Muck Around and Find Out: Recent Episodes
Alex Muck
Muck Around and Find Out is a learn-along home for my fellow well-meaning, high-achieving, multi-fascinated, marvelous, loveable, and lovely creatives learning to do what they want and be who they may. Here we greet creative fears, anxieties, and self doubts with compassion, and learn to lean on and rest into our muchness. Think of it as festive, open-hearted, worldview-generative pastoral care. Or don't. Your call. It’s about fun. It’s about flow. It’s about play. It’s about games. It’s about love. With care and gratitude, as ever, your faithful Pun of Fun, Alex Muck.
Join me for:
- Picking wild plants outside.
- Talking about setting healthy limits for yourself.
- Building a beautiful day.
Lost the thread of how to keep editing the audio in anchor, so I'm offering myself the grace of imperfect publication. No intro music this time around (unless bird song counts!), and some pretty jumpy cuts from one segment to the next.
If you're curious about any of these things, you may enjoy this ramble:
- Positive self-limitation/building self-trust/planning state changes, and the fallout of an unplanned one borne of a period of hyper-productivity followed by utter, inhibition obliterating exhaustion (which was paired with the first family vacation I'd been on in years, which involved travel to a country I'd never been to before, which did some super strange and educational things with my default self-concept.
- Interacting with kids (and life in general) from a perspective of curious, flowy, improvisational creativity. I admire kids' willingness to meet moments with a lack of functional fixedness (a willingness to use things in ways that are unconventional), and I tell some cute stories about making "crunchy lemonade" and swimming with a super brilliant and fun young kiddo.
- Experiments with releasing perfectionism around things like social expectations for friendship/relational communication, packing "properly" for vacation, my good-girl judgements around substance use, manifestation/"your experience of reality is based on what you think" belief systems, and effectively integrating newly-visible aspects of personality.
There is wind noise, and other background racket, but I feel like I said some interesting stuff if you're either down with that, or are willing to encounter choppy audio as an opportunity to let audio quality not pose a problem for you.
Perhaps you can experience it as an opportunity for close listening and awe that we can record recognizable audio and glean meaning from wobbly air and electrical impulses at all.
Honorable Mentionings of Kindred Spirits:
- The ramble format comes from Lucy Bellwood, who is a profound joy. Her writings, book reccs, and general creative encouragements are a gift.
- And Ren Hurst does all kinds of cool classes on rewilding with an eye toward animals of all sorts, including the human ones we inhabit. I'm honored to call her my friend.
- And Wendell Britt built a resource of staggering value, and utterly transformational magnitude for those bold enough to actually engage with it, in the form of his Mastering the Game of Allyship class. You can play the game at any level, but woooooo boy are the introspective tools he brought together powerful if they sing to you and you start singing back. Highly recommend checking out his work if you're looking for a way to engage with your Helping Other People Tendencies TM while also learning to care for yourself, and the parts of you that you've othered in your quests for belonging, acceptance, and ethically impeccable behavior. His YouTube is a great playground to get a vibe check, and the course link, if he's still taking students, is in his first video.
- Also, I mention Akilah Richards' work in my ramble. Not sponsored in the slightest, I just think she's brilliant and has some wildly helpful perspectives on parenting, learning, and the nurturing of autonomous, healthy humanness. The focus of the work according to the site: "Raising Free People Network helps families, organizations, and corporations to examine, assess, and solve big issues in education, leadership, and personal development. By tapping into techniques and philosophies from the unschooling and deschooling movements, our network uses independent broadcast media along with live trainings and events to sustain cultures of belonging, equity, and confident autonomy."