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[0:30] Laura Camien: Welcome to The Spark File, where we believe that everyone is creative, but smart, creative people don't go it alone.

[0:42] Susan Blackwell: I'm Susan Blackwell.

[0:44] Laura Camien: And I'm Laura Camien.

[0:45] Susan Blackwell: And we are creativity coaches who help people clarify and accomplish their creative goals.

[0:50] Laura Camien: Know that just by listening to this podcast, you are joining a warm and wonderful clan of creatives.

[0:56] Susan Blackwell: But hold up, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is a Spark File?

[1:01] Laura Camien: Well, a Spark File is a place where you consistently collect all of your inspirations and fascinations.

[1:07] Susan Blackwell: Every episode, we're going to reach into our Spark Files and exchange some sparks.

[1:12] Laura Camien: And from time to time, we may even talk to some folks who spark us too.

[1:16] Susan Blackwell: And your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take some of those sparks of inspiration and do something with them.

[1:24] Laura Camien: Make something of your own.

[1:26] Susan Blackwell: So without further ado, let's open up the Spark File.

[1:32] Laura Camien: Hi Susan Blackwell.

[1:33] Susan Blackwell: Hi, Laura Camien.

[1:35] Laura Camien: It's sparking day, Susan.

[1:36] Susan Blackwell: I know, it sure is, and I love it.

[1:40] Laura Camien: What's shaking over there?

[1:43] Susan Blackwell: So much fun stuff is shaking.

[1:46] Laura Camien: We are about a week and some change away from the launch of this next cohort of Blaze, our course in creativity.

[1:54] Susan Blackwell: Yes, we are.

[1:57] Laura Camien: We launch on Thursday. Check me on this. Thursday, January 29th, check, check.

[2:03] Susan Blackwell: And I'm so excited. The group that is coming together is just dynamite.

[2:11] Laura Camien: If you don't know about Blaze, what do you want to say about Blaze, Susan Blackwell?

[2:14] Susan Blackwell: For people that are like, what's a Blaze?

[2:16] Laura Camien: You know, it's what's a Blaze and also what's a creativity course.

[2:19] Susan Blackwell: And really, when we say creativity course, we mean a program that's designed to get you reconnected with your creativity, get a plan in place to get that idea up and out of you and into the world.

[2:33] Laura Camien: And we're going to just hook arms with you and go step by step until you get it done.

[2:39] Susan Blackwell: Essentially, it's all kinds of creatives. It's all kinds of projects. We have writers and entrepreneurs and performers.

[2:47] Laura Camien: You name it. So many different kinds of artists, so little competition, which is awesome.

[2:53] Susan Blackwell: Oh, my God. The fun thing about Blaze is your project could be something really specific like, oh, I really want to get the first draft of that novel up and out of me onto the page before I go.

[3:05] Laura Camien: Or it could be something like, I want to cultivate a consistent creative practice in my life. I feel like that would be a great counterbalance to all of the anxiety and the banana pants ness that's happening in the world.

[3:19] Susan Blackwell: I mean, it is. If you're wondering like, what the hell can I be doing in these crazy times, Blaze is a great place to explore that question and determine what your unique superpowers are that can be applied to making change in a really positive way.

[3:37] Laura Camien: It's great. If you want to learn more, you've got a little tiny bit of time to go to thesparkfile.com. Click on anything that says Blaze in big, bold letters.

[3:48] Susan Blackwell: Read a little bit if you want to schedule a time to talk with us. So fun.

[3:53] Laura Camien: No pressure. Just a chance for us to learn more about what you are aspiring to creatively, where you're at.

[3:59] Susan Blackwell: Do you feel lost in the creative woods? We want to send in a search party and gently rescue you.

[4:05] Laura Camien: So check it out. The airlift is on the way, friends.

[4:09] Susan Blackwell: That's right. The airlift is on the way.

[4:13] Laura Camien: And now, Susan, I believe you are sparking me today.

