Here is a lively short work of music I found randomly when looking on YouTube for something else. Just thought you might enjoy it while reading…
Crystalizing Creative Practice
A creative life is not powered by heroic bursts of energy. It endures because the inner creative engine never cools. The work remains warm, even in moments of stillness. An artist steps into the studio with the engine already idling not as a cold machine that needs restarting. This quiet creative posture is what makes decades of making art possible.
Over time, repetition becomes a living structure. Like a time crystal with its unbroken pulse, the artist’s routines begin to sustain their own rhythm. In the beginning, you must coax yourself to the table. Talk yourself into it. Over time, you return without thinking. You show up without question. The mind carries a deep internal momentum that carries over from one day to the next. Creative life becomes a low hum, steady and familiar, the mental equivalent of coals glowing beneath the ash that only need a little stir and a new log. What stays in motion continues, and the path remains open and clear.
This is the quiet secret of endurance. The artist learns to live at the threshold between rest and activation, where effort is minimal and attention is supple. A state of readiness without strain. Presence without pressure. In this condition, the work does not ask for dramatic ignition. It simply asks for you to step back into the rhythm that has been holding itself in readiness. And once you do, the fire rises again, almost on its own.
One of the oldest teachings echoes this same truth. In the Tao Te Ching, it says that the beginner steps in and out of alignment. Practice comes in flashes. One day the path feels clear, the next it is gone again. But over years of returning, the rhythm steadies. Effort loosens. The fluctuations begin to level. The artist moves from practicing the creative life to inhabiting it. The fire no longer requires tending. It stays alive of its own accord.
This is how the creative life matures. At first, you wrestle your way into the work. You light the flame again and again. Later, the flame becomes your atmosphere. Your days carry a trace of the studio even when you are elsewhere. The practice folds into your breathing, your seeing, it is carried in your way of moving through the world. You no longer have to seek the path. You are already on it, where ever you are and in whatever you are doing.
In this condition, the work becomes an extension of being rather than an act of will. Like the sage who abides in the Tao without attempting to hold it, the artist remains in a quiet state of readiness. The embers stay warm. The creative engine idles. This is not passivity but continuity, a sustained subtle momentum that carries the creative life forward for decades. The external results may rise and fall, but the inner rhythm remains unbroken.
Listening to the music while reading was a nice touch(onian)!
I needed to read that, Cecil. That piece of music is a delight.