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Creativity Handbook

Creativity Handbook: JLP’s Journal for a Creative Life. Find your Creative Personality Type, Daily Inspiration, Storytelling, Filmmaking and More

Eat Me Big, Drink Me Small

Diana Instant+Yesterday the Integrate Retreat finished, and I came home to rewrite my story for Thursday's show before running into Manhattan for the rehearsal.  This morning I'm taking it easy, thinking about unpacking from last week's trip, savoring and settling back into my daily life.  I was home to select the Get Lucky giveaway winner on Sunday at midnight, but couldn't get a post together to announce it until now.  Random.org helped me select the winner: Emily from Collecting Raindrops.  Congratulations, Emily!  Send me your mailing info and I'll get this yummy read on its way to you.  Everyone else can have Katherine's new novel arrive in her mailbox by ordering a copy here.  More on the retreat is coming soon, but here are a few thoughts about its theme, Integrate, in the meantime.

Size has been on my mind a lot since I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland a few weeks ago.  The parts in Alice's journey in which she's eating or drinking something to make her big or small really stood out to me.  I could feel her struggling with her size and power, and myself grappling with my own.

Life is full of moments in which we feel big or in which we feel small, and it's easy to think that one must be our true identity, and the other a mistake or a just a part we're playing or a sham.  So it's especially confusing when we feel both at once.  I know I can rock that stage, but I really wish my friends were here to hold my hand.

Something about watching Alice grow and shrink and grow back again on a big screen helped me see with a new clarity that the essence of who we are defies measurement--it exists on some other plane.  I could see the possibility that I could be so malleable, that I could be big or small as the situation requires.  Inside this paradigm, it is normal to go back and forth between these paradoxes of self: seen and hidden, strong and vulnerable.  Going from leading a retreat in a beautiful brownstone to washing poopy panties by hand feels matter-of-fact instead of like some crazy whip-lash.  It all belongs: all my roles, all my sizes, all my pieces.  They are all true, and they all get their moments.  Eat me big, drink me small.