Open is broken. There is no breakthrough without breakage.

—Norman O Brown

People express surprise that I no longer listen to music, and then ask why. Well, I've found that the silence music drowns is far more open than the music that fills it. Always. And OPEN, more & more, becomes THE word in this work.

THE GOOD STUDENT

• Intelligence to mistrust the rational dualistic mind.
• Courage & vision to persevere through thick & thin.
• Stomach for rigorous discipline & hard work.

head   heart   belly

Always looking to simplify the life

MEDITATION

Watching the silt settle
& the brightness rise

We are often, I think, deceived by the ease of speech. Words such as God, nature, love, spirit, heart, death . . . take almost no effort to utter. They stand ready at our disposal, respond to our command as we combine them with other words to form grammatical sentences. Soon we believe in an equivalence between our grasp of these words and that which they signify. This shallow relationship to language and meaning itself produces atheists. What after all is ‘God’?

—Luke Fischer

It matters little what you do
but the mind you do it with

Work with the gravitas of ritual

Reading Lawrence before bed last night. This phrase still in my mind this morning:

there is gladness in spite of ourselves

Spirit calls from outside our comfort zone.
Which is why we rarely heed it.

We live a life ensconsed in the house of language, too short-sighted to suspect that it is only the gate lodge to a vast estate we inherited at birth.

pay attention to details others overlook

Poetry is the natural way of speaking
of an enlivened consciousness.
—Luke Fischer

a vast blue cloudless sky

The perfect image of open

Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

—Anne Carson

Dr Chi told my teacher that when Cheng Man-ch'ing pushed hands his feet were always making little adjustments. This means that he worked off the heels.

When the heels go down onto the ground you become rooted in the wrong way – you become glued to the spot, you become slow. And what's far worse is that you instantly reconstruct the self and start thinking to yourself. You have become a separate subject pitting yourself against a world of objects – you have become dualistic.

Warrior or worrier?

It's your choice...

The struggle nowadays is to prevent technology from devastating the soul.

Without the sacrum forward of its normal position we don't have gravity properly and without the crown of the head back from it's normal position we don't have levity properly. Bum in AND chin in.

Practice is simply returning to the principles. The first principle in Taiji is lightness in the headtop (head suspended), and the second principle is sink & relax (sacrum hanging plumb). Levity & gravity.

I can't do the work for you, and if I could, I wouldn't.

—John Kells

The thing we need to work on is always the thing we find most difficult to work on.

Rain
drops
fall
ing
on
a
wind
less
day
The perfect image of gravity

A mindset that tightens the belly: detached, nervy, unsentimental, on edge, ready to kill, ready to die. Basically the mind of a warrior.

Without ethical consciousness,
a painter is only a decorator.
—Robert Motherwell

Stay on your toes

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

—Julian Barnes