The Heart of the Maker

“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions.… A place apart.”

— Mary Oliver, “Of Power and Time,” in Upstream: Selected Essays (2016)

Mary Oliver’s poetic elder wisdom helped me understand what underlies all true creation: a refusal to collapse—into noise, into certainty, into performance. Her reminder of the sanctity of solitude calls us back to the quiet ground where possibility first stirs. It’s there, in the stillness beneath the striving, that the heart of making begins to beat. And yet, solitude alone is not the full story. Creation, like becoming, asks for companionship—the kind that keeps us anchored when the silence grows heavy and the uncertainty deepens.

On Bearing Uncertainty Together

When I met Melissa Bernstein, I felt I was encountering a kindred spirit—not a business celebrity, but a fellow traveler who has made meaning from the raw material of struggle. Her journey felt familiar, as though in her voice I heard echoes of my own: the longing to create, the fear that always shadows that longing, and the quiet hunger for accompaniment. Our conversation wasn’t about scaling or strategy; it was about what it means to stay awake inside the process of becoming.

Melissa introduced a word I’ve enjoyed ever since: “exilifying”—a blend of exhilarating and terrifying. It’s her way of naming the paradox at the heart of entrepreneurship, and perhaps at the heart of any truly creative life. “True creativity only emerges,” she told me, “when we untether ourselves from certainty, embrace the terror of the unknown, and allow possibilities to unfold.”

That line hit me with the quiet authority of truth. To create is to live at the edge between promise and abyss, where exhilaration and terror coexist. (And, truthfully, was something I needed in this very moment as I’m incubating my ideas for another book.) It also reminded me of something Rilke wrote—that the creative soul must live close to the pulse of its own heart, trusting the rhythm even when it breaks.

We are not built for comfort; we are built for thresholds, for that trembling, liminal spaces between what is ending and what might begin.

The Discipline of Patience

Melissa insists that good ideas take time. In a culture obsessed with speed, she treats patience as a kind of spiritual discipline. It’s a countercultural act of devotion—the courage to let something unfold at its own pace rather than at the market’s. More wisdom for the creator within me.

Paraphrasing the psychotherapist Alfried Längle, Melissa notes that anxiety, especially the anxiety of the not yet created, still yet to be brought forth, “is the price we pay for freedom and creativity. There is no existence without anxiety.”

Indeed. To create is to live in tension—not because we’ve failed to manage fear, but because we’ve grown large enough to hold it and to step into the liminal space between what has been created and what is yet to come forth. Patience, then, isn’t passive; it’s a form of strength. It’s what I once called, in Reboot, “staying with the discomfort until it transforms.” And it’s what in Reunion I later described as the willingness to remain in relationship—with ourselves, with one another, with the work—even when the path forward isn’t clear.

Bearing Uncertainty Together

And here’s where the solitary work of creation meets the communal: no one creates—or survives—alone.

Melissa’s long-time business partner, Doug, has been her companion in both enterprise and endurance. Over the years, they learned to divide their work not by ego but by essence: she in imaginative play and product creation; he in structure, stewardship, and strategy. Their marriage and business became a single, evolving conversation about meaning.

In her story, I recognized the Buddhist idea of sangha—the community as both mirror and refuge. To be accompanied doesn’t mean the path gets easier; it means the burden becomes bearable. As I often tell my clients, we’re not meant to walk through transformation in isolation. Melissa and Doug embody this: creative partnership as spiritual practice, the shared act of holding steady amid uncertainty.

The Human Being at the Center

What moves me most about Melissa’s journey is how she refuses to separate the art from the artist, the venture from the human being. She speaks openly of her struggles with mental health, of learning to integrate the anxious, striving parts of herself with the patient, loving maker within.

This is the work that underlies all true leadership—the work which I have called “growing up.” And it’s the invitation extended to leaders everywhere: to create belonging not by performance or power, but by revealing one’s own humanity. Melissa’s story is a living testament to that truth. The point, she reminds us, is not simply to sustain the business but to sustain the person at its center.

Closing Reflection — The Heart of the Maker

Perhaps what Melissa reminds us is this: creativity—like leadership—is an act of faith.

We cannot predict the shape of what’s to come. But if we stay—with courage, with patience, with one another—something beautiful may emerge.

Where in your life are you being asked to stay with uncertainty—not alone, but alongside others who help you hold the tension between terror and wonder?

May we each live the exilifying life—open, uncertain, brave, and full of heart.