The past year or so has been busy setting up Flow and has also been a great opportunity to write more, explore more and think more. Reflective practice if you will. As I recently mentioned in the article on Arts Professional, the use of emotional words in arts policy is definitely on the rise. Personally I am inspired by Brene Brown and her work on shame, vulnerability and daring greatly.
Flow Contemporary Arts evolved from years of reflective practice. Philosophically it is informed by the thinking of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the physical world, it is inspired by the way the Severn Bore systematically and poetically occurs when the forces of the sea push the river back on itself, creating a wave that people surf on. That action creates reciprocity, a push and pull, a give and take.
As well as writing publicly on here and other platforms, I write extensively in private notes, planning documents and when framing ideas. I never got into writing in diaries, mostly because my handwriting is pretty illegible so it’s not useful to me. But technology makes reflective note taking a dream. Evernote, Notes, Googledocs, Dropbox, voice notes, Pinterest and a myriad of other software developments make writing accessible to all. And now there is Medium.com.
It’s new to me and I have been trying to understand it. Today I launched a collection about Reflective Practice.
If you haven’t used it before, I will explain (as well as I can at this point). I dipped my toes in by submitting some of my texts to other peoples collections. They then approved, refused or ignored my requests. I kept searching for somewhere that covered reflective practices and was surprised to find there aren’t any.
So now I want to wave a flag to you and invite you to submit something. I can’t promise to accept it – the way Medium is self-policed is how the writing standards are maintained. It’s like peer critique. You can also ask other people to give editorial feedback. I must try that soon!
Carolyn Black 