Taiji is not something you grow out of. Like freedom, you grow in to it.

Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.

—Wallace Stevens

Meditation: time out of the language centre

Hail-fellow-well-met

from the archaic salutation

"Hail, fellow! Well met!"

get by on less

A life buoyed by attentiveness.

A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.

—Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892

Keep to a 

yielding mind: 

ready for all 

possibilities—

The work proceeds from the conviction that we are in the world all wrong – selfishly.

This is what
we do—

use up
resources

wipe out
indigenous populations

destroy
ecosystems

all in the name
of progress.

the enduring transcendentalist tradition

He didn’t so much teach as exemplify, which is the way it should be, since even the wisest lesson soon sounds like drivel.

—Douglas Crase, writing about James Schuyler

They could not see
the river for the bank
yet still kept talking
about the bridge.

—Jennifer Moxley

Flirting with madness

repetitive & ever-changing

SPIRIT: conflate God, Life, Love, Nature

Loosen the mind, but don't lose it.

Life on a shoestring

In order to bring inspiration to people I must not be concerned with applause by the audience. I must stand erect, tall, and straight. I must be of a clear head and pure heart (no stimulants).

—Sonny Rollins, The Notebooks

we enter time’s fullness not by clinging to it but by cutting ourselves loose from it

Rid your life of journalese. The antidote is poetry.

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).

—Gilles Deleuze in Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet: Dialogues II, Columbia University Press, 2007

Gravity & levity : stillness & spirit

Practice: time spent engaging the principles of Taiji

prais-
ing

this
mo-
ment

with
all

of
his
heart

gave
him
heart


—Robert Lax

time speeds up in the presence of levity
(time flies when you're having fun)

It's not what you do that counts but the passion – the enthusiasm – with which you do it.