Music producer Rick Rubin has built a phenomenally successful career based on his ability to listen. Tune in and ask the right questions. He can’t play an instrument. He can’t read music. He listens, thinks about what he’s heard, and asks musicians questions designed to help them think deeply about where their passion is in the music, and have the courage of their unique vision and creativity. He’s worked with bands and musicians as diverse as Johny Cash, whose career he is credited with resuscitating, leading hip-hop artists, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Dixie Chicks.

In a Youtube video I came across this week entitled Rick Rubin: The Invisibility of Hip Hop's Greatest Producer, he described his approach.

If you really listen to what people say, they will tell you everything. I pay attention to what people say. And through that I can then reflect back to them thoughts that they don’t know about themselves. And allow them to unlock those doors to get to the places they want to go artistically.

The ability to listen is a talent so rare that he’s built a huge career based on it. He asks himself, “What makes this musician unique? Where is their passion? What questions do I need to ask this person to help them figure out where they really want to go with their art?”

A highly successful musician (I can’t remember which one and it doesn’t really matter) described working with Rubin this way:

“The thing with Rick is he has a way of being involved with our music by not really being involved. He’s always one of the first people we’ll play a work in progress for, and he has a really good way of giving us the bird’s-eye view perspective on the song and project. We’re so in it and it’s our whole lives and because it’s a very self-indulgent thing, you forget to step back and get an outside perspective on it, and he’s just great at seeing the song as a song and nothing else.”

"Everything I do," Rubin says in the video, "whether it's producing, or signing an artist, always starts with the songs. When I'm listening, I'm looking for a balance that you could see in anything. Whether it's a great painting or a building or a sunset. There's just a natural human element to a great song that feels immediately satisfying. I like the song to create a mood."
- For more on Rubin’s approach to creativity, with a particularly exploration of the role of meditation in creativity, see his recent book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

Somerset Maugham, at the end of a brilliant writing career, revealed that very early he had discovered his own literary flaws. "I was tired of trying to do what did not come easily to me," he says in his autobiography. He was aware that he had a limited vocabulary, no lyric quality, no gift for metaphor and simile, no imaginative sweep.
"On the other hand," he says, "I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things other people missed. I could put down in clear terms what I saw.  I had a logical sense, and if no great feeling for the richness and strangeness of words, at all events a lively appreciation of their sound. I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. 
- Somerset Maugham, from his memoir Summing Up

My eye has always been in love with the splendors of the world that surrounds us.
The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Eveiything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking — at the world — through the ever­more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes, stereoscopes — the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.
Listening to a Bach fugue, to his Magnificat, I do not hear a Mister Bach "expressing himself," I hear that which transcends Bach and us. I hear what no theology has ever proven: that — under whatever name — God must exist. I hear proof that the Experiment Man has not failed: This music too was made by one of us humans! We, humans, can do more than build missiles and produce junk food for body and mind! We have painted as Piero della Francesca, written elegies as Rilke, requiems as Verdi, Mozart, Schubert, Palestrina!
- Frederick Franck, Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation In Action. For more from Frederick, including excerpts from my interview of him, visit here.

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

. . .

This Pause For Beauty is an experiment with the idea of creating a book of art and words that summarizes key thoughts. When I read a book, no matter how good or meaningful, I retain only a tiny percentage of the book’s content. I’m experimenting with condensing the book I’m currently working on, which is now about three hundred pages without art, down to two or three hundred pages of short messages — the key thoughts I want to retain — and then reference the material on the Heron Dance website that explores the subject in more depth, as above. An art journal of condensed, inspirational ideas that can also be a series of posters. The working title is now:

The Song No One Can Sing But You:
To Be In Fact That Which We Are By Design.