There is now an entire industry built around creativity. Books, courses, podcasts, workshops — all of it circling the romantic idea of the creative life without ever getting to the work itself.

In this episode Bel picks up Rick Rubin's The Creative Act — a book she genuinely loves — and asks the uncomfortable question: is this chapter one of a conversation nobody is finishing?

She talks about the consumption trap, the real cost of an artist's life, and why creativity isn't something you read your way into. It's a reflex. It's a way of being. You already know how to breathe.

In this episode:

• Why The Creative Act is chapter one — and what chapter two looks like
• The industry keeping creatives permanently inspired and permanently stuck
• What it actually costs to go all in with your work
• Making art is like getting ready for a party
• The doorstop theory

Bel has been making things professionally for over 35 years. This is what she knows.

Find Bel: YouTube: @belbare Fauun Haus: fauun.haus

Bel sits with the songbirds outside her window and traces a creative lineage that starts with Sappho in 600 BC and runs unbroken through to your living room right now.

The thread this episode pulls:

Sappho — ancient Greek lyrical poet from Lesbos. Played the lyre, sang, performed. Devastatingly beautiful work about love, desire, and heartbreak that was so dangerous to the patriarchy it was almost entirely destroyed. What survives are fragments — scratched on pottery, found in tombs, quoted by other authors before her work disappeared. Less than five percent remains. It was enough to start a tradition that never ended.

The reception of ideas — in art history and literature, reception means tracing where an idea began and how it travelled through time. Bel traces the Sapphic creative tradition — women using their deepest interior as their medium — through the centuries to the present.

Sylvia Plath — Ariel, her most raw and celebrated collection, was edited after her death by her husband Ted Hughes who removed the most confronting material. Her archives show her own work marked through with red — you can't say that, you can't do this. Her deepest truth censored by the people closest to her.

Patti Smith — took the written word back to the stage, bringing music back to poetry for the first time in centuries. Called too intense. Too much. Too much truth.

PJ Harvey — dark, intense, unflinching. Making audiences step back. Doing it right.

Lana Del Rey, Hope Sandoval, Emily Dickinson — all part of the same unbroken thread. All told, in some form, they were too much.

The quote that anchors everything: "What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life? The world would split open."

Rumi's line that closes it: Your wounds are where the light gets in — and out.

The question this episode leaves you with: What would happen if you told the truth of your interior life? And what is stopping you?

Tonight Bel reads about Augustus and Nero for her classics tutorial and cannot hold it together. This is what happens when a mature age student with zero background in ancient Roman history encounters the Twelve Caesars cold — with full adult comprehension of the consequences, the ramifications, and the ripples still moving through society two thousand years later.

What's in this episode:

Augustus — the original personal brand. Built an empire on violence, rewrote his own story, and convinced history to call him great. The first influencer. Terrible human. Extraordinary PR.

Nero — murdered his mother, possibly burned Rome, fancied himself an artist. History finds him fascinating. Bel finds him appalling. Both are correct.

The pattern that won't break — from ancient Rome to right now, the monsters keep getting the microphone. The podcasts, the profiles, the marble statues. The cycle hasn't changed in two thousand years and Bel would like to discuss this.

The women who almost disappeared — Sappho. Diotima. The unnamed women of ancient Rome who might have brought some sanity to the chaos and left almost no record at all. Where are their statues?

The moment that cracked everything open — a speech at university about the worst thing you can do with an education being to not use it for what's right. Bel doesn't know yet how she's going to use hers. But she knows it starts here, in bed, furious, with a Chihuahua.

The question this episode leaves you with: We've had two thousand years to change this. Why haven't we? And what's your small corner of the world where you can push back?

Plato walked into a dinner party in 416 BC and accidentally wrote the best self help book ever made. It just took 2,400 years for anyone to notice.At some point in your adult life something shifts. You realise you are the most interesting, most alive, most fully yourself you have ever been, and almost nobody around you has noticed. The culture calls this a crisis. A phase. Ingratitude. What if it's none of those things? What if it's the oldest, most human impulse there is, and philosophy named it two and a half thousand years ago?

