Karen Kohler’s blog posts and musings about life, art, love, nature, the universe and everything. You in the key of mastery.
Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! I get words all day through; First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do? Don't talk of stars burning above; If you're in love, show me! ~ from My Fair Lady (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner) Think about the last time you played with a baby. How [...]
I've never been good at practicing. I like to be good at something quickly, and if I'm not good at something quickly, I don't like doing it. So I put it away, for awhile. Or forever. Such has been the fate of tennis, baking, sewing and tap-dancing, to name a few. The blame seems to fall squarely on the shoulders [...]
Performers are revealers; we lay a thing bare. To cultivate as broad a landscape of potential revelation as possible, we venture from the center of familiarity and recognition to the edge of mystery and uncertainty. Just as there are edges to the stage space, there are edges to us performers too. I consider the edge that place where there's nothing to hide [...]
"Don't put anything off," is the advice of a dear friend who recently lost his wife to cancer after a long battle. Together they had been grand patrons of art in my community. I pause to assess my life. It's rich with all that I hold dear - my marriage, family, singing, directing, coaching, traveling, gardening, reading, learning. Still, I [...]
One of the first really conscious tastes I had of being fully aligned and integrated as a woman occurred during a wilderness training exercise when I was 39. I had opted into the challenge of scaling a 40-foot high rock face with many purchase points, both real and deceptive. Safely harnessed and belayed from below with lots of eyes on [...]
If you search for your soul you won’t find it. Search for anything — power, talent, time, romance, riches, God — they will elude you. Instead evoke them. Call them forth. In the case of your soul — recall it and then seed it. Uncover who you already are. Bring forth who and what you already possess. Who you are at birth is given. There [...]
I believe in breadcrumbs. Since the night I snuggled up to my Oma’s bosom to hear her read Hansel and Gretel for the first time, breadcrumbs have fueled my imagination. Haunted and yet mesmerized by this tale of witches and evil stepmothers, it was the breadcrumbs I remember most. And I began leaving them too. I didn’t do it consciously, but then neither did Hansel [...]
Back in November, I was interviewed by Lizzie O'Leary, host of NPR's Marketplace Weekend who was querying different kinds of folks about their relationship to money, including me the artist. Our short chat was inspiring and has prompted more writing on the subject. Lizzie asked me to explain why I believe it isn't noble to be a broke artist. We have to [...]
This New Year's morning, my man and I were talking about the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And about how I have enough decades behind me now to weigh and measure. I've been here long enough to attend births, to steward some into their own becoming, and be with others at the doorway to their deaths. [...]
I am swept away by the story of the Rosetta Mission and our landing on Comet 67P! That it took over 6.4 billion kilometers to reach this landing strip, including all the gravitational assists needed to get our spacecraft there. That it all happened in just 11 years, barely a blip in the history of our species. Like the [...]
