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Subtle Practice

@subtle_practice

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Creative life, in practice ⚘
→Listen to the podcast, Conversations on Practice

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The Free Quarterly Vol. 1, Chapter 2: The Pleasure of Play starts today. We practice & engage in collaborative creative inquiry from new moon to new moon.

Join via link in bio. by @subtle_practice

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4 months ago

The Free Quarterly is a community cohort for creative inquiry.   Each year we circle around an annual theme which serves as our volume header. Each quarter we gather for a single moon cycle to shape a cornerstone of the theme.

Utopia comes from the ancient Greek elements οὐ (ou) meaning “not, no” and τόπος (topos) meaning “place.” A utopia is literally “no place,” a place that doesn’t exist.

As we enter an age of machinized creativity with the advance and mass adoption of AI, we’re invited to consider the ideal conditions to keep our human creative faculties alive. What kind of topos — inner / outer; personal / collective; micro / macro — offers space for true human expression, the kind that moves and stirs us at the level of soul?

Our first chapter explored the inquiry, Making Space, building on the premise that the ideal must first be imagined and imagination requires space.

This next chapter, we move into inquiry around The Pleasure of Play, where we’ll experiment with the faculty that arises when we shift beyond mere survival, offering ourselves ample containment and safety to lose ourselves to the moment and enter into no-time.

Play takes us out of chronological or sequential time into experience that is fertile, meaningful, and seemingly beyond time. Here, we let go of purpose, or utility, and delight in the pure existential game of being.

What new pathways and futures can emerge from this place?

Participation is free; Join Vol 1, Chapter 2 by dropping your email via the link in bio. by @subtle_practice

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4 months ago

The next chapter of our quarterly creative cohort begins June 15. Four weeks of creative inquiry from new moon to new moon 🌑

This is the second iteration of the cohort as the “Free Quarterly,” where free implies

- free to join
- liberation through inquiry & practice

Link in bio to join. Welcome materials will be shared by email on Monday, June 15 by @subtle_practice

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4 months ago

I’m honored to be in conversation with Armenian filmmaker and multimedia artist Emily Mkrtichian, whose debut feature There Was, There Was Not opens in theaters today.

We speak about the act of witnessing, and about the ways story, body, and land carry memory across generations. Emily’s film follows four women from Artsakh, a historically and ethnically Armenian land, through invasion and eventual ethnic cleansing. The film poetically weaves their daily lives and gestures of care into a living archive of a lost homeland.

Emily’s timely film touches something very deep, showing how art carries what history tries to erase, how cultural lineage and beauty persist, even through rupture.

Listen to our conversation on Conversations on Practice wherever you listen to podcasts.

There Was, There Was Not opens in NYC today at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, in Los Angeles next weekend & more cities to follow. by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

A few years ago, the visual artist and poet Alexandra Fuller reached out to me with a proposal to exchange letters in poems. It began as a playful experiment and a way to get to know one another. What unfolded was a correspondence of image, fragments from dream and ordinary life, passed between us in verse. We reflected on the betweenness of time in our personal lives and in the collective, the death of winter, the tension of being both mother and daughter, and the cycles of death and renewal in our interior worlds.

This week we read our poems aloud to one another for the very first time and reflected on our exchange for Conversations on Practice. Giving voice to the verses gave them new register and life. We were reminded of the necessity of language to have breath and resonance, and of art’s capacity to awaken presence, connection, and possibility.

Our recorded conversation picks up just after our reading. We explore the discomfort of being between and the way attention is our greatest creative currency. Alex shares a waking-dream image of a white plastic chair that invited her to sit, to notice, and respond. After the waking dream encounter, she found that very chair and carried it to the Great Salt Lake. That playful gesture seeded A Participatory Universe, a body of work on framing the in-between, an inquiry on how gaze shapes nature.

We circle around surrender and play—the way art asks us to let go and be carried by the current, the way it asks us to be remade.

Listen to our conversation via link in bio.

