We are always the same age inside. — GERTRUDE STEIN - Julia Cameron

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain — the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things — quite