Thinking.

Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

John Ruskin, from The Stones of Venice

Progress.

Willing.

Alexander Volkov on "The Process" ...

We really teach ourselves. If you want to learn, you will always find someone to learn from, be they dead or alive, great or unknown. You will learn from everything you see and hear around you, if you are willing to pay attention. Perhaps, during my formative years, I have made a lot of unnecessary mistakes, but at the same time I have had the enormous advantage of picking my own teachers.

Autumn Road, n/d

Maples, n/d

Autumn Wind, n/d

October Wind, n/d

Reflections, n/d

Maple Moon Road, n/d

Humility.

God knits man in his mother’s womb, slowly and wisely. Art should be born in a similar way. To be like a beggar when it comes to writing music, whatever, however, and whenever God gives. We shouldn’t’ grieve because of writing little and poorly, but because we pray little and poorly, and lukewarmly, and live in the wrong way. The criterion must be everywhere and only humility.

Arvo Pärt, from his commencement speech at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, May 31, 2014

Have you thanked God for this failure already?

Rings.

Your marching orders.  Every thought and word from one of the most exuberant human beings who ever lived. 

Ray Bradbury interviewed in 1974 ...

RAY BRADBURY: [I]t's very dangerous, I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish, and too intellectual and the intellect is a great danger to creativity.

JAMES DAY: The intellect is a danger.

RAY BRADBURY: Terrible danger because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth. Who you are, what you are, what you want to be. And I've had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads don't think, you must never think at the type writer you must feel and then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of things there, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter. But at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience, just as when I'm here with you, speaking to you, your popping all sorts of questions at me, I don't have time to think about them, I can react to them. I try to say things that are meaningful in a reaction to them, if I stopped and thought too long both of us would fall asleep. And that can happen at the typewriter too. The worst thing you do when you think is lie.  You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did and what your trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself, find out who you really are and try not to lie, try to tell the truth, all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active, and very emotional, and get it out of yourself, making lists of things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. And when its over, then you can think about it, then you can look at whether it works or doesn't work or something's missing here, and then if something's missing you go back and re-emotionalize that so its all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life, its not supposed to be the center of our lives. Living is supposed to be the center of our lives. Being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around which hold us, like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not aware of life living is the blood pumping through our veins.  The ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn't really help your brain much there, you should get on with the business of living.

JAMES DAY: You rely heavily upon intuitions?

RAY BRADBURY: Oh completely, everything of mine is intuitive, all the poetry I've written. I couldn't possibly tell you how I did it, I don't know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of this sort of thing.  It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved, feeling again. I love Shakespeare, I don't intellectualize upon him.  I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don't intellectualize upon him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don't know what in the hell he's writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well.

Formative.

Copley, Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel), 1765

Harvard Magazine on the power of patience ...

In the thousands of years of human history that predated our current moment of instantaneous communication, the very fabric of human understanding was woven to some extent out of delay, belatedness, waiting. All objects were made of slow time in the way that Copley’s painting concretizes its own situation of delay. I think that if we want to teach history responsibly, we need to give students an opportunity to understand the formative values of time and delay. The teaching of history has long been understood as teaching students to imagine other times; now, it also requires that they understand different temporalities. So time is not just a negative space, a passive intermission to be overcome. It is a productive or formative force in itself.

Action.

From Farnam Street's "Brain Food" ...

Falling in love with outcomes doesn’t move you forward. Falling in love with the process does.”

“It can be hard to appreciate just how much the world will give you what you want after you stop waiting for it to give you what you deserve.

Stop waiting for the world to recognize your potential; start giving the world something positive. Don’t wait for a friend’s apology; reach out and reconnect. Instead of waiting for the perfect partner, become that partner. Rather than waiting for motivation to exercise, start small and build momentum. Don’t complain about something; change it.

Life rewards action.

Actively.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. 

James Baldwin, from "The Creative Process"

Enlightened.

There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity. 

Shunryu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Eat.

Peter Ackroyd on his written procession of mystics and evangelists, heretics and headbangers ...

On the wall beside his desk are portraits of some of his other subjects: John Milton, Oscar Wilde (in whose voice he wrote a novel), the Elizabethan occultist John Dee. “You develop an affinity and eventually a sort of companionship, when you get to know them well enough,” he says. “Of course, that’s an illusion. But it’s something which spurs you forward.”

He says there is a fleeting quality to these friendly obsessions that puzzles him, though he doesn’t interrogate it too closely. “Most writers, I presume,” he says, “keep a sort of a memory of events and details of people’s lives when they write a biography. But in my case, it just completely vanishes once the book is done.”

He wouldn’t be much use in a pub quiz?

“It would be embarrassing. The things I wouldn’t be able to remember about Dickens, say [subject of a 1,000-page plus Ackroyd bestseller]. I can now hardly remember who he was married to or the names of any of his children or the order the books came in.”

He likens his methods to “a form of intellectual bulimia: you eat a great deal of knowledge. And you sick it up. And then you start again.”

