In Bed with Bel

There is now an entire industry built around creativity. Books, courses, podcasts, workshops — all of it circling the romantic idea of the creative life without ever getting to the work itself. In this episode Bel picks up Rick Rubin's  The Creative Act  — a book she genuinely loves — and asks the uncomfortable question: is this chapter one of a conversation nobody is finishing? She talks abou...

Bel sits with the songbirds outside her window and traces a creative lineage that starts with Sappho in 600 BC and runs unbroken through to your living room right now. The thread this episode pulls: Sappho  — ancient Greek lyrical poet from Lesbos. Played the lyre, sang, performed. Devastatingly beautiful work about love, desire, and heartbreak that was so dangerous to the patriarchy it was almost...

Tonight Bel reads about Augustus and Nero for her classics tutorial and cannot hold it together. This is what happens when a mature age student with zero background in ancient Roman history encounters the Twelve Caesars cold — with full adult comprehension of the consequences, the ramifications, and the ripples still moving through society two thousand years later. What's in this episode: Augu...

Plato walked into a dinner party in 416 BC and accidentally wrote the best self help book ever made. It just took 2,400 years for anyone to notice. At some point in your adult life something shifts. You realise you are the most interesting, most alive, most fully yourself you have ever been, and almost nobody around you has noticed. The culture calls this a crisis. A phase. Ingratitude. What if it...

The Original Situationship: Homer, Sappho, Plato & Rumi on Why Love Wrecks UsHave you ever loved someone so completely it felt dangerous? Turns out you're not alone, and you never were. In this episode Bel takes you through the ancient texts that somehow, impossibly, know exactly how modern heartbreak feels. From Homer's Odyssey, the original story of a woman waiting twenty years while...

In tonight's episode Bel discovers the term  pretirement  — and falls down a rabbit hole of thousands of women saying the same thing in the comments of a single YouTube video:  we are done.  What follows is an honest, unscripted late-night conversation about what it actually costs to want out, what happens when you let go of something without a plan B, and why the life you are going to be reme...

The danger of creativity. We humans are the most dangerous being on earth… and I don’t mean in the most obvious violent sense. I’m referring to our most powerful weapon that is unlimited, unmatched and cannot be replicated by the most advanced technology on the planet. We’re all born with it in equal measure and what differentiates us all is how well or how much we dare to use it. We’re may choose...

Hi, I'm Bel. Welcome to my bed. I'm a graphic designer, artist, writer, clairvoyant, and mature-age university student on the Gold Coast, Australia — currently doing my undergraduate degree with my eye on Honours and a PhD in art history. I record from bed because this is a small apartment, I have three kids, and honestly the bed is the best place to think. This channel has no fixed format...

I have two days to memorise 25 Renaissance artworks for a major university exam worth 45% of my grade — so let's do this together. In this video I run through the key works, artists, and movements from the Byzantine era through to the High Renaissance — including Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Masaccio, Bellini, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Hieronymus Bosch. I share what I actually find intere...