The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there.... Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.
Stephen NachmanovitchTechnique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances.
Stephen NachmanovitchIf we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
Stephen NachmanovitchCreative living, or the life of a creator, seems like a leap into the unknown only because "normal life" is rigid and traumatized.
Stephen NachmanovitchIf we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.
Stephen NachmanovitchHere the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization, but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard, except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surface from the Self, revealing his original nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch