Sunday, June 1, 2014

Live, Love and Forgive


I was honored to be asked to contribute to a new book that just came out this week entitled LIVE, LOVE AND FORGIVE, Insights from Artists, edited by Justin St. Vincent in cooperation with The Fetzer Institute.

The new book is filled with short essays from musicians, film makers, photographers, writers, actors, and healers, and is a remarkable and honest meditation of the ways craft can help heal our world. Here is a little sample.

Art fortifies our capacity for compassion, which means "to suffer with," by allowing us to step into experiences radically different from our own.
Dale M. Kushner | author & writer 

Music may be a way—a passage—a common plane we can walk on with bare arms raised in appreciation versus anger.
Naseem Rakha | author, speaker & storyteller 

To me sitting at an instrument to compose music is like sitting on a beach, running my fingers through the sand. My fingers hit upon something solid, and I start to dig the sand away from around the object...
John Adorney | composer & musician 

When I started doing music it was tunnel vision. I saw my hood, my circles and my thoughts. After talking to people all over the world and expanding my intake of art, I've found such valuable stories and perspectives that relate to mine more than I could have ever imagined.
Demi Amparan | poet & director of publications & communications at young chicago authors

When we stop and listen to a musical work, life or expression of another, sometimes wholly different from ourselves, we allow that difference to come inside and are made new by it.

When art touches us in a deep way, our feelings, ideas, beliefs and perspectives can change in an instant.

Art and music have the ability to disarm, to help us move beyond what's bothering us and soften our edges.

The personal development of the artist is just as important as the artistic development

Forgiveness requires vulnerability. It requires the unleashing of your own ego. It requires the ability to face the truth. It requires a small crack—like a light leak in a camera—to penetrate your walls of division leaving you no choice but to give way