Spend time in solitude and silence. Solitude permits us to retreat from the press and struggle in order to let our fragmented and dispersed selves to become collected again. Silence goes hand in hand with solitude. Silence sensitizes, just as noise desensitizes.
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.