Hidden.

Edward Espe Brown on rules and popcorn popping at different rates ...

The officers of the temple, serious and stern, came to inform me that one of the students, James, had been doing drugs and sharing them with others. Unfortunate news in the crisp spring air with lucid sunlight flooding in my windows. What shall we do? I said, please, let me speak with James, before we decide anything.

James was an energetic, occasionally moody young man with a disarming smile. He was by far the youngest student, perhaps eighteen (or was it twenty-two), and he’d come to Zen practice off the streets of San Francisco, after being discovered by Issan Dorsey, one of Zen Center’s priests. Rumor was that they had been lovers. And now James was following the schedule at Tassajara—Issan was not there—where he slipped easily into the role of mascot (rather than hero, scapegoat, or lost child).

Sitting down together in my cabin by the upper garden, I found James to be entirely forthcoming. It had been his birthday recently, and his mother had sent him a Care Package, only instead of the usual chocolate chip cookies, there were brownies laced with hashish, some LSD, along with marijuana for smoking. What a mom! What was she thinking—sending drugs to a Zen Center? Why wasn’t she thinking? James said that the package had entirely way too many drugs for him to consume on his own, so naturally he had shared the drugs with others—on their day off, of course.

James also expressed his remorse and his deep wish to continue practicing at Tassajara.  He loved being there, and he especially loved Suzuki Roshi. I told James that I would do my best, but I wish I’d known how to make his wish come true, known the story about David and Suzuki Roshi, known to consult with others outside of Tassajara. When I met with the officers, I told them that I wanted James to stay, but they were insistent that he had broken the rules and had to leave Tassajara. I argued that he would soon be back on the streets of San Francisco, and that he wouldn’t survive for long. The officers said that was up to him; that he had to leave. I finally agreed to go along with them. Heaven help me.

James may have lived for a while at our City Center, but shortly he was back on the streets, and after a year or so, we heard that he was dead. How painfully sad. Of course we don’t know what would have happened had he stayed at Tassajara, but an isolated canyon in the mountains does not have the temptations of the streets of San Francisco, and today I am heart-broken not to have kept him in that structured isolation. Where we could have provided him with a big brother or mentor, where the spirit of Suzuki Roshi would have welcomed him: James, please stay, do your best, let this practice take care of you. Though you break the rules, come back to the way.

Zen practice is not like training your dog: “Sit. Heel. Fetch.” Some of us dogs have taken years to mature. What finally helps is hidden in the heart, waiting to be uncovered. Sometimes by a teacher. Sometimes through sorrow.

Step.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.  It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

A primary mistake that public education continues to make is in permanently grouping students by age (but doing anything else doesn't fit their industrial model ... "It's important that we keep to schedule/There must be no delay").  As we say in our classroom, popcorn pops at different rates.  Be relentless in the pursuit of learning, but be patient with the progress of the process. Uncle Teddy also reminded us that comparison is the thief of joy.

Learn.

A PSALM of LIFE

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

   Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

   And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

   And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

   In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

   Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,— act in the living Present!

   Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Harmony.

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.  The hidden harmony is better than the visible.

Heraclitus

Roots.

A tree without roots is just a piece of wood.

Marco Pierre White

Audacity.

Churchill, Self-Portrait, 1920

If ... you are inclined - late in life though it be - to reconnoitre a foreign sphere of limitless extent, be persuaded that the first quality that is needed is Audacity. There really is no time for the deliberate approach. Two years of drawing-lessons, three years of copying woodcuts, five years of plaster casts - these are for the young. They have enough to bear. And this thorough grounding is for those who, hearing the call in the morning of their days, are able to make painting their paramount lifelong vocation. The truth and beauty of line and form which by the slightest touch or twist of the brush a real artist imparts to every feature of his design must be founded on long, hard, persevering apprenticeship and a practice so habitual that it has become instinctive. We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.

Sir Winston Churchill, from Painting as a Pastime

Truth.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and there defines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.  I promise you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances. There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth. 

Auguste Rodin

Process.

Kurt points to another example of society's fascination with symbolism over substance ...

It’s a seductive postmodern idea that is at the heart of so much progressive folly. Art is not an idea and it’s not a product, it’s a process. The value of anything derives not from what it looks like, but the work that someone put into it.

Closely.

David Lee Roth on "banking ideas," focus, and contribution in the creative process ...

Georgia O'Keeffe on looking closely at, what Jim Harrison calls, the "small gods" ...

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.

So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

A journal.  There is no more important tool to carry everywhere you go.

Sustaining.

THURSDAY

Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I simmered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.

The phone rang. So with my left

Hand I answered it,

Sautéing the rice, then adding the broth

Slowly, one ladle at a time, with my right. What’s up?

The miracle of risotto, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks dissolve,

Each grain of rice releasing its tiny explosion of starch.

If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit

While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,

It will be perfectly creamy,

But will still have a bite.

There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.

James Longenbach