"Right mindfulness is essential to any art", I read in The Book of Tea.

Just watched Keeping the Faith for a second time, with the filmmakers commentary on. I find this exercise to be an easy form of education, a way of re-establishing the right mindfulness required for filmmaking. Before this special feature of DVD's, it was difficult to get inside the mind of a filmmaker, to observe the craft and not merely the end product. It took many hours of strenuous decoupage and poring through books like Projections and magazines like Sight and Sound in order to get a sense of this right mindfulness - the ecstatic buzz of things coming together, a rush of ideas, images and emotions, a glimpse of art through the maze of coincidence and process.

Sometimes this maze seems to go on forever, in all directions. Knowing the scale of the challenge facing you is not always such a good thing. Perhaps the only way to get through these challenges is to keep your head down and keep walking. Although it seems a lucky few are given wings to fly above its walls and bluffs, to glide through to the other side.

Right mindfulness is so hard to maintain. The important knowledge rarely falls in your lap. You have to go out into the wildnerness to seek it out, and bring it back to feed the fires of right mindfulness, to stoke the sparks of inspiration. And all this effort can still leave you cold. The temptation to give in to pleasant mediocrity is strong - after all, no one expects this of you except yourself.

The loneliness of embarking on a personal journey. When you start out, you don't know what you will gain, only what you are giving up. The sadness is real. Like meeting soulmates in foreign airports, it's not always easy to leave in the morning.