TOM COMERFORD. I was in shock, depressed, and lost after the death of my mother. Tom was a District Manager for the State of New Jersey’s Division of Youth & Family Services. He hired me to provide payments to all the foster care parents in the huge district. He helped me get back on my feet mentally, emotionally, and financially; and that job led to meeting my best friend who has been in my life for 37 years.
Years later, I learned that he fell in love with my mother and asked her to marry him when he was a Catholic priest working beside her on an innovative community project. They were pioneers in race relations through Operation Understanding: a program that worked with churches to place inner city kids in suburban family homes and vice versa. It fostered some really amazing life-long friendships, and more!
Rachel Ward and Richard Chamberlain in “The Thorn Birds” (Credit: ABC)
Her answer was “No”, and eventually, he left the priesthood, married a former nun, and had his own family. Tom passed away a number of years ago. Funny thing is, he was always my favorite priest, and if things had gone his way, he would have been my stepfather. As it turned out, mom married an Episcopal minister.
This is a short story that could lead to multiple stories from different perspectives about these relationships. And so it goes. Cheers!
“Things are only impossible until they’re not.” “Make it so.” ~ Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation
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Valerie Mich’El Oliver explores the art and architecture of creativity and storytelling in imaginative, innovative, playful and award-winning ways. Tisch School of the Arts (New York University) and The Mystery School (Sacred Center for the Healing Arts) graduate. | Imagine, innovate, create, be generous, love this life, and dare to shine.
I ATTENDED A GRADUATE SCHOOL WHERE ARTS & BUSINESS STUDENTS WERE BROUGHT TOGETHER–on purpose–to propose, create and apply communications technology solutions as a team to problems. As graduate students of the Interactive Telecommunications Program(ITP), we were encouraged to face our distrust of “the others'” approaches to problem-solving (creative arts vs. business) and collaborate in playful and experimental ways to meet the needs of individuals, groups; local, national, and global communities–artistic, nonprofit and commercial–who we were learning to serve as a workforce. Otherwise, we could not succeed in our studies, projects, or current and future employment.
How Can I Trust You?
WE HAD TO FIND WAYS TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND, TRUST, AND SUPPORT ONE ANOTHER (even if one’s primary incentive might only be to get a good grade). Sometimes trusting simply meant investing in the belief that we would do whatever we could to help each other succeed for the sake of that project.Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t commit, who gave up, failed: they either left the program or flunked out. For those of us who did commit, paths always eventually opened, and some of those solutions we accomplished together were simply astounding. Those collaborations and solutions led to our Information Age and what’s coming beyond it.
“Kurosawa was determined to become a better screenwriter and set about writing one page a day, despite how busy he was as an AD, ‘There was nothing I could do about the nights I had to work till dawn, but when I had time to sleep, even after crawling into bed I would turn out two or three pages.’ Writing didn’t come easy, but over time the daily struggle became a habit and Kurosawa found that like most creative endeavors, just showing up was the key. ‘At some point in the writing of every script I feel like giving the whole thing up. From my many experiences of writing screenplays however, I have learned something: If I hold fast in the face of this blankness and despair, adopting the tactic of Bodhidharma, the founder of the Zen sect, who glared at the wall that stood in his way until his legs became useless, a path will open up.'”
SOMETIMES I THINK THAT WE HUMANS SUFFER FROM CHRONIC FORGETFULNESS: we work hard on something, complete it, and then lose our confidence in what we’ve learned and know: we start from the beginning again–over and over–in uncertainty (a creative-specific conflict forgetting like in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–though they choose to forget!). We stick to our endeavors, come through again, and hope we will remember in the future.
THE HEALING ARTIST STUDIO PROJECT BLOG, THE CREATIVITY & STORYTELLING ‘ZINE, and all the writing, content curating, posting and tweeting I do is my way of remembering, of continuing the open-mindedness, trust, and collaboration I learned as a high school student at The Team School, and as a graduate student at ITP.
WE ARE NOT IN A PHYSICAL CLASS TOGETHER, AND MAY NEVER MEET, but I choose to believe that I am investing in our creative and business problem-solving success to benefit our world through the practical and miraculous solution we are every day.
