The Breath of Ghosts Blowing Through

If you're gonna make love .. do it everywhere. That's what love is!

A creative life is risky business. To follow your own course involves a delicate balance of tradition and personal freedom. Creating in the moment without props and supports, without security, can be supreme play, and it can also be frightening. Stepping into the unknown can lead to delight, invention, humor, and occasionally a great creative breakthrough. Stepping into the unknown can also lead to failure, disappointment, rejection or death.

In creative work we play with the fleetingness of our life. Listen to Mozart's later music ... you hear all its lightness, energy, transparency and good humor, yet you also hear the breath of ghosts blowing through it. Death and life came to be that close for him. It was the completeness and intensity with which both primal forces met and fused in him, and his freedom to play with those forces, that made Mozart the supreme artist he was.

—Stephen Nachmanovitch