Tag Archives: joy

The joy of creativity, risk and improvisation

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I’ve been listening to a great TED Radio Hour on the theme of creativity. In one segment, the host interviewed a scientist at Johns Hopkins University, Charles Limb, who is researching the source of creativity by studying jazz musicians’ brains with an MRI while they improvise.

Keith Jarrett apparently improvises whole concerts; he just sits at the piano and channels music. He said he has, from long experience, an intimate relationship with the piano and even now he never knows what will come out. He considers it a great joy and privilege to be that channel.

One fascinating thing the Hopkins researcher found was that the prefrontal cortex shuts off during these improvisations. Continue reading →

A case for sharing our gifts

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I have a friend who works with clients who suffer unimaginable difficulties. In a recent conversation, I asked her how she cultivates joy. She ticked off a number of practices: conscious breathing while walking her dogs, yoga, self-care, and exercise. Each year, during her birthday month, she journals about what gives her life meaning, her gratitude for her children’s health, her own good fortune, and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Practicing self-love in the face of hardship can take any form, one of which is to notice and appreciate the natural world. The theologian / historian / philosopher Thomas Berry said that humans came along late in evolution because we need the dazzling beauty and diversity of the world to give us solace. We have a lot to grieve, starting with the paradox that we must take the lives of other living beings in order to survive. Continue reading →

Reconnecting with the feminine

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There is a dark side to our culture’s affinity for the hero’s journey that stems from a mistaken elevation of the masculine over the feminine. This is not about gender; both women and men participate in and are affected by this bias. It shows up as a preference for control rather than adaptation, for rational knowing over intuition, for answers instead of mystery, and separation in place of connection. Writ large, these ways of being do great damage.

A quite sane response, then, is the yearning to reconnect with the feminine. Sounds simple enough, yet since most of the weight of our culture is skewed in the opposite direction, it often requires conscious choice, if not effort. It’s also subversive and generally frowned upon. An interesting aspect of being on the threshold between stories is that we feel this pull in two different directions, all the time. Continue reading →

Growth, surprises and remodeling

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Toby-plant_smThis is a drawing my son made in third grade. He has a cameo later in this piece.

Frank Lloyd Wright said the architect’s best tools are the eraser in the drafting room and the sledgehammer in the field. The process of designing and creating something from scratch is a source of endless fascination to me. No matter the medium, there’s a long tradition of craft – the rules, structures, guidelines, and accepted practices to get someone from an idea to a finished product. This applies to everything: cooking, making pottery, and writing included. In every medium, there are always the outliers who push the boundaries and take it to a whole new level. The best of these have a deep knowledge of the rules, though; they aren’t breaking them out of ignorance, but by choice. Continue reading →

Shining Clarity

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At the end of a yoga class a while back, I was visited by a marvelous insight. The class sat facing the teacher after Savasana for our Namaste and goodbye. I caught sight of someone’s water bottle standing alone in the space between the group and the teacher. It was a clear orangey plastic and the water inside was glowing with light. Looking around, the room was rather dim. The windows were far away from this spot. Certainly, no direct shaft of light was hitting the bottle. I imagined that light is as dense and real a medium as air, and as ever-present. It takes a glowing water bottle to reveal that. As though the water is in league with the light — standing in the gravity-defying vertical column of that vessel.

The sudden insight was this: we are like that water in the bottle. Our substance can glow just like that — as the light flows around and through us. Continue reading →

Taking flight

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Recently, while playing the piano, it struck me that sometimes (okay, rarely) it feels like I’m suddenly taking flight. I’ll be playing a difficult piece, technically. I know all the notes, but my fingers still have to play them accurately. There’s so much to think about – dynamics, fingering, evenness of striking the keys, emotion – and yet it’s the very effort that gets in the way of playing it well, let alone transcendently.

Taking flight is that point where the effort falls away and everything just becomes easy and free and beautiful. Not by coincidence, that’s when it sounds the best. Continue reading →