psalms on Improvisation

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

One summer, the composer Edvard Grieg stayed at a small Norwegian hotel. A restless child also resided there, constantly annoying the guests by attempting to play the piano, producing nothing but disc...

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983), the celebrated American lyricist, was known for his collaborations with his brother George on numerous iconic songs and musicals. He was also an avid, though notoriously unlu...

The great composer Rachmaninoff was famously uncomfortable with being labeled a genius. He preferred to project an image of complete normalcy. Once, a stage-struck listener, enchanted by his “C-Sharp ...

The truly inventive state of mind approaches the plane of consciousness you’d hope to attain if you were driving down an icy highway and skidded into the path of an oncoming truck ... concentration is...

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

Toes curled at the edge before jumping from the plane Bodies crouched in position before bursting from the gate Ballerinas posed behind the curtain front and center stage A child perched on sh...

Every creator, from a child with Play-Doh to Michelangelo, learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other opt...

The very nature of light provides contrast. In juxtaposition, differing levels of light illuminate in extraordinary ways, helping us to see what we’ve been missing. In the late 1400s, the art world ma...

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. Especially strong thinking powers (...

In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to lis...

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Contemplation is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers.

Richard Mouw, the former president of Fuller Seminary and a professor of philosophy, shares an amusing anecdote from a lecture by the esteemed Catholic ethicist Charles Curran. During his talk, Curran...

In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our...

Breath has a rhythm to it, a cadence of inhales and exhales. Prayer has a rhythm too, a cadence of inhaling God’s grace and exhaling our fears.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Peter Drucker suggests that we should always sustain two streams of learning and self-improvement. And though he is speaking specifically about work and career, what he says is equally applicable whet...

Intimacy happens as we bring more and more of ourselves into God’s presence. To pray with soul and body means, says Jane Vennard, “praying with all of who we are: our physicality, our emotions, our in...

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...

The point of discourse is to learn with and from one another. I used to tell my students that at least 20 percent of what I was telling them was wrong, but I didn't know which 20 percent it was: I...

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to w...

Holy Spirit You are not just a whirlwind in the desert a tempest in a teapot You are also here in the slow growth of learning a nearly imperceptible accrual of wisdom Holy Spirit Inspire us from th...