my beginnings

Every project was simply a response to the question: what should I do with my life, right now, in this moment? I'm grateful to have been raised in a way that celebrated this kind of thinking. Over time, the projects became increasingly more elaborate. I was part of some amazing projects like Road to the Shire, The Dreamathon, and The Village of Lights.

 

After eight years of projects, I enrolled in graduate studies at Stanford University. I wanted to understand the nature of creativity, and how certain designed experiences changed people. I started to notice that not all experiences were created equal. Some experiences, which we might call transformative experiences, left me feeling somehow, mystically changed. I began to wonder what made these experiences different, and questioned if I couldn't, in fact, design them. 

 

Around that same time, my best friend Brett died by suicide. Unfortunately, he was not the first friend to die this way (and he has not been the last). I found myself questioning life at a deeper level than ever before. I began sitting for long periods of contemplative silence. I got rid of all my clothing that wasn't black. I started sleeping on the ground, hoping to feel more connected to the earth, to myself, and to God. In hindsight, perhaps I was mimicking the monks in their cells and the hermits in their caves. But by grace, what I found in these deep waters was not any answer to my suffering, but rather a familiar, creative impulse.

 

I felt inspired make things; to create transformative artifacts and experiences, not as an artist per se, but as a disciple. I realized that art, creativity, and life in general are not really about me. They are really about relationship, and being in relationship with life and God in a way that makes creation inevitable. Suffering, then, is actually a doorway into deeper relationship with Life. To receive an idea is an invitation to step through that door, to lose myself for the sake of the Whole. As Yeshua taught: whoever will lose their life for my sake will actually find it. 

 

Transformative experience is always available, so long as I learn to notice it, and let go of non-transformation. This is the process by which I lose my life for the sake of Real Life, for God and for Sacred Reality. By dwelling in this light, I see that there is not actually any problem to solve.

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Based on these realizations, and building on what I had studied at Stanford, I began formal training in contemplative practice in order to learn self-emptying (kenosis). I joined the Lower Lights School of Wisdom where I began training under contemplative teachers Thomas McConkie and John Kessler. I continue to receive wisdom from these teachers, and apply it to my uniquely personal service to the world, i.e. my ministry, which is something like bringing my highest conscious creativity to bear on the suffering I see.

 

Still Point: School of Mystical Design is the creative studio I established to house my various projects and experiments within this ministry. The mission is to cultivate creativity as a spiritual practice. My vision is a world where everyone sees themselves as divine artists collaborating in the beautification and unfolding of Creation itself.

 

I believe this mission and vision require com-passion, in the life of the individual as well as the collective human family, as we "suffer-with" all of life, transforming that suffering into awakening. The intention is not to solve humanity's problems, but to suffer with humanity creatively, on the path back to Oneness with all of Creation.

 

I am honored that we have met on this path. 

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Shalom shalom,

Haymitch

 

You can follow my experiments and projects via Patreon, Instagram, or my Monthly Meditations newsletter.