The Practice of Creativity: Expressions of the Dharma in the Arts and the Natural World
Our series on the Practice of Creativity honors the roles of the imagination and the arts, often drawing on the natural world, to access insight, compassion, and awareness. The workshops, literary readings, courses and events in this series are designed to inspire artists as well as non-artists in a space of creativity, community, and play.
Upcoming event
Rhythm Within Workshop
Melissa Smedley’s Rhythm Within workshop
Saturday, June 13th (2-4pm) in person
Mangalam Research Center at Center for Creative Inquiry
2210 Harold Way, Berkeley, CA
This second workshop in our Practice of Creativity series, led by artist Melissa Smedley, explores the art of communal sound-making and its effects on our experience of mind-body and world.
Sound-making is a tool that is used for a variety of purposes. A bell can be a call to prayer, to becoming present. Pots and pans banged on balconies have become instruments of protest. How does breath through a seashell shape a call and indicate ceremony? How do hands touching skins shape time?
Learn to use sound as a creative tool in collaboration with one another and an assortment of instruments drawn from the natural world, as well as found objects.
We will listen deeply, learn to make and recognize patterns, and interact in new ways.
Note: Open to all. Just bring yourself. Sound-making materials ranging from historic drums and bells, to seashells, cookie tins, sculptures and bicycle rims will be available.
Melissa Smedley is an artist, writer, and educator currently based in Salinas, California. Whether designing public sculpture, inventing performances, or podcasting, her goal is to create art for the situation, to discover and transmit art, in a great variety of forms.
Since 2020, Melissa has served as the “The Art Ranger” at The Department of Homeland Inspiration podcast. She specializes in the discovery of “art” in daily life, as well as riffing off various absurd conditions that may surround us.
Smedley received her undergraduate education at Brown University and continued with her MFA at UCSD in 1993. She has taught in the art departments at California State University, Monterey Bay, UCSD, and SouthWestern College: www.melissasmedley.net
Recommended Reading:
“The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin
“Silence” by John Cage
Past Events
Poetry Reading & Reception
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
February 27, 2026 (5-6:30 pm PT) in person
Center for Creative Inquiry
2210 Harold Way, Berkeley, CA
Acclaimed poet and scholar, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, will read from new work that draws on Buddhist ideas and postcolonial ways of knowing.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is a poet (MFA, San Francisco State University) and scholar (PhD, UC Santa Cruz), whose works draw deeply from her experience of the natural world and her Buddhist upbringing in the Tibetan communities of India and Nepal, while also interrogating the problems of identity, imperialism, and nation.
She is the author of three poetry collections from Apogee Press, My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award Finalist), In the Absent Everyday, and Rules of the House (Asian American Literary Awards Finalist), as well as five chapbooks, including Revolute (Albion Books, 2021). Her non-fiction includes A Home in Tibet (Penguin, 2014) and The Politics of Sorrow (Columbia University Press, 2025). She is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University.
Practice of Creativity Workshop: Expressions of the Dharma in the Arts and the Natural World
Melissa Smedley's Ink helps us think workshop
November 15th (2-4 pm PT)
In our first Practice of Creativity workshop, led by Melissa Smedley, MFA, participants had an opportunity to collaborate with the natural world and experiment with non-ego based gestures. We worked with making and using inks derived from a variety of earthen substances and explored free forms of mark-making, such as the traditional Japanese ensō, in a collaborative setting.
Melissa Smedley is an artist, writer, and educator currently based in Salinas, California. Whether designing public sculpture, inventing performances, or podcasting, her goal is to create art for the situation, to discover and transmit art, in a great variety of forms.
Since 2020, Melissa has served as the “The Art Ranger” at The Department of Homeland Inspiration podcast. She specializes in the discovery of “art” in daily life, as well as riffing off various absurd conditions that may surround us.
Smedley received her undergraduate education at Brown University and continued with her MFA at UCSD in 1993. She has taught in the art departments at California State University, Monterey Bay, UCSD, and SouthWestern College.
Recommended Reading:
“Make Ink: A Foragers Guide to Natural Inkmaking” by Jason Logan
“The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin
“Radiating Incrementally Outward” by Crystal Gandrud and Nuala Clarke