Isolde Kille

Persistence is what I attribute my success to. It's important to be persistent and be very detail-oriented. What differentiates a master from somebody else who does certain things is you have to be very precise in what you're doing, and it can be precise in your experimentation, but you have to know who you are and what makes you tick. You have to be persistent and edit constantly. You make art because you need to breathe, you need to actually explore this further, and you go deeper, and you go expanding, and you become more precise in what you're doing, and you learn about yourself.

I really like this sentence: see what arises. I feel that there is a lot of planning always going on, and there is a lot of 'I want to do this or that,' and I'm really a little bit more holding on to the idea of work on your internal self and see what arises next. Hold on to your dreams and see what they actually tell you what you have to do. I'm a little bit more going against the trend of what I believe is this American stereotype where you go after and you get what you want. I learned in New Mexico to hold, to listen internally what my dreams tell me, and see what arises. Sometimes I'm often surprised when you do the work, something even greater can happen than actually what you planned out to do. It's a Buddhist perspective. It's also Kafka, you know, you can sit at your kitchen table and the world can unfold in front of you. You don't really have to always run after it. It's a little bit more of an imaginative, a little bit more of a poetic way of handling life.

I try to stay away from judgment and really try to listen a little bit deeper. I think we're in this society where we're actually thinking 'oh, this is like this, and this is like this,' and what we really actually need to change is to listen a little bit deeper and listen in between, of what is the real truth behind that. I stay away from the reactionary mind to have a little bit more of a sensibility, to allow compassion and empathy and really coming from a moment of love instead of judgment or orienting yourself 'this is like that, or this is like this.' The inner unknowing is very important, to cultivate this field and to keep an open mind and stay curious. Curiosity is probably one of my strongest assets. I'm always open and I'm always interested in what is really behind this story. Staying curious and also experimenting, you're free to do whatever you want to do. That's really the biggest joy, to just explore.