[4:18] Susan Blackwell: I was going to say, I've got something to serve up to you today, Laura. I'm very excited.

[4:24] Laura Camien: Here's how I'm going to start. I'm going to start with a poem. I know you love that.

[4:28] Susan Blackwell: I do.

[4:29] Laura Camien: I'm going to give you, this poem is going to give you, I think, all the information you need to know about what my topic is today.

[4:39] Laura Camien: Here we go. The name of this poem is, I Love People Who Cry, and it's by Yuli Kay.

[4:49] Laura Camien: Here we go. I love people who cry when they read books or when they find the perfect little broken bloom. I love people who cry when they see someone else who is crying or laugh until they can't help but cry. I love people who cry at the stars or cry at the sunset or cry at lonely trees in a lonely forest. I love people who cry at hellos and cry at goodbyes. It reminds me how very human it is to feel and what a privilege it is after all this time to still see the world with such tender eyes.

[5:32] Susan Blackwell: Laura, I love that. And I have to tell you, just this morning, I was having a conversation. One of those Spark calls that we have talked about before, you can schedule a time to talk to us, learn about the Spark file. We can learn about your creativity, assess whether the Spark file might be the right thing at the right time for you. I was having one of those calls with someone who I'm happy to say is the newest member of the Spark file and our upcoming Blaze cohort. And this person, Elizabeth, if you're listening, this person apologized for crying on the call.

[6:10] Laura Camien: I was like, Elizabeth, we have really normalized crying at the Spark file and that poem really says it all.

[6:20] Susan Blackwell: I mean, yes. We just like to keep our emotions in motion. That's what it's all about.

[6:27] Laura Camien: It is all about that. And I was trying to find the human language to convey to Elizabeth that it really, really was okay for her to be wherever she was at in that moment as she was expressing what she was expressing. And that poem just, I wish I could have slid that poem right across the Zoom desk.

[6:49] Susan Blackwell: Well, guess what? I offer you it now for future use any time.

[6:55] Laura Camien: For me, for Elizabeth. For every single one of us who's ever felt like, oh, I need to, I'm so sorry I'm crying. Let's put that behind us. This Spark is a celebration of crying and all those who cry.

[7:12] Susan Blackwell: I kind of can't believe that I haven't shared a Spark like this before because crying is such a big part of my life, which sounds a little sad, but it's not sad at all. I promise.

[7:24] Laura Camien: We've been doing this podcast long enough that I'm like, did you look back and check? But I don't think you have.

[7:31] Susan Blackwell: And it's interesting because we really do consciously talk about this a fair amount. How normalized.

[7:39] Laura Camien: It's just so normalized.

[7:40] Susan Blackwell: It's so normalized, which by the way, we're not putting crying up above all other expressions. It's just that we are here for expressions of feelings and like you said, moving the emotion through us and allowing it to move through us.

[7:56] Laura Camien: So I think now, I think I celebrate crying so much because of the number of years I spent growing up being told that I was too sensitive and hearing things like, what are you crying about now? Which of course never made me stop crying. It only made me cry more. Now I feel ashamed of crying and I need to cry about that.

[8:21] Susan Blackwell: So I was thinking about how happy I am. There's not a single person in my life now that would ask me that question.

[8:30] Laura Camien: Just not one. My inner circle is carefully curated. If you cannot hang with tears, you cannot hang here.

[8:39] Susan Blackwell: So I know you know this, Laura, but I'm just like everybody else. I cry when I'm sad. I cry when I'm happy. I cry when I'm scared. I cry when I'm grateful. Sometimes I cry when I have something to say that feels scary. Like if I have to express myself and it doesn't feel like it's okay for me to have this feeling or take up this space. So it might come along with tears.

[9:06] Laura Camien: And I want to say, Susan, I'm really grateful for you. I mean, for a million reasons, but put this on the list because you can always hang with my tears, like always, without exception. You just roll with it and you're not thrown if I say like, okay, well, I'm going to cry as I tell you this. And I do. And you're just unbothered by the water streaming down my face. You just listen to me and you know that it's just fear or it's just sadness or it's just stress. It's no big deal.

