Spirituality & Mindfulness · The Creative Process: Spiritual Leaders, Mindfulness Experts, Great Thinkers, Authors, Elders, Artists Talk Faith & Religion

Salwa and Selma Mikou are the founders of Paris-based Mikou Architecture. Born in Fez, Morocco and educated in Paris, they have spent the last two decades reimagining the relationship between the built environment and the cultural landscape.
After honing their craft under two of the world’s most iconic architects, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano, they founded their own studio. For them, architecture is a living interaction with landscape and what they call the Atlas of Resonance, interpreting the hidden layers of a territory, geology, memory, and craft. It is a philosophy that rejects the generic, seeking instead to weave together technological innovation with local materials. Whether it is a mosque in the north of England or a hybrid innovation hub in a former royal manufactory, their work asks a fundamental question: How does space shape the way we think, learn and remember? They were selected by Rem Koolhaas to represent Morocco at the Venice Biennale. Most recently, they were commissioned by Hermès to create a 17,000-square-meter facility that bridges industrial performance with poetic expression. At the heart of their practice is a belief that architecture is not just about building—it’s about shaping relationships: between people, between past and future, between technology and craft.
(0:03) Architecture as a Living Transformation
(1:42) The Intuitive Knowledge of Living Art
(2:20) Preserving the Human Core of Expression
(3:14) The Medina and the Geometry of Childhood
(6:35) The Social Spaces of Rooftops
(8:27) The Twin Dynamic and Confrontation with 'l'autre'
(10:21) Contextual Echoes & Traces of the Site
(12:12) The Temples of Water
(13:15) The Mosque as Pure Spatiality
(15:49) Building Culture with Yves Saint Laurent & Pierre Bergé
(16:57) The Wast ed-dar (وسط الدار) and the Heart of a Building
(18:31) The Smells and Sounds of Home
(19:44) Balance, Nature, and Sisterhood
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion.
Haskell has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken, and he received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees.
His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is How Flowers Made Our World. In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds of our daily calories.
(0:00) How Flowers Made Our World
(1:33) Networked Connection is the Foundation of Life
(2:00) Contemplating the Small
(4:07) Consciousness, Intelligence & Memory in the More-Than-Human-World
(4:18) We Are Grass Apes
(5:41) Memories of His Childhood in Paris & Wild Orchids
(6:34) The Networked Intelligence of Forests
(7:45) The Earth in Full Song
(8:46) The Practice of Listening
(10:11) Escaping the Screen: Real Connections in the Classroom
(11:35) The True Cost of AI
(12:11) Transforming Ourselves
(14:23) Silence Without Expectation
(15:32) A Sensory Legacy for the Future
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

What if the defining revolution of Earth's history wasn't led by animals or humans, but by flowers? Are we truly individuals, or are our bodies and minds just walking ecosystems?
Our guest today is David George Haskell, a biologist who has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken, and he received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees.
His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is How Flowers Made Our World. In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds of our daily calories.
(0:00) How Flowers Made Our World
The incredible ancient history of flowers on Earth
(4:56) Contemplating the Small
Expanding our world by restricting our gaze
(14:30) The Illusion of Individuality
Why atomism is false and interconnectedness is the foundation of life
(26:08) We Are Grass Apes
The evolutionary origins of humans and our dietary dependence on grass
(33:32) Memories of His Childhood in Paris & Wild Orchids
(38:55) The Networked Intelligence of Forests
How trees communicate and share resources beneath the soil
(44:00) The Earth in Full Song
Tracing the sonic history of our planet
(51:08) The Practice of Listening
Why tuning in to the natural world is crucial for our survival
(1:01:21) Silence Without Expectation
Sitting with nature without demanding progress or enlightenment
(1:11:01) Transforming Ourselves
Why personal change matters in the fight for the climate
(1:15:20) Escaping the Screen
Finding real human-to-human connection away from technology
(1:16:16) The True Cost of AI
The devastating impact of data centers on our fossil fuel consumption
(1:23:18) A Sensory Legacy for the Future
What we must preserve for the generations not yet born
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. It wasn't unrequited in the past. Usually, we think of unrequited love as you never got to do it, you never had it for yourself. But, in fact, there can be requited love, which is then unrequited love in the paroxysms of grief.”
Today, we are honored to welcome a writer whose work has long explored the intimate landscapes of the mind, memory and the heart. Siri Hustvedt’s writing moves between the personal and the philosophical, the literary and the deeply human. Her work bridges collections of essays, non-fiction, poetry, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the Gabarron Prize for Thought, her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Her new memoir, Ghost Stories, is a reflection on forty-three years shared with her late husband, the writer and filmmaker Paul Auster. In its pages, we encounter not only love and loss, but the quiet persistence of presence, memory, and language itself.
(0:00) “We were hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives”
(2:04) Grief as Unrequited Love
Siri explores the emotional reality of living without Paul Auster, noting that grief occurs because love does not stop when a person dies.
(3:19) The Shared Space of a 43-year Marriage
(4:36) Reading from Ghost Stories
Siri reads the opening passage of her memoir, detailing how the loss of her husband deranged her sense of time and bodily rhythms.
(7:02) How Loss Changes Our Sense of Time
(11:24)  How Powerful Emotions and a Person's Life Can Play a Role in Illness
(13:04) Believing in a Reality that Transcends the Individual
(20:06) Physical Love in Marriage
On the importance of physical intimacy in long-term marriages, a reality often left out of grief memoirs.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Grief happens because you don't stop loving the person who died. The person doesn't exist in your reality anymore. The everyday is not colored and shaped by this other human being, but you don't stop loving the person. So grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. And probably without that dynamic relationship with this person, I would be someone else. And he would've been someone else. I mean, Paul died before me. But we were, I think, hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives.”
Today, we are honored to welcome a writer whose work has long explored the intimate landscapes of the mind, memory and the heart. Siri Hustvedt’s writing moves between the personal and the philosophical, the literary and the deeply human. Her work bridges collections of essays, non-fiction, poetry, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the Gabarron Prize for Thought, her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Her new memoir, Ghost Stories, is a reflection on forty-three years shared with her late husband, the writer and filmmaker Paul Auster. In its pages, we encounter not only love and loss, but the quiet persistence of presence, memory, and language itself.
(0:00) Grief as Unrequited Love
Siri explores the emotional reality of living without Paul Auster, noting that grief occurs because love does not stop when a person dies.
(4:00) Facing Death with Courage
The importance of not hiding from mortality and how discussing end-of-life wishes offered a necessary perspective.
(12:37) Reading from Ghost Stories
Siri reads the opening passage of her memoir, detailing how the loss of her husband deranged her sense of time and bodily rhythms.
(18:41) The Phantom Limb: ” The beloved is taken away and it feels as if you're amputated or gutted.”
(21:50)  Grandfather, Father and Son: Generational Traumas Behind Paul Auster's Writing
(24:11)  How Powerful Emotions and a Person's Life Can Play a Role in Illness
(30:09) Feeding the Earth
"Paul very pointedly told me that he wanted to be buried in the Jewish mode. And the phrase he used was, “I want my body to feed the earth.”
(44:23) Physical Love in Marriage
On the importance of physical intimacy in long-term marriages, a reality often left out of grief memoirs.
(54:00) The Philosophy of the Between
How relational existence is foundational to life.
(1:00:16) The Hubris of Controlling Nature
(1:12:00) The Dark History of Statistics
(1:32:12) The Art of Learning vs. AI and Automated Outcomes
“I think we have to ask ourselves, what is education? What do we want from it? How do we want people to learn?
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast