Softness

Someone emailed me yesterday to complain about me being negative (yet again) about Chinese symbolism. For me images and symbols should be used the way poets use them – to evoke unusual feelings and moods – rather than to intellectually clarify a situation. A good image doesn't bring the comfort of certainty or clarification, it opens and then touches parts inaccessible without such opening – it sensitizes, connects, amazes and inspires. The problem with symbols and theories, from yin/yang to the Holy Trinity to Newton's Laws of Motion, is that they become a way of looking at the world, or worse still they replace the real world with one in which they are paramount – in a vain attempt to clarify what is there they distort to such a degree that one loses all touch with both the natural and the internal. And having, or requiring, a mind full of simplistic certainties the student will not develop softness, or not the delightful vibrating sensuous softness that seduces and transforms as it touches. Such softness comes from developing the sobriety, humility and openness to admit or even hold, in one's heart rather than mind, the whole of creation – every possibility is already within you – yielding heart. I remember hearing an interview with James Lovelock – the Gaia man – in which he explained that a system that supports life contains many active and volatile components that would usually combust or combine into relatively inert substances, but somehow the livingness of the environment stops this, allowing life to flourish. The tremble of life is the dance of life – the seething interplay between these components – and it is this that softness connects to and evokes. It is so supremely active that it can connect to anything – it already contains everything so connexion is simply admitting an aspect of its own experience.