[9:39] Susan Blackwell: Thank you, Laura. Happy to be of service. And it reminds me of this story that my friend Jesse Tyler Ferguson told me. This was years ago and he was studying voice with a very lauded teacher. I think it was Joan Lader and he was talking about how, you know, she's playing piano, he's singing whatever song he's singing, working on whatever concept they were working on. And he just was so like frustrated and just tears running down his face. And Joan Lader was just like reached over, grabbed the tissue box and is just like just keeps playing, slides in the tissues.

[10:23] Laura Camien: It's just such a part, I think, of the human process, but the creative process. And that image of Joan Lader, just like, like no drama, just like here's the cleanest tissues is how I feel. It's just how I feel for myself and for others in the spark. I mean, I'm just like, it's so no big deal. Here's the tissues. You don't even bat an eye, like you don't bat an eye. And it's so nice because I know that you're not like super conscious of, like I said, the water running down my face. You're just listening to what I have to say, which is obviously scary or fearful or stressful. Like you're just listening. That's it.

[11:04] Laura Camien: I remember really early on in the spark file, we were doing something that was new to me. We were teaching a workshop at the Performing Arts Project and you had taught there many times, but this was all brand new, that brand new location, brand new people I was meeting. We were recording a live podcast in the theater. We were interviewing sweet, sweet, Gavin Creel, and then he was leading everyone in the theater in a live recording of the spark file theme song. It was a really big day going on.

[11:39] Susan Blackwell: Yeah. And like I said, I didn't know anybody. This required a lot of social energy on my part. It was a lot of newness. And I remembered we had like half hour break at some point and I found a little empty room to hide out in because I just needed to settle my nervous system. And you came in to check on me and asked if I was okay and I said like, I am okay. I think I just, I just need to cry for a minute. And I wasn't sad at all. It was the most amazing experience. Everything was going great. I just needed to release this, like just turn the release.

[12:24] Laura Camien: And it's like Holly Hunter's character in broadcast news. If you haven't seen the movie, it's from the late eighties. You're in for a treat.

[12:32] Susan Blackwell: Yes. The eighties, friends. If you watch it, it's going to feel so quaint and so innocent because I love it so much, but it's about ethics in journalism.

[12:45] Laura Camien: Ethics in the news business. They have one single ethical issue they explore through the whole movie. And now it's like, wow, we see that about a hundred times a day at this point. But anyway, Holly Hunter plays this TV news producer and she's in a very high stress job and the way she handles that.

[13:04] Laura Camien: She schedules a cry every morning before she goes to work. She just like sits down on the side of her bed. She puts a box of Kleenex in her lap. She takes a deep breath. She cries, wipes her eyes, and then she goes to work. So you and I will often reference that. If we just need a release, like not to worry, I just need a good broadcast news cry. It's shorthand. We both get it. We know nobody is losing it. They're just getting some release out. So for this spark, I did some research among a core group of friends, and this was so fun, Susan. I asked them, do you ever feel the need slash the want to cry, specifically a desire to cry on purpose, perhaps to release stress or overwhelm? I am telling you, I'm just gonna pause for a second and just make a recommendation.

Reaching out to your friends with a big, meaningful question is just an awesome thing to do. So fun. I highly recommend it. It doesn't matter if you have a podcast or not. Just tell them you're doing research, and everybody was like so willing to play along, and I learned so much about so many people that I love. Like some people I've been friends with for years and years, and this topic has never come up. Like we've never talked about it directly. Yeah. And some are brand new friends who I adore, and I love knowing this about them, like right from the jump. It just bodes really well for the future of our friendship. So before I share some of the responses that I received, I wanna share some things that I learned about why crying is so damn good for us.

