now for me that's very close to what you feel when you're doing creative work.
Maisie - Yes.
Shinju - You're in a very relaxed space, I'm just curious as to whether you felt...similar?...different?
Maisie - Yeah, there's definitely a likeness. I think that's going back to the conduit idea. In that sense it could easily be said that there's no such thing as creativity because...
Shinju - You're just a pipe.
Maisie - Yeah, often we may have a creative idea that we feel hasn't immediately be spurred by something around us, but you know, everything that we've lived and experienced up until that point, that's a huge range of experience and a huge amount of that is going to be drawn on to produce this kind of spontaneous idea. In a way its very reflective both of the three dimensional world that it communicates with and a kind of pan dimensional...I have this image of the magnetic picture of the sun where there are particles in millions of intricate eddies all fundamentally feeding back on themselves but there are also these great flumes that fly off on tangents off into outer space and its a bit like that, where as the flying off into space is the unknown space were the ideas spring from, and they're tempered and affected by a huge amount of the immediate surroundings. It's as though the things around you are your building blocks to create the message that you've experienced on a non three dimensional channel and so obviously that's going to reflect a lot on where the artist is and what their life experience is. Given that we have to see the things to hand all of those things, those building blocks are going to be pieces of the creator's or the message builder's creation or their art. The inspiration comes from outside our dimensional understanding and is then expressed in very localised language.
Shinju - How do other people fit into the life of a shaman, and vice versa? Is it still true that the shaman is on the edge of the tribe, out at the edge of the woods, out on the edge of reality? Or has that whole archetype changed completely these days?
Maisie - I think in the small pockets of the cultures of the world where they were first discovered, you know, as an acknowledged role, that's why we use words like shaman is because they're from societies which had an acknowledged role and space for this, and would, you know, readily support anybody who grew into that space, which very largely, unless you're going to throw in, essentially, with an organised religion, then you're not going to, its very hard in our society to be in

any way funded to be supported to live in that role .
Shinju - Do you not think there's an emotional support role there?
Maisie - Yeah, I think that does exist and people do it for each other every day with the knowledge that hey would it be great if we actually got paid to be good to each other.
Shinju - Yes it would.
Maisie - Wouldn't it be fantastic.
Shinju - Totally, small piece of wages set aside for being nice to people.
Maisie - Yeah. But I think some people don't find space. You see to me shaman is a bit of a redundant phase because the concept, to me, what my experience is, where it maybe differs, is that having felt my own connection, its not even a connection, it's, I believe there's a physics thing where something can exist as a particle in two different forms at once.
Shinju - As a particle and a wave.
Maisie - Yes, they are states existing at the same time .
Shinju - So everyone's connected and disconnected at the same time?
Maisie - Everyone's connected but a lot of people don't feel that
Shinju - Yes I can see and talk to people and I can see their connection and yet they say they're not connected.
Maisie - Yeah. I mean the sum total of life never goes away basically. That is essentially it. Often its just a case of just remembering that you are a part of all of that and that every last stray squiggle of energy wherever it goes, whatever it produces in our reality, its all sacred. I think from somebody, yeah going back to having experienced that, and just that for me it was a very loving experience I gather it isn't for everybody. A lot of people experience it as a baptism of fire. It's maybe a part of not accepting how individually tiny we are .
Shinju - For some people there's a lot of fear to get over.
Maisie - Yes, how simple it is to realise that actually you know my worries are there, I worry for myself, but its OK its not like the universe wont blink an eye and carry on I guess having felt as though I've received obviously infinite quantities of love and support from that thing that may just be the hum on the universe and it may just be what I've projected. So coming to that experience, it just immediately seemed obvious to me that everything and everybody and every animal and every plant and every table and dining chairs is just as valuable and just as much a part of all of this strange matrix of energy as I am. So for me the kind of advisory and healing roles often associated with shamanism don't really apply rationally.