MAY YOU DISCOVER MORE CREATIVE ideas and storytelling support now (and in the future).
Valerie
“Things are only impossible until they’re not.” “Make it so.” ~ Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation
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Valerie Mich’El Oliver explores the art and architecture of creativity and storytelling in imaginative, innovative, playful and award-winning ways. Tisch School of the Arts (New York University) and The Mystery School (Sacred Center for the Healing Arts) graduate. | Imagine, innovate, create, be generous, love this life, and dare to shine.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME ISMission Impossible that is also a successful film franchise starring Tom Cruise. If you’re unfamiliar with it, basically, it revolves around a team of special covert agents who are given an extremely dangerous mission to accomplish within a tight time frame.
WHAT REALLY KEPT ME ON THE EDGE OF MY SEAT WASN’T the mission getting accomplished or the end (though I was happy to get the payoff): it was everything that occurred prior to actually accomplishing it. In effect, the joy for me was in the journey–that was the story! Or as David Byrne of Talking Heads sings in the song, Once In A Lifetime: Well, how did I get here?
David Byrnes of Talking Heads
WELL, HOW DID I GET HERE?
THE MISSION IMPOSSIBLE TEAM WERE MASTERS OF CREATIVITY serving a practical purpose; who were constantly aware, alert, mindful, paying intensive attention, and had to be extremely close to perfect timing, synchronicity in order to make the impossible possible. How about you and I? Aren’t we all in the same or similar story in one way or another?
Things are only impossible until they are not. –Jean Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation
ARE WE OPEN-MINDED ENOUGH TO EXPERIMENT WITH NEW ways to create art, content, ideas, marketing strategy, content strategy through mindfulness, intuitive knowing, spiritual synchronicity, or some channel we can’t fully comprehend or explain as part of our story?
I WAS HIRED TO DESIGN THE ANNUAL REPORT FOR THE NEW YORK STATE BAR ASSOCIATION, and was researching legal images, symbols, colors, sounds, words; and had two rough compositions based upon them to share at my first meeting. In the course of that week, I had been noticing windows over and over again. They kept drawing my attention. Why?
THE NEXT TIME I SAT DOWN TO WORK, I DREW WINDOWS AND EXPLORED HOW WE USE THEM and what they represent. They allow those of us on the outside to look at what is occurring on the inside. Eyes have been described as windows to the soul. There’s an intimacy associated with looking in on the activity of others. Windows are related to opportunities.
SO, I CREATED ONE MORE COMPOSITION WITH WINDOWS FLOATING AROUND a central window in which a man is having an intimate conversation with a young boy. The floating windows were colorful (like Microsoft Windows), and the central window was framed with legal columns. I decided to trust what was being visually communicated to me.
I PRESENTED THE THREE COMPOSITIONS TO THE DECISION-MAKERS (THREE OF THEM), who immediately chose the one with the windows while exclaiming how well it fit the message content of and intention for that year’s report: it focused on all the pro bono work they do (immigrants, domestic violence, child abuse, etc.), and they needed to attract lawyers to participate in their pro bono program (offering them opportunities to be of service). We had not conversed before the meeting about the theme of the annual report. It truly caused me to pause and begin opening up to more of these experiences.
WOW, WHAT STORIES WE HAVE TO TELL WHEN OUR EXPERIMENTS LEAD TO SUCCESS (the happy ending). No success? Sure there is in that we have opened ourselves up to more possibilities that may lead to more opportunities for something extraordinary to occur through that channel in which you may come to believe and experience the impossible as possible.
“Things are only impossible until they’re not.” “Make it so.” ~ Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation
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Valerie Mich’El Oliver explores the art and architecture of creativity and storytelling in imaginative, innovative, playful and award-winning ways. Tisch School of the Arts (New York University) and The Mystery School (Sacred Center for the Healing Arts) graduate. | Imagine, innovate, create, be generous, love this life, and dare to shine.
TOM COMERFORD. I was in shock, depressed, and lost after the death of my mother. Tom was a District Manager for the State of New Jersey’s Division of Youth & Family Services. He hired me to provide payments to all the foster care parents in the huge district. He helped me get back on my feet mentally, emotionally, and financially; and that job led to meeting my best friend who has been in my life for 37 years.
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