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

literary writing is not to “make a point”; it is to provoke imaginative states.

our sensitivity diminishes in proportion to the total amount of stimulation. If there are two candles lit in a room, we easily notice the difference in brightness when a third candle is lit. But if there are fifty candles burning, we are unlikely to notice the difference made by a fifty-first. If there is less total stimulation, each small change

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

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.

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.

I eventually learned to treat each solitary writing session at home the same way I treat a live performance. In other words, I learned to treat myself with the same care and respect I give to an audience. This was not a trivial lesson. These rituals and preparations function to discharge and clear obscurations and nervous doubts, to invoke our

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.