Quotes About Rhythm

Primo Levi laid bare the oldest function assigned to music. Music, he writes, was felt to be a "malediction." It was a "hypnosis of continuous rhythm that annihilates thought and numbs pain.

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

Maple. Maypole Catch and carry. Ash and Ember. Elderberry. Woolen. Woman. Moon at night. Willow. Window. Candlelight. Fallow farrow. Ash and oak. Bide and borrow. Chimney smoke. Barrel. Barley. Stone and stave. Wind and water. Misbehave.

My fingers darted, then danced, then flew. I played hard as a hailstorm, like a hammer beating brass. I played soft as sun on autumn wheat, gentle as a single stirring leaf.

I was so deeply in the music that I couldn't have told you where it stopped and my blood began.

But how quickly you can finger notes is the smallest part of music. The real key is timing.

learners who were given pronunciation lessons emphasizing stress and rhythm were judged to be easier to understand than learners who received lessons focused on individual sounds.

When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say." "Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise." "What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?" "You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another." In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

Things happen in their own sweet time.

Semper Fi, Semper Funky

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hop of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hope of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

movement from inside, the sound of

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

Walking is magic. Can't recommend it highly enough. I read that Plato and Aristotle did much of their brilliant thinking together while ambulating. The movement, the meditation, the health of the blood pumping, and the rhythm of footsteps...this is a primal way to connect with one's deeper self.

Before I was even halfway up the steep ridge, I heard the ngoma. Drums set the air vibrating and rang through the ground under my feet as if something were tunnelling powerfully in every direction at once.

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.

To pay better attention to the feeling of the Flow, it helps to merge into a rhythm of rocking and enjoying the phases of the life's creative cycles. Perhaps the experience of Flow has something to do with taking the path of least resistance. By this, I don't mean the lazy way, but the path that is inviting you, the path that already feels like it has your kind of frequency and momentum

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Children woke up at six-thirty in the morning and shifted directly into fourth gear. Fourteen hours later they rushed straight into sleep at more than a hundred miles an hour without decelerating.

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

And a spiderweb's gleamings in the exposed roots of a cut bank. And in a tailwater pool: the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain.

He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows when to set.