the sheer joy of hard work

We are not among those who have ideas only between books, stimulated by books. Our habit is to think outdoors – walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 366

We are figments in the intending mind of God.

dojo is where we kill the ego


Dojo is two Japanese characters:
do 道 (Chinese dao) way or path
jo 場 place
So dojo means 'Place of the Dao'

The courage to do without authority.

(Requires real self-discipline.)

A maturity that values softness, delicacy, subtlety…

Weilian attention (l'attention pure) is the price of admission to the world of energy.

We can count on so few people to go the hard way with us.

—Adrienne Rich

the subversive function of the imagination

Is all we're trying to do is be in the world the way God intended.

Pull yourself together
Let yourself go

(It's all breathing)

Practise like your life depends upon it

When John Coltrane first began performing “My Favorite Things” a jazz critic somewhere transcribed a solo from a Carnegie Hall performance, then showed the transcription to Coltrane at the beginning of an interview. Coltrane looked at it long and hard, squinting as though listening to black smudges of ink that covered several pages. Then he looked up. “Can’t play it,” he said.

—Sam Hamill

Real thought is always creative & always surprises.

A sense that it's come from the muse, not from me.

Patience is the art of caring slowly.

—John Ciardi

Meditation develops spiritual resilience. 

Eventually nothing gets you down. 

Not for long anyway.

ALL HEART
belly lower heart
head upper heart

play with it  :  never force it

Yielding, at its most subtle & refined, suckers the world into giving you the energy you need to do what you want to do. We call this borrowing energy.

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
   by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it

—A R Ammons

Poetry uses language to reach beyond language.

I know that a painting is finished when the ground becomes groundless and the surface dissolves into that groundlessness.

—Raquel Rabinovich

There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same.

—Eric Weiner

Despite history and progress, which is really only technological progress (Picasso announced after visiting Altamira that art has not really gone anywhere in 30,000 years and Alfred North Whitehead said all Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato). So despite history – so-called human progress – there's always been a counter current, an underground, secret subculture trying to move away from the civilised, the social, the cultural, move backwards towards inner silence, spiritual insight and a naked simplicity.

The Hebrew for attention is tsumet lev (תשומת לב) which literally translates as placing the heart.

Alchemists say patience is the Ladder

and humility the Key to their Garden