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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.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 73
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Therefore
Continually
Challenges
Challenging
Practice
Delusion
Ever
Fresh
Play
Test
Sometimes
Tests
Work
Painful
Demolish
Flow
Delusions

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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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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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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around...The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.
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The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.
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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.
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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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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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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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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When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of just anything.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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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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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