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

“We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.”
Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prizefor Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.
Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.
(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia
(2:13) The Art of Translation
(5:44) The Pandemic of the Past
(11:30) Reading from ‘Time Shelter’
(14:28) Death and the Gardener
(19:34) The Translator's Calling
(26:05) Cultural Rhythms of the Bulgarian Language
(30:00) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling
(34:30) Separating Personal and Historical Pasts
(42:55) Storytelling vs Propaganda
(47:19) Bodies, Animals and the Loneliness of the Minotaur
(56:00) Reading ' Eight Minutes and 19 Seconds’
(1:00:28) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?
(1:04:18)   Childhood, Memory and Imagination
(1:10:38) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him
(1:17:20) Education and the Empathic Imagination
(1:23:25) The Museum of Memory
(1:26:15) The Importance of Hugging and Empathy
(1:28:02) AI and the Future of Humanity
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."
Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent nineteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.
(00:00) Reimagining Lincoln Center
(03:09) A Collective Caretaking
(03:47) The Technology of Human Creation
(04:20) The Curiosity of Childhood
(09:25) San Juan Hill and The Wall
(14:20) globalFEST: Music and Connection
(16:06) The Gift of Pause
(17:20) A Collective Caretaking
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prizefor Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.
Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.
(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia
(1:22) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling
(3:53) Translating the Atmosphere
(4:31) The Pandemic of the Past
(6:37) Death and the Gardener
(9:49) The Translators Calling
(11:00) Slowing Down Time
(13:14) Storytelling vs Propaganda
(15:54) Translating the Atmosphere
(18:19) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?
(20:56) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him
(23:43) The Importance of Hugging, Empathy and Storytelling
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

If you live in a city, you’ve probably had that moment in the middle of the night. You hear a scratching in the walls, or you catch the glowing eyes of a raccoon peering out from a dumpster, and for a second, the concrete world feels a lot less 'controlled' than we like to pretend. We’ve been taught to think of cities as 'biological deserts'—places where nature goes to die. But my guest today, Dan Werb, says that’s a myth we tell ourselves to feel safe. Dan is an award-winning epidemiologist and a musician, and in his new book, Our Wild Familiars, he explores the 'synanthropes'—the wild creatures that aren't our pets, but aren't quite strangers either. They are the coyotes, the bats, and even the octopuses that are learning to use our cities as laboratories for their own rapid evolution. He’s also the author of The Invisible Siege and City of Omens.
(0:02) The unexpected biodiversity of urban areas and wild familiars
(1:18) What is a Synanthrope?
(4:15) The Myth of the Biological Desert
(8:04) The Ancestral Bond between early humans, ravens, and foxes
(9:15) Crows and Grudges
(12:42) Stepping Stones in the Concrete
(14:20) The Epidemiological Triangle
(17:58) The Illusion of AI Connection
(19:56) The Museum of Memory
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

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