First of all, there are three distinct and different types of tears. We have basal tears. These are like the always present. They're released every single time we blink, and their function is just to keep our eyeball lubricated and nourished and protected, keep that cornea protected. They help us to see clearly. I like to think of that in a literal sense, but also metaphorically too. They help us to see clearly. We have reflex tears. These are a rapid response to sudden stimulus, like cutting an onion, or smoke gets in your eye. These reflex tears flush out the toxins or harmful irritants like that. Like they're instant. They're a little bit more watery than the basal tears, and they contain antibodies to fight bacteria, which is really amazing.

Amazing. Their job basically is to keep things clean. Amazing. Isn't the human body amazing? I just think it's amazing. Okay, and finally, we have emotional tears. These tears release the stress hormones and byproducts of strong emotions. They also possibly are there to promote social bonding. Like when I think of crying, like when we cry when we see others cry, or when you have empathy for others, it promotes like human connection. But these tears are triggered by feelings of sadness, joy, anger. They actually contain, like if you study these three types of tears, there's different things in each one, and these tears, the emotional tears, contain stress-related hormones like cortisol and proteins that are not found in the other tears.

It's just crazy, amazing to me. So when we cry, first of all, our body is literally dumping those stress chemicals, like getting rid of it, getting rid of the cortisol, the other hormones, so we're physically releasing some of the stuff that your body has been holding on to. Then our nervous system shifts out of holding it together mode, right? Our parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. This is the part that helps you calm down after stress. It's like your body says, okay, cool. We are finally safe enough to let this out. When we cry, we finally stop resisting the emotion, holding things in takes so much energy. Crying is the moment that we stop bracing against it, right? That release of tension can feel so relieving, even if nothing about the situation has changed.

We feel different after we've cried about it. So our brain uses crying to help organize overwhelming feelings, grief, frustration, stress, even joy, into something more coherent, like emotional processing. You don't have to solve the emotion. You just have to let it move. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know we have talked about this a good deal. Emotions just need to stay in motion. That's it. Finally, crying can signal to yourself, and sometimes others, that you need care, like something needs tending to. Even if nobody else is around, your own brain responds with more self-soothing chemicals, like oxytocin and endorphins, when you cry. Just really like taking care of yourself.

It's kind of amazing. And Susan, you sent me something once that made me feel so good. It made me feel so seen. It feels a little bit like bragging, which I am not doing. I mean, I wouldn't, right? I'm just kidding, I would. But this isn't that. It's just that I felt really seen. You sent me a clip of a psychologist explaining this. They said, if you cry at commercials, movies, or sometimes nothing at all, your nervous system processes emotion faster than people around you. Those tears are evidence of rapid integration, not weakness, not instability. Rapid integration. Researchers studying emotional processing speed found that easy criers showed 40% faster resolution of stress hormones after emotional events.

The tears are literally flushing that cortisol and adrenaline from your system in real time. People who don't cry easily, they're not tougher. They're slower. Their systems take longer to recognize, process, and release emotional experiences. They said, sometimes those experiences never fully process at all and just accumulate. Easy criers also score higher on emotional intelligence assessments. They read situations accurately and respond authentically instead of performing reactions they think they should have. The childhood pattern usually involves being told you were too sensitive. That message taught you to feel shame about a system that was actually functioning better than average. You learned to apologize, right, Elizabeth?

You learned to apologize for tears that were doing exactly what they were designed to do. That is amazing. I'm so glad I sent you that video. I'm so thankful. And I also, not to get ahead of ourselves with a what do we make of it, but I feel like if you do start a girl group, the easy criers would be a great name for your band. The easy criers, oh my God. Think about it, take it or leave it. I'm into it, Susan. You always deliver on the band names. All right, and again, I'm not judging those non-criers out there. I wasn't trying to be braggy about that, but I do wish my younger me could explain that to my mom or my family when they were saying, what are you crying about? I wish I could have said, this is just rapid integration.