This week Bel studied Plato's Symposium — a dinner party in Athens in 416 BC where a group of brilliant, hungover, competitive men took turns giving speeches about the nature of love and desire. What she found inside that small, ancient text shook her. Because Plato wasn't writing about romantic love. He was writing about the thing you are reaching for when you know, in your bones, that the best of you is still ahead.In this episode: the round humans Zeus split in half and why your other half might not be a person at all. The Latin root of the word desire, and why it literally means the ache of being away from the stars. Diotima's Ladder — the map of how desire, properly followed, ascends toward something absolute and eternal. And the word Eudaimonia — not happiness, something far more demanding and far more alive than that.This one is for you. If you have ever been told you want too much. If you have ever felt guilty for not being satisfied with a life that looks fine from the outside. If you have ever looked at your life in the quiet moments and thought — this is not all of it. I am not done.Plato wrote about you. Aristotle named you. And Diotima — the only woman in the room, the one Socrates deferred to completely — understood you best of all.

Books discussed:

The Odyssey — Homer, translated by Emily Wilson The original complicated love story. Penelope waits twenty years. Odysseus island-hops with goddesses. A meditation on commitment, infidelity, and how much you're willing to put up with. Bel recommends the audiobook narrated by Claire Danes above all else.

Sappho: Fragments Willis Barnstone translation recommended. Less than five percent of her work survives — destroyed by patriarchy and time — but what remains is stunningly alive. All longing, all passion, all limerence. Written 2,600 years ago and she still makes you feel seen.

The Symposium — Plato A dinner party. A hangover. A group of ancient Athenian men taking turns explaining what love actually is. Only eighty pages. Contains the most famous origin story of romantic love ever written — the round humans split in half by Zeus, doomed to spend eternity searching for their other half. Also contains the only woman in the room, who turns out to understand love better than all the men combined.

The Love Poems of Rumi — edited by Deepak Chopra Thirteenth century Sufi mystic. Every poem a painting. Words that are heartbreaking and lucid and somehow completely modern. For when you need to be reminded that longing is not a now problem — it is a forever human experience.

The question this episode leaves you with: Who has really loved you — and what was your role in that?

In Bed with Bel is the podcast and YouTube channel for women who are not winding down. New episodes twice a week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

I'm Bel. Artist, designer, scholar, and chronic overthinker. Join me in bed for art history, esoteric rabbit holes, midlife reinvention, and whatever my mind is chewing on this week.

🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss whatever happens next.Listen to my other little podcast @sacredmechanics

#midlife #artistlife #genx #arthistory #phdlife #startingover #philosophy #selfhelp #selfhelpbooks #stoicism #Sapiophile #midlife #history #love #marriage #breakup #brokenheart

The Original Situationship: Homer, Sappho, Plato & Rumi on Why Love Wrecks UsHave you ever loved someone so completely it felt dangerous?

Turns out you're not alone, and you never were. In this episode Bel takes you through the ancient texts that somehow, impossibly, know exactly how modern heartbreak feels. From Homer's Odyssey, the original story of a woman waiting twenty years while her husband island-hops with goddesses — to the heartbreaking fragments of Sappho, the woman who invented the language of longing, to Plato's Symposium and its theory of why we spend our whole lives searching for our other half. And finally Rumi, the thirteenth century Sufi mystic whose love poems read like they were written last night. This episode is for the lovers, the brokenhearted, and everyone who has ever wondered why loving someone can feel like handing your soul over with no guarantee of getting it back. Spoiler: the ancient Greeks wondered the same thing. And they wrote it down.

#sappho #theodyssey #rumi #plato #symposium #philosophy #love #lust #desire #soulmate #grief #heartbreak #breakup #lostlove #fallinginlove #midlifelove #divorce #marriage

I'm Bel. Artist, designer, scholar, and chronic overthinker. Join me in bed for art history, esoteric rabbit holes, midlife reinvention, and whatever my mind is chewing on this week.

🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss whatever happens next.Listen to my other little podcast Sacred Mechanics

#midlife #artistlife #genx #arthistory #phdlife #startingover

In tonight's episode Bel discovers the term pretirement — and falls down a rabbit hole of thousands of women saying the same thing in the comments of a single YouTube video: we are done. What follows is an honest, unscripted late-night conversation about what it actually costs to want out, what happens when you let go of something without a plan B, and why the life you are going to be remembered for might not have started yet.

In this episode:

• What pretirement is and why it's hitting Gen X women hardest right now - are we ehausted?
• The sandwich generation trap — caring for boomer parents while adult children are still at home
• What Bel saw in corporate comment sections that genuinely shook her: colleagues retiring only to be gone within five years
• Leaving a Paris executive creative career in her mid-forties — and what she discovered on the other side
• Why you cannot backtrack once you let go, and why that's actually the point
• 38 years of graphic design work and the confronting truth about legacy
• "I have nothing. I have everything." — rebuilding your interior when the exterior falls away
• The one thing Bel wants you to do before you go to sleep tonight

The question this episode leaves you with: What will you be remembered for — and has it happened yet?

