Late night musings

A couple of days ago I visually recorded a session in Whistler, BC (am hoping I'll get permission to post the images here). Someone at the session told me that one of the things they loved about this process was the fact that they could see their thoughts taking concrete shape almost as soon as they uttered them. There must be something magical about seeing your words materialize into images as you speak them, because this is something I hear almost every time I do this work. It's not the same when only words get recorded. People do that at meetings all the time, and it doesn't generate the same kind of excitement.

Clearly there's some kind of alchemy that occurs when you add colour, images and symbols to the words. I'm trying to think of what it is (over and above what I said in my previous post) – and the image I come up with is baking a cake. You have your eggs, flour, butter, sugar and so on – but they don't become a cake until you put them all together in a particular way. And when you do – they combine to become something that is considerably more than the sum of their parts!

I hope that's not a totally dumb analogy. I'm hungry, so that might have something to do with it – but it makes sense to me… What do you think?

The picture above shows some of the tools of my trade.