Stephen and stuff
"My only sacred cow is that i have no sacred cows." --Paul Krassner
Stephen: "My calling proceeds from my gift for supporting personal growth. Fundamentally I'm fascinated by what makes people tick. One simple way of describing my gift is that I'm good at being attentive to and supporting insightful ticking!"
As facilitator I aspire to be a trustworthy and adept guide to the terriotories which lay just on the other side of the learner's familiar, sometimes habitual, territory. It's come about that I have been privileged and startled and deeply moved to witness people's natural processes of growth and self-artistry. This is what I'm after and it's what I hope to sustain with the intrepid learner. This is the shared goal of squareONE's twelve year-and-counting playful work.
"I was 19 when I discovered that my own experience wasn't a simple given and was subject to revision through reason, will, artistry, emotion, eros and the strange generatvity of the unconscious. This discovery freaked me out. It took a long time for me to realize my mistakes and foolishness would play a big role too. Fundamentally, I became an inveterate experimentalist."
"What is 'underneath' our persistent patterns of desire and response? How much of the fantastic--said by some to be divine--richness of the context we are literally embedded in and entangled with gets through to our depths, and, moreover, comes to make a decisive difference? What purposes do we choose to fulfill in our lives? How deeply can one live and how much artistry is available to what I term the 'self-artist."
"What a surprise when I learned some assumptions, no matter how closely held, are unable to be further refined. Also, those same core assumptions, when subjected to radical reality testing via experience, were found not commensurate with the very facts of experience. Somehow having survived my own nonsense, I became grateful. Nowadays my experience is much like dance or jazz: flexible, feeding back salient responses, soberly intoxicated, coordinated and all about close listening and creative questioning and answering."
What ultimately abides for Stephen is: human mystery, human relationship, human creativity, and the human ability to break though to new ways of 'making sense' and being.
"We generate the relationships with our selves, each other, the world, cosmos, and, to both fantasy and reality. Creative choice melds with shocking apprehension! Where does your energy wish to go? Where must it go? How do you know what you know?"
Stephen has sustained a lifelong commitment to his own expressive, artistic nature and to his search for different vistas of experience and learning. For decades, he has been an essayist and street philosopher, with a special interest in the squared triangulation of the psychologies, anthro-sociologies and philosophies of self-knowledge, creativity, and, relationship. He is rumoured to be a trickster, (whatever that means). He is an archivist of stories, cartoons, koans, poems, books, dreams, musings, and music. He is a naive abstract painter, digital artist, sound and music designer hand drummer, and avant lap steel guitarist.
Above all he has persisted in his quest to discover modest gleanings about what it is to be a person, what it is to deeply know one other, and, what are the prospects and predicaments which define the creative unfolding of purposeful human living and becoming in a troubled world. Stephen is a product of his rich experience, a work-in-progress, and an able counselor in the expressive field of experiential learning and daring exploration.
"We generate the relationships with our selves, each other, the world, cosmos, and, to both fantasy and reality. Creative choice melds with veracious apprehension! Where does your energy wish to go? Where must it go? How do you know what you know. Yes, what you want to know, but, at the Heart, who do you wish to know?"
"The inquiry I've made in my own life makes up the experience with which I frame my facilitation of transformative learning."