culture separates us from the needs and desires of our bodies, especially the pleasures and challenges of rest. What does it mean to resist rest, and how might imagining rest as a creative act change our relationships with creative process? How does rest get complicated by chronic disease and neurodivergence, and how do busyness and...

this week’s episode This week, we get transgressive about academic and cultural institutions that have built an industry around workshops that are often discipline-and-rigor-focused zones of punishment. We also (tenderly) examine those internalized forms of creative punishment many of us encounter when we start working on a creative project, where imagined audiences watch over us, judging our crea...

Scrappy has two meanings, and we embrace both of them. This, our first go at a podcast, is scrappy in the sense of untidy . We want to play with things before we refine them. It’s also scrappy in the sense of determined . We recorded directly to Substack assuming we could learn how to edit afterwards. But then it seemed we couldn’t! Which maybe would have been fine—to just hit publish and release...

Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe