Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in puppies, kittens, children, baby baboons—and also in young communities and civilizations. Galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity. It is profligate, excessive, exaggerated, uneconomical.
[the book's] purpose is to propagate the understanding, joy, responsibility, and peace that come from the full use of the human imagination.
Spontaneous creation comes from our deepest being and is immaculately and originally ourselves.
The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.
He who binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity's sun rise.
Whether we are creating high art or a meal, we improvise when we move with the flow of time and with our own evolving consciousness, rather than with a preordinared script or recipe.
The work of the improviser is, therefore, to stretch out those momentary flashes, extend them into the activity of daily life
As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business, I am in the surrender business. Improvisation is acceptance, in a single breath, of both transience and eternity. (emph added)
In creative work we play undisguisedly with the fleetingness of our life, with some awareness of our own death.
Every moment is precious, precisely because it is ephemeral and cannot be duplicated, retrieved, or captured.
The knowledge we tap into is intelleto of a dynamic reality in constant flux – a flux that is not random but is in itself a pattern of patterns. When we experience inspiration…we are running into this ever-present ever-changing environment of information about the deep structure of our world, this ever-flowing Tao
The violin is a ruthlessly honest seismograph of the heart
To create, we need both technique and freedom from technique.
I eventually learned to treat each solitary writing session at home the same way I treat a live performance. In other words, I learned to treat myself with the same care and respect I give to an auidence. This was not a trivial lesson.