To treat creative work as a spiritual practice is to submit it to disciplines that are not primarily aesthetic: regularity, attention, the willingness to continue without guarantee of outcome or recognition. The studio practice of the serious artist, the daily poem written not for publication but for clarity, the musician who plays scales long after the scales are mastered — these are forms of devotion whose object is not the product but the quality of attention brought to it. What accumulates in a life of this kind is not only a body of work but a transformed maker.
Each step builds on the last.