I'm processing my emotional feelings much faster than you are. I wouldn't pay money to see a seven-year-old Laura Kami and just lay that one on her mother. It's so good, it's so good. It's so good. Now everyone has it to use. All right, so let me share some of the most interesting findings from my research. And I have to say, I got so much from this, from so many friends, I'm not gonna be able to share everything. This is a short podcast, folks. So this was not a large sample size. It wasn't a double-blind study or anything like that. So research is a term I'm using loosely here. This was some outrage to people in my inner circle. Almost all of them are creatives of some kind. So there's a high probability of highly sensitive people, sensitive souls, empaths, et cetera.

So, I mean, I did start this spark with a poem called, I Love People Who Cry. So that tells you something about who's in my Rolodex, my contact list. All right, a total of 26 people responded to my query. All of them fell into one of three categories. One, there were eight non-criers or people who said they were new to crying, which I loved. For those of you new to crying, welcome, friends. Welcome, you are safe here. Just let it rip. Eight people in this category, which is higher than I thought it would have been, honestly. Next, we have all the members of my new band, the Easy Criers. And these are people that don't have to cry intentionally because they just roll with it whenever the urge happens.

This was 14 people, the most people. I would say I definitely fall into this category almost all of the time. But like I said, if I need to cry and it isn't happening for any reason, I'm not afraid to join the last group, which is the Stress Criers or the Intentional Criers. This is crying with the purpose of release. And we had four of those friends. So the fun part was, my follow-up question was, if you are someone who wants or needs to cry, do you have any go-tos that get you there? Movies, songs, poems, playlists, memories, et cetera. If you're willing to share your resources, it would be so useful to the listeners of the Spark File podcast. So I'm excited to say, if you wanna add to your bank of material that can support your crying habit, we will be sharing gifts.

If you get our newsletter or if you follow us on social, we will post a list of movies and a link to a playlist of songs that everybody contributed to, songs that make them cry. Love this. So when you get the need to cry, you can find a song that speaks to you and just let it rip. I'm gonna say more about that in just a minute, but friends also gave me some other go-to ideas that I think are really important to share besides the movie and the song list. So when you're in need of a good cry, one friend said that she did a lot of intentional grieving after her father passed away. And at the urging of her therapist, she watched movies specifically with dads who had passed away or people who had died.

And there's so many movies obviously that fit into this category. They're on the list. But I thought it was interesting that it was actually therapist approved to do intentional grieving in that way. Wow. This same friend was going through a sad season and she had a cry your eyes out night with friends and they watched the series finale, specifically the finale of all these different series that they loved, West Wing, Six Feet Under, Scrubs, Friends, et cetera. Wow. And they just cried and cried and cried, which is really fun because I've never really thought about, let's just go back and watch the finale, you know? Yes. I noticed that documentaries scored very high on the good cry list depending on the topic, of course.

But everything from sports documentaries like The Last Dance, which is Michael Jordan, or Derek Jeter's The Captain, then Come See Me in the Good Light, the new Andrea Gibson documentary, or our sweet friend Dan. Susan, Dan told me this story that he watched the Mr. Rogers documentary on a flight to China. And he was weeping so hard that the woman next to him had to lean over and ask if he was okay. Oh. I know, I was like, oh, Dan. Oh. Yeah, Mr. Rogers.

[26:06] Laura Camien: Alright, our beautiful friend Wheels shared this tip. Wheels said that she will watch videos of people being able to see color for the first time or people being able to hear for the first time. That gets me when kids, oh my God, when kids can see or hear for the first time. Amazing. She'll also watch military parents surprising their kids after not seeing them for an extended period of time. And sweet Kevin Weinbold, our fearless Spark File team captain loves him some military parents returning home as well. Those videos, they are real, they are intense, they are joyful reunions. My friend Ben came in with one of the most, actually two of the most surprising and thought provoking answers that I wanted to share.

I love them because I thought about them for days. Ben said, horse racing almost always makes me cry. Something about singular focus activities, running as fast as possible, escaping something, watching Olympic level sprinters as well, singular, singular focus, he said. It always strikes me as us humans trying to escape death. Wow, Ben, deep. I was like Ben understood the assignment and really, really love this answer. I'd never thought about it that way. You need to know, obviously my dad was a track coach. So we thought about and talked about people running long distance sprinting. We talked about it a lot in my whole life. So the closest thing that I felt to sadness about that topic is when I think it was Jackie Joyner-Kersee who said, you train for years for the Olympics, so much time spent, years and years of time trying to get to the shortest amount of time.

