Open Field: Openness, Choice, and the Creative Act. Sasha Chapin and Peter McEwen in dialogue

​Creative work seems to involve a natural oscillation between openness and choice. There is the receptive side: curiosity, play, aesthetic arrest, the suspension of what we already know. And then there is making something.

​Making requires judgment, technique, revision, preference, and choice. A writer chooses this sentence instead of another. A designer commits to one solution. Every finished thing requires abandoning countless alternatives.

​So what is the relationship between these modes?

​Writer Sasha Chapin joins Peter McEwen for an hour-long Open Field conversation about creativity, spiritual practice, craft, personal mythmaking, and the movement between openness and deliberate action.

​Spiritual practice can invite us to drop our demand for a particular result. Creative work asks us to discriminate, choose, and make something particular.

​Perhaps openness makes unexpected possibilities available and choice gives them form. Perhaps that's too tidy. Either way, this neverending oscillation seems worth investigating.