If you’d like to hear us read our poems, we’ve made them public on the @subtle_practice site. We share the rules we made for our exchange and some ideas if you’d like to start your own epistolary exchange. by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend and client Ben Mustin, an organizational ecologist, systems thinker, and facilitator for a new episode of Conversations on Practice.

Ben and I first met on Orcas Island a couple of years ago. What has always struck me about Ben is his way of meeting life with profound curiosity and openness.

In this conversation, he speaks candidly about facing the shadow of masculinity and the ways repressing the feminine created imbalance in his life and creativity. Through years of what he calls “blind practice,” he was led into deeper engagement with dreams, where he began to encounter images that asked him to surrender, to listen, and to enter into relationship with the unknown.

We talk about the unsettling presence of the anima in his dreams, a dream of a misty path that became a guiding image, and how his understanding of both masculinity and the feminine has been transformed by shadow work, the natural world, and the voices of companions like James Hillman, Ursula Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, and Octavia Butler.

Ben shows how a practice of surrender leads toward a more spacious way of being, one that is more at ease with the uncertainty of our changing world.

Listen via link in bio ⚘ by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

This weekend, as the equinox brings the light and dark into balance, artist Ceara Metlikovec will open an intimate three-month journey centered around the art of making sacred space.

In her ongoing artistic and spiritual practice, Ceara finds the altar is a potent tool for insight and meaning. The altar is an ecology of relation—between the four directions, the elemental forces, the moon’s rhythms, and our own archetypal nature. Through the shared rhythm of creation and reflection, altars reveal themselves as both mirror and threshold: they hold what we bring, and they open us to what we long to know and embody.

This seasonal passage offers a natural container for orienting inward, clarifying intentions, and cultivating a practice of presence.

Head to the link in bio to find all the details & join. We have a few sliding scale tickets available, DM to inquire ⚘ by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

Join us this weekend as we open a practice series on the art of making sacred space with artist and facilitator Ceara Metlikovec.

From equinox to solstice, we’ll gather once each lunar cycle to create and tend altars as living vessels of devotion—mirrors of who we are now, and thresholds to who we are becoming.

Guided by Ceara’s artistic and personal practice, this series is an invitation to slow down, orient to season and cycle, and discover how the spaces we tend outside of ourselves shape the spaces we inhabit within.
 Visit the link in bio to read more and register ⚘ by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

I sat down with artist Ceara Metlikovec to discuss her practice: a devotion to silence, sculpture, and shaping space as something sacred and alive.

In our conversation, Ceara shares her early instinct to gather materials into altars, her deep attunement to the rhythms of the natural world, and a vision she had of Georgia O’Keeffe that radically shifted her creative practice.

This is the very first episode of my new podcast, Conversations on Practice, where I’ll speak with artists, dreamers, and makers about the subtle ways practice transforms how we live, create, and imagine.

🐚 Listen to the full episode via the link in bio

You’re invited to come practice with Ceara in our upcoming @subtle_practice series, The Art of Making Sacred Space

🤍Alma by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

Join me for meditative practice this season. 21 days of entering the zero-point - the heart of pure awareness and the place where all our fertile possibility dwells 🤍 by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

What does the muse have to do with remembrance?

We circle around these ideas in our creative workshop series A Study in Permeability - a three-part exploration of imagination & psyche. Visit our website to access the series on-demand by @subtle_practice

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a year ago

When we say that something “moves” us creatively, we are often describing a moment in which possibility stirs within form—where something latent in the body, in the psyche, begins to shift, tremble, open. It’s a felt moment. It is the body remembering its capacity to respond, to shape, to give voice. Remembrance, then, goes beyond recollection of past event. It’s a rekindling of what the body or matter already longs to become. Inspiration emerges as this vital animating force of possibility.

From Module 2 of from our three-session workshop series A Study In Permeability where we circle around imagination and the creative psyche.    In this second session, “Muse, Memory & Desire,” we look to the idea of the muse as a source of inspiration. From the Classical image of the Muse through the lens of Pindar, Sappho, and Hesiod and their link to Mnemosyne, or Memory. We inquire, “What does creation have to do with remembrance?” by @subtle_practice

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a year ago