to relax the shoulders
first relax the hips

If we want our connexion with the Earth to become a root, we must be prepared to both sink our energy into it and allow its energy up into us. When we get this right, the one release allows both.

MEDITATION
sit & quietly
smoulder

A mind
that has no appetite
for itself

THE SILENCE


Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

“It is golden,” while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men’s silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.



—Wendell Berry

Spirit is an ebullience always ready to bubble over.

Without levity, love becomes depressive. Love must always be enlivened & lightened by play. Das göttliche Liebe-Spiel.

What I mean by depressive is the rejection of spirit.

(And for me spirit, levity, heart, God (or at least Christ/Buddha) – even awareness – are largely synonymous.)

Practice resurrection.
—Wendell Berry

To me it seems obvious that if there's a physical force pulling us down to Earth (gravity) then there must be a spiritual force drawing us up to the Heavens (levity).

What prevents us from feeling levity is the general disheartenment that comes from worry & anxiety. And it's strange that the more our rational & technological advancement takes away the need to worry, the more we worry. We are addicts.

The good student knows she has no choice.

When people ask me why I get up in the middle of the night to meditate for two hours, I feel like saying: "Because I have no choice." But I don't because they wouldn't understand. To them everything is a matter of choice.

If you are so consumed by worry (fear) that you cannot even appreciate the beauty of levity as an idea let alone feel it as a presence, then start meditating – it's your only hope.

Dantian makes its nest amongst the twitching fibres of psoas.

If your Taiji isn't taking you on an amazing journey then you're doing it wrong. (Failing to put spirit above form.)

To say that theology comes down to theopoetics is to say it deals in imaginative figurations originating in the depths of our sensuous, affective, and preconscious life, that its engagement with the world takes place in the preconceptual, prethematic base of our existence, in the dark and ambiguous ground from which we all spring.

—John D Caputo

We creatures have been created to create. Not simply propagating the species but using spirit to make it new.

A tense response
effectively erects
a barrier

When you feel the practice getting stale & flat, always come back to yielding. And remember, true yielding is from & to the heart – it is the heart breaking open to welcome in the Other.

You will find poetry nowhere unless
you bring some of it with you.
—Joseph Joubert

Poetry precedes prose
Always

The artist has no choice but to create. Their creativity is as primitive, basic & uncontrollabe as the sex drive. When it bursts free, in the act of creation, anything is possible, and what's created surprises the artist more than anyone.

A healthy psoas is juicy, supple, responsive.

—Liz Koch

When we let gravity take the body then we sink down and the knees break forward. When we let levity take our spirit then the eyes brighten and we look ahead & slightly up. Both gravity & levity take us forwards.

Culture is a poor substitute for Nature.

What we call learning
is only a process
of recollection
—Plato

To get stronger you must endure pain; whoever says otherwise is trying to sell you something.