As an artist, I’ve always tried to focus at least as much on process as on product. I’ve tried to make the creative process authentic, so that the product will have something real and vivid and alive to say to an audience. The greater the surrender to the process, the richer the product. At the same time I’ve always hoped for a certain sort of product – something that I can put on stage confidently.

Although there is nothing wrong, and indeed much very right, about approaching something purposefully and with goals and aspirations in mind…habits wear grooves as surely as a repetitive dripping of water forms a channel through rock. I’ve been a musician pretty much all my life, and though I by no means consider myself old, forty-odd years is long enough for a lot to change under subtle yet sufficiently repetitive conditions. Looking back I see that it became difficult to do some of my creative work and play because of a quiet but present sense of conditional satisfaction…misgivings about whether what I was doing was “going anywhere.”

I can definitely get too serious, but I’m blessed with a persistent playful curiosity that sometimes taps at my shoulder. That curiosity leapt with joy like a kid after an ice cream truck a few weeks ago, when I learned that one of the Tamalpa Institute faculty members who taught my Level One training last year had an opening in a Saturday practice group in the Life Art Process. It is an intermodal expressive arts process focusing on using the arts as a personal expressive medium not only one by one, but exploring the relationships between art forms. Take what’s happening in your life and dance about it…but why stop there when you can write about your dance, and sing about what you uncovered while you were writing? I’m currently on track to train as a teacher of this work so I’m already quite familiar with it, and yet there is something wonderful about being facilitated by a teacher like Rosario Sammartino. Her words and ideas and even her choices of music to accompany movement give me something fresh and interesting to play with. An experience like this group restores the playfulness and wonder and freedom of creativity.

A lot of synchronicity has joined me recently, and it all came together during one of these group sessions: the experience of creative freedom, immersion in the moment, encountering by turns both the playful and the profound…this is its own product, not just qualities of the process. If I spend an hour or two in the creative process and nothing comes of it that is destined for the stage, I still get the experience of being fully alive and present. I get to be myself, feeling my body, engaging with my imagination, sensing color and rhythm and gravity and energy and sound. What more worthy product could there be? What better use of most any hour?