The Liquid Space Between Building and Dreaming (again!)
(Same refrain, more informed perspective)
What do trees, caterpillars, and tadpoles know about creativity?
A lot more than we think.
Because inventive thinking requires something deeper than cleverness.
It requires dissolution. Listening.
And trusting that your mind is responding to something not yet visible — something you’ve prompted it to consider, even if unconsciously.
I’ve chosen these three not just as metaphors, but as mirrors — living patterns that reveal how we form ideas, shed assumptions, and follow the threads that shape who we are.
And the last one changed my life.
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Trees Make Wood out of Thin Air
Where does the wood mass of a giant tree come from, given it starts as a tiny seed?
It’s kind of a shocker.
Not from the ground — but from the sky.
A tree pulls its substance from carbon dioxide in the air. It metabolizes light into glucose, transforms it into cellulose, and builds structure from it.
And the instructions to do this — are already written in the seed.
Why is this relevant to creativity?
Because our best ideas come from discerning something that’s invisible and giving it form.
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Caterpillars Don’t Grow Wings — They Liquefy
Here’s another shocker.
Inside a chrysalis, a caterpillar doesn’t slowly grow wings.
It melts into a cellular soup.
No eyes. No limbs. No form.
Only imaginal cells — fragments of what will become the butterfly.
How could creative transformation happen in anything but a liquid state?
How often do we hear that we must unlearn to truly learn?
Dissolution isn’t failure. It’s a prerequisite for reinvention.
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Tadpoles Don’t Just Grow Legs — They Listen
This one is personal.
As a child, I spent what felt like hours at the edge of a pond in Hawaii, watching tadpoles wriggle through the murky water.
I didn’t know it then, but that moment became my first sense of meaning.
It planted something — wordless and instinctive — that still roots me today.
I call it a moment of undifferentiated wonder. And it became a powerful model for everything I looked for thereafter.
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But my first signal related to this meaning came later.
Like the first time I watched a Batmobile take shape on a blank page a boy was sketching on.
That moment sparked recognition.
Not just “this is fun,” but:
This is something I’m meant to do.
Signal isn’t the origin — it’s the echo.
The pattern that tells you you’re still on the right path.
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Together, these experiences shaped the MAPS framework I now use to help students trace their creative trajectory:
Meaning. Adversity. Passage. Signal.
And today — especially in an AI-driven world — that early sense of meaning (my tadpole moment) and the signals that followed are how I navigate.
They remind me: AI can generate options. But only we can feel what matters.
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We’re at a cultural crossroads.
Will we become cognitive off-loaders — optimized and efficient, but unmoored from inner direction?
Ghosts in a machine of our own making?
Will we become human batteries — fueling AI with our questions and attention, while we ourselves are slowly depleted?
Or will we remain intelligent collaborators — willing to dissolve, to dream, to draw structure from thin air (or at least, from WiFi)?
I don’t think we have much of a choice. The wood is being sawed (zzzz), the butterflies are free, and the tadpole has become a frog.
I worry most for emerging creatives — not because AI will outpace them, but because they may never be invited to trust themselves before they trust the tools.
They may never be enticed to enter the liquid space — to imagine, to dissolve, to re-form.
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So maybe the most important questions we can ask ourselves — whether we’re 20, 35, 47, or any age — are these:
What early experience gave your life meaning?
And what signals have echoed it since?
These aren’t the answers to “Find your Passion!” These are the seeds of creative intuition and curiosity.
They’re what ensure we stay robust, intuitive, and meaning-seeking — rather than becoming efficient, offloaded, optimized inputs.
Let’s make sure we’re still becoming, too.
This is the liquid space between building and dreaming. It’s ours — if we dare to enter it.
