FROM THE ARCHIVE
A Living Inquiry
Some questions don’t resolve. They become more interesting as we become more able to see them.
For years, I have recorded parts of my own inquiry—not because I knew what they would become, but because I was interested in what could be seen when something real was allowed to unfold.
Returning to the material now, I don’t always see what I saw then.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Crisis as Opportunity
Bliss Keys — Archive Excerpt
This idea changed my life.
Learning to question what I believed was possible—and to take responsibility for what I wanted to create—gave me a degree of freedom I had not known before.
But there was a difference I did not yet understand between being able to imagine a different life and being able to live one.
Some structures are deeper than the beliefs we can name.
2015
Whatever Is Here
By 2015, an idea I had carried since discovering Journeywork nearly a decade earlier had become a creative experiment.
I wanted to make films differently. I wanted to know what might become possible if we did not begin by imposing a narrative, but created conditions in which something real could emerge first.
So I invited an actor and a filmmaker into the room and turned on a camera.
I was finally showing the work. I was also saying aloud, in front of other filmmakers, what I wanted to create.
And then I did something else.
I used the process on myself to investigate whatever might still be standing between me and doing what I said I wanted to do.
LATER THAT DAY
So Much Love
When I turned the inquiry on myself, it moved into anger, grief, my father and my sister.
And when I was asked what was underneath the anger, the answer that came was love.
I could feel the love then. It took me much longer to understand what to do with it.
For years, I had located much of what I was looking for outside myself—in being loved, recognized, supported, needed, or given permission.
Again and again, life brought me back to a different question:
What would it look like to give myself what I was waiting for someone else to give me?
That question became practical. How would I show up for myself? What would I choose? What would I stop participating in? What would I create if I no longer needed someone else to make it safe?
I already knew how to reach that place inwardly. Learning how to organize my life from it took much longer.
ELEVEN YEARS LATER
I watched the footage again.
When I returned to the footage, I wasn’t only listening to what I had said. I was watching it with eleven more years of my life behind me.
What I had understood primarily as beliefs and emotional material began to look to me like something larger.
A structure.
The ways I sought safety. Where I located permission. What I felt responsible for in other people. The conditions under which I trusted myself enough to act.
And when I returned to the footage, I could see traces of that structure there too.
What interests me now is not whether someone else would discover what I discovered.
It is what becomes possible when we begin with a real question and don’t decide in advance what the answer is.
An actor might come with a character, a project, a relationship, a question of purpose, something they want to change, or simply a territory they want to explore further. We can begin there.
Sometimes the inquiry may lead further into the creative work. Sometimes it may lead somewhere entirely personal. And sometimes something discovered in one becomes unexpectedly relevant to the other.
I don’t need to know beforehand what we will find. My work is to create the conditions in which we can find out.
The container can be known. The discovery doesn’t have to be.
Creative Inquiry
I develop creative inquiries with actors and other artists who are curious about this territory.
The person remains the author of their own experience. What is discovered does not automatically become material. What, if anything, enters the creative work is a separate decision.