So she was a sprinter and she could train for four years for a race that is over in 10 to 15 seconds, less than 15. If she ran 15 seconds, it was a bad day. So you're training for four years to try to get like under 10 seconds. That always made me really sad. I was like, wow, yeah, that's intense. That's intense. High stakes. But I'd never thought about it like Ben in terms of like, are we outrunning death? Wow. Ben also shared Apex twins. I've never heard of Apex twins, but they're big into ambient music, this ambient stuff. And he said it's pretty tear worthy. Like number three, rhubarb orc. Okay. And the classic stone in focus. I've added those to the playlist too. But the real gift here is that Ben said the comment section of these videos on YouTube are usually really intense.

Oh my God. Susan, he sent the link. We can share that too. The comment section is so vulnerable. These are real people writing in after listening to this song and they're essentially just talking about everything to do with the human condition. Ben pointed out there's one comment that moved him that simply said in a couple of weeks, I'll be 1000 days clean, which is so real and so honest. But there are hundreds of people sharing stories of loss and pain and big questions about life. Like how do I go on? What does it all mean? Wow. What a use of the comment section. I mean, Susan, there was a question that I was like, Oh, this person wrote, why does being happy feel scarier than feeling sad? Like feeling happy and then being immediately terrified that it's all going to be taken away.

I sat personally sat and cried for at least an hour reading these comments. And I would like to say, thank you, Ben. Thank you for that gift. I also saw people saying that they come back to this comment section like once a year, and they just are there to connect with other human souls, simply attempting to be human in a world that hurts so freaking much. I invite you to the comment section of Apex twins stone in focus on Jack is Sears YouTube page. That's what I'm going to share with you all.

[31:05] Laura Camien: Alright. Another idea that I want to share real quick. This amazing idea by Courtney King, Courtney says, a positive release I've discovered recently is collective effervescence. And wow, do I lose all my defenses against tears. It's the idea that watching a group of people having a shared joyous experience can provoke deep emotion. And it is real, Courtney says. She says a group of kids scream singing golden, a marching band in the Macy's parade, a flash mob. It all makes my cry balls activate. TikTok is full of videos of these moments. And who couldn't use a little more joy right now? Wow. That just really got me. I'm so into this idea of collective effervescence. I feel like that like Blue Man Group shows were about collective effervescence, but we didn't have that terminology.

Yeah, we would say like a collective like heightened sense of being alive. But collective effervescence is the powerful sense of unity, energy and shared emotion expressed when people gather for a common purpose, described by sociologist Emil Durkheim as a transcendent feeling like a group's energy elevating individuals seen in concerts, sporting events, rituals, or even shared laughter, fostering deeper social bonds and collective unity. It's that magical, bubbly feeling of being part of something bigger, where individual selves merge into a joyous, unified experience. I fucking love this.

[32:47] Susan Blackwell: Yeah, it's great.

[32:48] Laura Camien: It's true for all the things, concerts, sporting events, rituals. But I've also felt this when working on a big creative project, like as a collective as a group, like opening a show, making a film, like when you get to the other side, and you have that sort of depression afterwards, because you were part of something that was so much bigger than yourself.

[33:04] Susan Blackwell: Yes.

[33:05] Laura Camien: Yeah. So all of this, I have so many songs to share. I'm looking at the time and realizing I can't even tell you all about them. But there are songs. I'll say this about the playlist. I think I had fantasized when I was putting this playlist together that it was going to be like the ultimate in, you know, tear shedding music. And what I found was, there are so many personal reasons why people choose a song. So subjective.

[33:43] Susan Blackwell: Yeah, so subjective.

