creative practice

When artists are burdened with the label of “genius,” I think they

lose the ability to take themselves lightly, or to create freely

(Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, “No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of the forest,

it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly . . . it begins to speak with all the treetops at once.”)

Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby. Everything I have ever written has brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a

different way. I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into.

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Id... See more

Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get

serious with us.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what

that expanded imagination does to transform your life.

The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence be... See more