Welcome to Holy Mischief
Dear fellow human, we are so delighted you are here.
These are momentous and auspicious, rock and roll times. When we gaze in any direction in the world, we see both profound suffering and astonishing beauty. Our deep calling and invitation here is to flourish soul-centric, compassionate, resilient and creative lives. We are poets, artists and lovers; explorers, rascals and indomitable creatives. We are intensely curious. And we know we are born for these times.
In these increasingly polarized times, HOLY MISCHIEF is a sanctuary for our longing for stillness and spaciousness, and exploring right action through creativity, play and community dialogue. It is also a safe harbor for our overstimulated nervous systems to rest and restore.
We believe in a mythopoetic way of living and seeing beyond right and wrong a world which invites us to lean further into a sense of awe and enchantment. This is the way of the visionary alchemist, the fool, and the trickster, aka the artist. Through our musings at HOLY MISCHIEF we hope to summon the artist in each of us who is inherently equipped to marvel at and meet the mystery of life.
What on earth happens at Holy Mischief? What do we offer?
We curate a selection of prose, poetry, and questions - ours and other artists’ who inspire us - and we extend some (mischievous) invitations that help us connect with our bodies, intuition and imagination. From time to time we call upon you to join us in soulful conversations, deep listening and playful creative experiments.
Our approach to creativity explores play, spontaneity and improv, conversations with the more-than-human world, prayers, rituals and other practices.
Let us cultivate eyes for beauty, practice presence in hard times … and play.
Who are we?
Our story begins in 2012 when Filiz made a pilgrimage from her home in Turkey to North America. Thanks to a mutual friend, she met Debra in North Carolina and after a matter of hours, they moved from curious and intrigued to delighted, enchanted and connected with one another. Like new old friends reunited. Filiz invited Debra to Turkey (to teach natural beekeeping). Debra said yes (and immediately had to google where Turkey was). They fell into each other’s lives, igniting a profound friendship and years of astonishing adventures.
DEBRA ROBERTS is a 72 years young practicing human. She hangs her hat at the crossroads of art and spirituality, in loving service to life (human and other-than). She grew up in a vibrant arts and crafts household (oh the glitter) and has swum in all kinds of creative waters: documentaries, dance, theater, poetry, doodling, ritual and spontaneous rumba (especially in her kitchen). In 2005, honeybees Called and Debra responded. She is a passionate, free-range honey bee advocate and bee celebrant … a bee-sotted woman on a bee bhakti (Sanskrit for devotion) path. She resides in the Appalachian Mountains in Western North Carolina with her precious husband Joe, all manner of wildlife family and thousands (and thousands) of honeybees.
FILIZ TELEK found her spiritual belonging in a mythopoetic lineage of artists and mystics. A devoted student of life, an apprentice to all things human, a lover of rituals and creativity rites, she walks the labyrinth of life with the utmost curiosity and wonder. She loves writing, dancing, walking in solitude, listening to mama earth, poetry, following her intuition and making mischief (obviously). She is based in Southern Turkey and makes sacred pilgrimages wherever her Soul calls her in the world. She has been a circle host for over 20 years and passionately hosted women’s circles since 2013. She is currently in a process of liberating her inner artist while digging deep for gold in her psyche … and doing a lot of unburdening thanks to menopause. Her favorite words in 2025 are itadakimasu (I humbly receive) and yūgen (the profoundly subtle and mysterious beauty of this world) from Japanese aesthetics.
She also regularly writes her personal Subtack newsletter Collateral Beauty.
Community Guidelines:
If you intend to join us and engage with our ongoing conversations, contemplations and play, we invite you to consider these guidelines:
Listen and speak from the heart
Be prepared to be surprised
Take care of yourself, each other and everything in between
Practice kindness, beginner’s mind, curiosity and trust
Don’t take yourself too seriously
Follow awe
Why subscribe?
Join us in drawing nectar from the creative source through poetry, music, stories, rituals and prayers … and cross-pollinate in our hive-mind. As the world we were born into is shapeshifting, HOLY MISCHIEF is an experiment in making beauty, loving and celebrating life. We warmly welcome you to sit, listen and play with us! Let us soak in the heartbreaking beauty of the world together.
Free Subscription
Free subscribers will receive two of our weekly newsletters each month and occasional public announcements. You are also invited to participate in the comments section of our weekly posts. You’ll definitely have a taste of what’s going on in the kitchen of Holy Mischief.
Paid Subscription
If you love our content and would like to deepen your participation and reciprocity with us, consider joining our playground as a paid subscriber to enjoy these offerings:
Our weekly newsletter that will drop into your mailbox every Saturday as a sweet libation from our hearts to yours.
Our monthly Zoom get-together at the HEARTh where we shall convene to dive deeply into what matters, sparks joy, and keeps us aligned and awake. Sometimes guests will also join us, kindred spirits from around the world.
Our MUSEings - we are full of inspiration, curiosity and wonder about this world and this life and we want to share this with you.
Pop-up invitations - spontaneous creative combustion as the muse moves us.
A Note on payments:
* If you choose to be a paid subscriber, we kindly request that you choose monthly payments instead of annual, as this allows us to offer you HOLY MISCHIEF for as long as it feels alive and in service to all of us.
(Note: Substack does not allow us to remove the annual payment option.)
* If you choose to be a patron of HOLY MISCHIEF, thank you for championing this work! For however long we feel called to co-create this holy experiment, please know how much we appreciate you. Thank you for your generosity and support.
