Welcome to Holy Mischief
Love, Creativity and Other Sacred Business
Dear friend,
Welcome to HOLY MISCHIEF. We are so happy you are here.
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. 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.
We know we are blessings in each other’s lives. We both celebrate creativity, intuition, growth spurts, laughing, mourning, making and flowering. We commit to keeping our eyes and hearts open to the everything of these times; to the beauty and sacredness of this life; and to keeping our light lit as we create a safe container for others to do the same. We feel an infinite tenderness towards this precious earth and everyone who lives here (human and other-than). And we are devoted to keeping love alive … and well.
For years we have yearned to collaborate in some form of creative endeavor … and the time, at long last, is now: 2025. 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 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.
You can get to know more about us and HOLY MISCHIEF here.
In these increasingly overstimulating times, HOLY MISCHIEF is a sanctuary for soul nourishment from the creative field. Here we invite spaces of presence, curiosity and wonder through contemplative creativity. Our approach to creativity explores play, spontaneity and improv, poetry, questions, deep listening, conversations with the more-than-human world, prayers, rituals and other creative practices.
We believe in a mythopoetic way of living and seeing beyond right and wrong, in a world which invites us to lean further into a sense of awe and enchantment. We don’t need to write poetry to live a poetic life. Cultivating a certain presence - attention, witnessing, deep listening - enables poetry to find us and guide us into that still, connected and resourced place that exists within each of us. Poetry is a way of dancing with not knowing and finding our intuitive knowing and belonging in the Unknown. We invoke the spirit of poetry to fill our sails for our adventure of creative living.
We now extend our hands and hearts to you. We are all Medicine in these times. Let us sit together, exactly as we are, in the not-knowing and knowing, and ask generous and beautiful questions, make friends with silence, and co-create a deep listening space and sanctuary … a place for us to breathe, gather, play, imagine and restore our faith and strength to live and love.
We invite you to slow down with us … and allow a spacious, delicious moment of creative murmuration in your day.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease
into the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.1
Welcome to HOLY MISCHIEF. Welcome to our table and to this community, circle and sangha. Welcome home. We are so grateful you are here.
Love,
Filiz and Debra
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 comment 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. Your monthly subscription will be automatically renewed unless you choose to end it, which you can do anytime.
(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.
Excerpt from the poem “Everything is Waiting For You” by David Whyte
So beautiful... Resonating.
Beautiful! 💕