Quote

There is not ultimate breakthrough 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.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Life
Series
Ultimate
Development
Journey
Endpoint
Open
Provisional
Creative
Breakthroughs
Soul
Breakthrough
Find
Ended

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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
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Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.
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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.
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Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions therefore, it is sometimes painful.
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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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