my beginnings

Every project was simply a response to the question: what should I do with my life 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, transformative experiences, left me and others feeling truly changed. I began to wonder what those were, and if transformative experiences could in fact be designed. 

 

Around that same time, my best friend Brett died by suicide. Unfortunately, he was not the first friend to die this way, and I found myself questioning life at a deeper level than ever before. Did art and creativity even matter if people I knew and loved were suffering so deeply? 

 

I began sitting in long periods of contemplative silence. What I found in these deep waters was not any answer to suffering, but rather a familiar, creative question: What would do if there was no problem to solve? This question felt similar to what had inspired me to make art in the first place, but there was a new clarity to it all.

 

I realized creativity, and life in general, was not really about me. It was about relationship. And suffering was actually a doorway into deeper relationship with Life itself. To receive an idea, then, was actually an invitation to step through the 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. Transformation, I realized, was always available, so long as one learned to notice it, and let go of non-transformation.

 

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 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 "suffering-with" all of life, transforming that suffering into awakening. The intention is not to solve humanity's great 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.