Tending the Wild Field: Creativity as a Portal to True Leadership
- Marrissa Rhodes
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Leadership Beyond Performance
There’s a deeper hum beneath what we’ve been taught to call leadership. It doesn’t follow blueprints or step-by-step plans. It cannot be managed, optimized, or rebranded. This kind of leadership doesn’t emerge from mastery—it arises from mystery.
In this wild, liminal space, creativity is not decorative. It is directive. It doesn’t arrive on cue.
It arrives through coherence. Through risk. Through reverent attunement to the unknown.
You’ve felt this. The edge where the old systems can no longer carry your truth. Where performance chafes. Where strategic identity begins to feel like a betrayal.
If you’re reading this, some part of you already knows:
The old forms are cracking. And something more honest, more feral, more sovereign is trying to come through.
Creativity as Leadership Technology
We’ve been conditioned to see creativity as an accessory. A side hobby. A “soft skill.”
But creativity is not luxury—it’s lifeblood. It’s what animates leadership from within. It is the soul’s problem-solving language. It is how we vision futures not yet mapped. It is how we metabolize complexity without collapsing into control. It is how we lead not through domination, but through emergence.
True creativity is not clean. It doesn’t conform to timelines or algorithms. It speaks in symbol, in sensation, in soul. It requires your willingness to lose coherence with systems that rewarded your compliance, in order to become coherent with the frequency that formed you.
This is not about being reckless. This is about being rooted.
The Old Model vs. The Wild Field
The old model of leadership taught us:
Control the process
Predict the outcomes
Silence the ambiguity
Perform stability
But control is a closed circuit. It narrows possibility. It breeds burnout. It severs intimacy with life. It cannot midwife what wants to emerge.
The new model—the one being seeded in this moment of collective unmaking—is responsive. It’s relational. It’s alive. It requires a leader who can feel, sense, listen, and create. Not just execute.
And creativity is the technology that allows this.
To lead from creativity is to become an ecosystem, not a structure. A channel, not a brand. A field, not a persona.
Tending the Wild Field
The wild field is the part of you that refuses domestication. It is the internal soil from which insight sprouts sideways—through dream, image, movement, sound. It doesn’t answer to efficiency. It cannot be scheduled. But it holds the key to your most authentic leadership.
To tend the wild field means:
Listening for what wants to emerge, not what is expected
Letting go of tidy containers and strategies that no longer hold you
Trusting the unknown over the familiar
Creating from coherence, not performance
You cannot access the wild field if you are still trying to be good. Good for the market. Good for the brand. Good for the lineage that taught you to survive but not to create. You must be willing to get a little feral. To be rewritten.
This is the root of sovereign leadership.
Creativity as Infrastructure, Not Indulgence
When you engage your creativity, energy moves. Possibility opens. The ecosystem of your leadership comes alive. You stop asking, “How do I fix this?” and begin asking, “What wants to emerge here?”
This shift is not minor. It is initiatory. Creativity reorients you:
From rigidity to responsiveness
From burnout to regeneration
From managing to midwifing
Creativity is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It’s what makes your leadership sustainable, soulful, and sovereign.
The Risk of Creation
There is always risk in creativity. It will ask you to drop the persona. To dissolve the scaffolding of certainty. To let the vision lead, even when you don’t yet know the way.
You might feel disoriented. You might find your old strategies crumbling. You might notice your work no longer fits into marketable templates. This isn’t failure. It’s threshold.
The truth is: You cannot lead anyone where you haven’t gone yourself. If your creativity is asking for your surrender, follow it. Let it remake you. The wild field is initiating you, too.
Practices for Leading Creatively
Prioritize Play: Let go of outcome. Follow the spark. Doodle. Dance. Detach from utility.
Slow Down: Spaciousness births insight. Urgency collapses it.
Ask Better Questions: Trade “What’s wrong?” for “What’s possible?”
Embrace Imperfection: Let messiness be a portal, not a problem.
Tend Emotional Sovereignty: Regulate. Reflect. Reconnect. Your nervous system is the container for creativity.
Trust Emergence: Lead with presence, not prediction.
Creativity doesn’t demand polish. It demands presence.
You Are Leading Energies, Not Just Tasks
Take a breath. Ask yourself:
Where am I suppressing creativity in my leadership?
Where am I craving aliveness?
What’s trying to emerge through me, if I made space for it?
You are not just leading projects. You are leading futures. You are shaping fields. And creativity is your access point to all of it.
Closing Invocation
You don’t need a rebrand. You need to remember. You don’t need to go viral. You need to go inward.
To the place where truth is raw and radiant.To the place that doesn’t make sense—but rings unmistakably clear.
To the wild field.
Because the future doesn’t belong to those who control it. It belongs to those who dare to create it.
Begin Your Own Creative Reckoning
If today’s reflection stirred something in you—if you’re sensing that the way you lead, live, or create is ready to be reimagined—I invite you to reach out.
At my practice, we offer depth-oriented, psychoanalytic therapy for visionary individuals in Missouri and Kansas who are ready to lead from a place of truth, imagination, and inner coherence. If you’re feeling the call to reconnect with your wild field and reorient your life around what is most alive, we’d be honored to support you.
✨ You can also listen to this conversation in its spoken form on the Reverence for Rêverie podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.
Reach out to begin. Your creativity is not a side note. It’s your compass. Let’s tend to it together.