Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it.

I no longer sought skill, flexibility, strength, endurance, muscle tone, and quick responsiveness as means of imposing my will on the instrument, but rather of keeping an open and unrestricted pathway for the creative impulse to play its music straight from the preconscious depths beneath and beyond me.

Play, creativity, art, spontaneity, all these experiences are their own rewards and are blocked when we perform for reward or punishment, profit or loss.

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.

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.

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.