In Bed with Bel is the podcast and YouTube channel for women who are not winding down. New episodes twice a week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

The danger of creativity. We humans are the most dangerous being on earth… and I don’t mean in the most obvious violent sense. I’m referring to our most powerful weapon that is unlimited, unmatched and cannot be replicated by the most advanced technology on the planet. We’re all born with it in equal measure and what differentiates us all is how well or how much we dare to use it. We’re may choose to weaponise it or may use it to express our love and feed every desire. And that’s what I want to talk about today. Creativity.Imagine atomic strength levels of creativity lives in a jar in our head. We all get the same sized jar. Some of us struggle to even loosen the lid during our lives, some of us lost the lid and might be locked up because of it… and some of us have figured out how to poke holes in the lid and shake that stuff everywhere as needed and to taste. The spice of life.Where do you sit on this scale? What’s your relationship with this jar or pure creativity? The kryptonite to boredom?If you haven’t used your creativity enough, you’re going to think it’s dangerous. Too spicy. If you’ve used it a lot, it doesn’t cross your mind that it will ever run out - because it won’t. It gives you a hardwire to your soul.Some people confuse creativity with artistic skill. They’re not related. Any artistic skill can be learned and must be treated as an outlet … a tool.Here’s another way to visualise Creativity. It is like walking around with a box of matches… Imagine the power on that box of matches. From zero, we never strike one and they go through the wash… all the way to lighting a toilet paper warehouse on fire. So here, we can see creativity can be muted m, and it can be powerful and very very dangerous. This dangerous level of creativity is what society, and I can only speak for the West, strives to control, reduce, capitalise and if necessary, neuter. Do you see AI a bit differently now? You should. When you are about to undo that jar on your head, just a little… don’t let it know what you’re doing. Don’t ask its opinion. Just do it. Think it. Write it. Draw it. Sing it. Design it. Protect it. Then do it again.Right now we are running in a race, the race of our lives, and the oxygen of our sanity is creativity.Use it. Breathe it in. Breathe it out. Be defiant and create.Give your soul some voice. Let it laugh, let is wail if you like, heal it with this fresh oxygen that is the ultimate human gift, that’s not for sale on Temu… it’s impossible to fake. You are rich. You own it in spades.Go. Make. Create. Dangerously.------------I'm Bel. Artist, designer, scholar, and chronic overthinker. Join me in bed for art history, esoteric rabbit holes, midlife reinvention, and whatever my mind is chewing on this week.🔔 Subscribe on YouTube youtube.com/@belbare?sub_confirmation=1In Bed with Bel is part of Fauun Haus.#midlife #artistlife #genx #arthistory #phdlife

Hi, I'm Bel. Welcome to my bed.I'm a graphic designer, artist, writer, clairvoyant, and mature-age university student on the Gold Coast, Australia — currently doing my undergraduate degree with my eye on Honours and a PhD in art history. I record from bed because this is a small apartment, I have three kids, and honestly the bed is the best place to think.This channel has no fixed format. It has a mind. Expect art history, esoteric history, midlife reinvention, creative practice, books I'm obsessed with, and whatever my artist's brain is connecting this week that probably isn't supposed to connect.I cut my own bangs. I don't wear makeup on camera. The bar is low and the conversation is real.Come in.#midlife #50s #singlemom #university #midlifestudy #vlog #arthistory #phddiaries #phd #phdlife #confession #artist #art #literature #fired #history #middleages #aiwreckedmylife #australian #genx

I have two days to memorise 25 Renaissance artworks for a major university exam worth 45% of my grade — so let's do this together.In this video I run through the key works, artists, and movements from the Byzantine era through to the High Renaissance — including Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Masaccio, Bellini, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Hieronymus Bosch. I share what I actually find interesting about each work, including a few observations you won't find in the textbook.Topics covered:Byzantine vs Renaissance naturalismTempera, fresco, and oil painting techniquesLinear perspective and BrunelleschiChiaroscuro and contrappostoThe Scrovegni Chapel and Giotto's first kissMasaccio's Trinity and Tribute MoneyBotticelli's Primavera — is it a stage set?Leonardo's Last Supper and why that's definitely JohnBellini's sacred conversationThe Garden of Earthly Delights — and what I think the middle panel really meansSpoiler: I think I'm ready.-------That wild Bosch painting - not for kids!https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-c...-------#arthistory #renaissance #studywithme #italianrenaissance #davinci #botticelli #bosch #hieronymusbosch #university #matureagestudent #arthistory101 #studyvlog #inbedwithbel #genx