on practice by kurtz….

Artistry may seem divine, but practicing is always mundane. Practice immerses you in your daily self — this body, these moods… You struggle with mistakes and flaws. The work is physical, intellectual, psychological. It can be exhilarating and aggravating, fulfilling and terribly lonesome. But it is always just you, the instrument, and the music, here,

LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELLTOWER

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is

THE SWAN

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone, as if still bound to it, is like the lumbering gait of the swan. And then our dying — releasing ourselves from the very ground on which we stood — is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself into the water. It gently receives him, and,

work and purpose

When our purposeful work also is meaningful, we will have a good time in the midst of it. Then we will not be so eager to get it over with. If you spend only minutes a day getting this or that over with, you may be squandering days, weeks, years in the course of a

People by Charlotte z.

some people talk and talk and never say a thing some people look at you and birds begin to sing some people laugh and laugh and yet you want to cry some people touch your hand and music fills the sky.

Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Living the Questions

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live

The Knot in the Rosary: Rainer Maria Rilke

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is,