The Core Principles of Wings Open Studio
These three truths help me stay awake in a world that feels like too much.
There are days when the world feels like too much. Too loud, too fast, too heavy. Too uncertain. Everything demands your attention, but nothing touches your soul. The inbox fills, the news keeps breaking, your heart keeps breaking—and you can feel yourself drifting further from your own center.
When that happens, we forget what matters. We scroll. We shrink. We lose the thread.
At Wings Open, we come back through making. We return through noticing—the curl of steam from a mug, the late light across the floor, the way a feeling rises and dissolves. Art and awareness don’t fix the world, but they help us stay awake to it. They help us respond with care instead of collapse.
That’s what this space is built on: a practice of staying open. Not pushing through. Not pretending everything’s fine. But meeting the world with softness, courage, and creativity.
Everything we do rests on three guiding principles. They’re not rules or goals. They’re invitations. Anchors. The ground beneath everything we make.
1. Everyone Is Creative
You don’t have to be a painter, poet, or performer. You don’t need a gallery wall or a side hustle. You just need to be human.
Creativity shows up in so many forms—writing code that solves a problem, tending a garden, making spreadsheets that sing, caring for someone with tenderness, organizing resistance, asking better questions. It lives in your choices. In how you meet uncertainty. In your ability to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet.
Creativity isn’t decoration. It’s how we stay alive inside. It’s how we remember that we’re not stuck. You are creative because you breathe. Because you adapt. Because you notice.
You don’t need permission. But if it helps—here it is.
2. Every Moment Matters
Even the unremarkable ones. Maybe especially those.
The mind will always yearn to skip ahead or rewrite the past. But everything real happens here—in this breath, this glance, the sock crumpled on the floor.
This isn’t about chasing peace or pretending everything’s fine. It’s about noticing. Returning. Letting the moment be exactly what it is—and meeting it with your whole attention.
The more we learn to stay, the more we see: There’s beauty in the broken. Chaos as it is. A web of connection humming beneath it all.
This moment is not an obstacle. It’s a doorway. Walk through. Eyes open.
3. Joy Is Possible
Even here. Even now. Not the tidy, smiling, silver-lining kind that consoles with the phrase “at least…”
It runs beneath everything like a river—deep, steady, always flowing. Even when you forget it’s there, it keeps moving. Listen carefully: Can you hear it right now, bubbling beneath it all?
Joy is not something you earn for being good or productive or healed. It’s a signal that you are still alive to the mystery of it all.
It can be the beautiful, fleeting moments: a ridiculous dog yawn, the earthy scent of rosemary crushed between your fingers, the way the sky stuns you silent in a grocery store parking lot.
But it also lives in the quiet places. The hardest hours. A joy that can sit with you in your grief, like a bird on your shoulder, singing to you of your own resilience. Singing: it was worth it.
You don’t have to chase it. You don’t have to grasp it. You just have to allow what’s already there to rise through you.
Joy is the arc of stars overhead, steady even when you don’t look up. A thread. A current beneath the noise. It’s always been there. You just forgot. That’s okay.
You’re allowed to remember.
These three principles shape everything we create at Wings Open Studio:
Creativity as life-force. Presence as practice. Joy as possibility.
Come as you are—burned out or buzzing, skeptical or soft. Bring your spreadsheets, your paintbrushes, your questions, your grief. Bring your unfinished things.
There’s room for it all. Let’s make something true.