[33:44] Laura Camien: So there's those personal songs, then there's those universal ones that are definitely like designed to tap into your humanity. And but basically, like we have songs of love and heartbreak, and loss. And we have songs of like, parental love, that like the most unbearable losses ever. But we I think, most surprisingly, the genres, it's country music, it's musical theater, it's instrumental, it's classical, it's got everything. And so I'm like, okay, one thing this playlist is not is a cohesive, like, wow, somebody really curated this and all the songs flow easily into the next. It's not that. But what I would like to invite you to do is listen, steal the songs that work for you, and just disregard the rest.

[34:48] Susan Blackwell: Yeah.

[34:49] Laura Camien: Alright, Suze, I'm going to bookend my spark with another poem. It is also for all the people who cry, who I love. And this one is called, When You Forget How To Stop Crying. It's by Christy Sayan.

[35:04] Laura Camien: When you forget how to stop crying, I will take your pain and build a large boat. I want to make a home for your sadness, one with a welcome mat, heated blankets, a porcelain statue of two little turtles hugging. Allow me to care. There's nothing broken. You cannot share. The bet is made. The plumber paid. Your grief is no burden to hide. I'll carry the darkness. Let me stay by your side.

[35:47] Susan Blackwell: Oh, Laura, what a beautiful spark. Who knew crying could be so fun? I'm like, so energized. I'm over here like, like, how exciting to talk about crying. I love that you approach this as a research study.

[36:03] Laura Camien: I love that you crowd.

[36:04] Susan Blackwell: I always like sourced spark. I do. I love it. God, you learn so much. But what a useful spark that was. Thank you for that.

[36:09] Laura Camien: Thank you. I'm so full of joy about it. Truly full of joy about it. And also full of joy about the amazing people in my life.

[36:21] Susan Blackwell: Yeah.

[36:22] Laura Camien: Like so many things remind me of that. But this is yet another one that I'm like, damn, really incredible people who are in tune with themselves, who are showing up authentically and allowing themselves to be where they are. Because we're all in some really interesting places right now. And I think allowing ourselves to be there, being there for each other. It's what it's all about. I love how you created an opportunity for your own collective effervescence with this research study for this spark.

[37:00] Susan Blackwell: I love how you pulled that all together with a nice little button. Thank you. That was beautiful.

[37:06] Laura Camien: And I think that's it. This episode of The Spark File was made on the lands of the Lenape and the Mohican people. And as always, we hope it put another bunch of sparks in your file. Listen, if there's a spark that you'd like us to explore, you got a good spark out there. You want us to take a look at it? Let's do it. Or if you would like to learn more about how to coach with us to accomplish your creative goals, you can email us at getcreativeatthesparkfile.com or you can reach us through our website, thesparkfile.com. We'll even happily take your feedback. You know we will. But first you have to share the price of admission, a creative risk that you've taken recently.

[38:01] Susan Blackwell: You can follow us on social at The Spark File. And if you would take a moment and be sure to subscribe, rate the podcast, give it a nice juicy five star review. It really helps other listeners to find us. Also, if you like this podcast, we hope that you will share it with people that you love. And if you didn't like it, go cry about it.

[38:10] Laura Camien: If something lights you up and gets your creative sparks flying, we're writing you a forever permission slip to make that thing that's been knocking at your door.

[38:21] Susan Blackwell: It's your turn to take that spark and fan it into a flame.

[38:25] Laura Camien: You know, you got to take it and make it.

[38:30] Susan Blackwell: Do you know those girls on social media who review food and they are like, go cry about it?

[38:36] Laura Camien: I don't.

[38:37] Susan Blackwell: No, you do.

[38:40] Laura Camien: Something that inspires me.

[38:44] Susan Blackwell: I dump it in my Spark File.

[38:48] Laura Camien: Could be something that I want to make or how I want to be.

[38:53] Susan Blackwell: I pump it in my Spark File.

[38:58] Laura Camien: I jump into my Spark File.

[39:03] Susan Blackwell: Let's open up the Spark File.