Wonderful though strange time of year this. A tender time. A time of introspection – a looking inside, right inside, into genes. The first week of December always feels like a turning point, turning into a different energetic space where the coarse activity of generation – growth and decay – have quietened sufficiently for what's really there to reveal itself. This feeling stays until well into January, and the year's energy doesn't really pick up until the beginning of February. The important thing is to acknowledge this time as special and allow yourself to work differently – sensitively and softly with less of a physical grind (if you carry on the way you were you'll get ill). The year's momentum has stopped so there is no longer that drive and continuity, giving you a wonderful opportunity to sink into aspects of your ancestry and whatever ancient teachings reside within. This will happen naturally – it wants to happen, and it will happen if you manage to resist the social pressures this time of year to overindulge and stupify. Back in the Wimpole Street days of the BTCCA my teacher would have his centre open over the Christmas break (often including Christmas day) for daily 4-6 hour pushing-hands sessions. Add to that my own 4-5 hours of solo practice and it made for quite perfect days, and he always used to say that if you managed to make each session you'd be a different person at the end of the week. He was always right. The rest of the year was spent realizing and coming to terms with what came up during this special week. The same way that the rest of your life is spent coming to terms with important transmissions in your past – especially from childhood. My strongest memories – and they're getting stronger – are of my grandfather – my dad's dad – who died in 64 when I was just 5. He was a real formative influence, energetically, and it's strange – I see him as though he's in front of me, or at my side, although I feel him behind me, as though he's becoming, or has been all along, my guardian self – the energy mass that resides behind. He was such a gentle man – the only one who really understood.
the white page darkens
with the soup of dusk
a world of no distinction
and unreflected presence
cool eyes lost
the body wakens
to feel the looming evocation
and hear the quiet incantation
of life’s
gentle passage
time suspended
night’s quiet intensity
dispels the clarity
that blinds me
to the essence
of the whole world here
at this tender time
of love and feeling
1 comment
This resonates with one of the formative moments in my life, when I was about 18. I was standing in my mother's living-room while the snow fell in huge heavy flakes onto the glass-roof of the conservatory just outside. You know how silent the world is when snow is falling. The room became more and more shadowy and still, and gradually I became aware of the enormous power of the crocuses in the earth, pushing up silently through the cold. That is still one of my images of endurance, and of yielding.
I was probably under the influence of Louis Macneice's poem 'Snow', which begins
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
That is probably one of the reasons why for many years I turned to books to give me the answers I needed.
Pat
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