Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Full-blown artistic creativity takes place when a trained and skilled grown-up is able to tap the source of clear, unbroken play-consciousness of the small child within.

Attempts to conquer inertia are, by definition, futile. Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness. Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.

The most dangerous trap is to get into a contest of strength between “will power” and “won’t power.”

There is, in fact, no such thing as a “note” in music. A note is an abstract symbol representing a tone, which is an actual sound. You can play thousands of so-called B’s or C’s and they will all be different. Nothing can be standardized. Each vibratory event is unique.

“The whole difference between construction and creation,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”54

psychiatrist Donald Winnicott came to clarify the aim of psychological healing as “bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.... It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that t

what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.

As we ride through the flux of our own creative processes, we hold on to both poles. If we let go of play, our work becomes ponderous and stiff. If we let go of the sacred, our work loses its connection to the ground on which we live.

The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.