Forgiveness frees me from the past, whilst grace allows me into the future. The present is where forgiveness and grace become one.

Most importantly mind. State of mind. A mind in control of only itself. Because reality is made in my engaging with it, and this engagement is where my mind is – this is my mind. The mind is never of itself or in itself, it is always spilling into the world, and what spills back is mind but not my mind. If I create reality – if I have the desire – then there is immense intelligence in that creation, not mine but that of me with the other.

You know, verse
is a lovely thing.

It issues,
like the vapors,

from the rock

Charles Olson

Root is a point of return

To affirm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life light and active.

Gilles Deleuze

At heart each of us is singular – unique – never a statistic – unaveragable. Essence is that singularity. But we are also bound into a process of becoming, which isn't simply a slow revelation of who we are but, hopefully, a subtle transformation of that essence. Connexion makes this possible. Real togetherness touches and thereby changes essence. Connexion is the possibility of change.

To say we each have ‘a life’ and to say that we each have an unconscious thus amounts to the same thing.

John Rajchman

The heart is properly nothing, but only when its foundation – the belly beneath it – is something. The belly's confidence allows the heart to hover and receive – touch everything.

this vitality at the heart of things

live as a complex one

We castigate ourselves with a transcendent that we can never achieve and whose only function is to reinforce that very castigation.

Todd May

When the heart is clear and empty it allows free passage and fills with warmth.

Go deeper. Otherwise it's all lip service.

Root is a point of departure

Softness dissolves boundaries. In particular those between me and the world, and between me and my future. A way forward – the possibility of forward.

Faith seeking understanding

Anselm of Canterbury

As soon as I dwell in something – a body, a home, an organization, a belief – my being congeals and I begin to lose heart.

Metaphor instigates metamorphosis – becoming. This is why the imagery we use – the vocabulary – is all important. It is our way of going beyond meaning.

To have gravity strongly without being heavy. For this I need to let gravity flow through me rather than pull me down. This is the first stage of Tai Chi – to relax sufficiently to allow energy to flow unimpeded through the body and mind.

To affect change.

The spirit of experimentation

It's not what I do that is important, but the spirit in which I do it.

Root systems remember the soil
from which they were removed.

Whit Griffin

The pondering reflective mind tends to fall and settle into holes where it quickly chokes on its own energy. A healthy mind roves and swarms over surfaces. In fact for a healthy mind there is only surface, endlessly convoluted and extensive. The first surface is my own body, and all other surfaces are extensions and reflexions of my body's surface. Even the inside of my body is surface – lung and gut – breathing interfaces – where I meet and confront the world beyond – also of surfaces. Yielding is the act of becoming one surface. Only then can I open essence to essence with what it is I touch.

Softness is not just a quality or a principle, it is the key to opening what we call the world of energy. This world is not just a world of which energy is a part – all worlds are such – it is a world in which only energy exists. For example, that red shirt left bedraggled across the chair possesses the energy of red, the energy of cotton, the energy of weaving, the energy of the water, detergent and machine that washed it, the energy of the sunlight and warm air that dried it, the energy of me and my moods that since wore it and flung it, the energy of the shape it now finds itself in, the energy of the friend who wore it before me and gave it to me, the energy of his generosity, the energy of whom he has become in the meantime, and the energy of that becoming, etc. etc. All these energies reside on the object – as though clinging to its surface – or the surface of its fibres. When all are stripped away, assuming such a thing is possible – when I remove its vocabulary – everything that can be said about it – then I have its essence – its singular energy. Of course it is not possible to prove that essence exists because there is no way of stripping an entity of everything it has. But my softness – my total immersion in energy and so my refusal to countenance force or will – provides a surface upon which essence shimmers and reveals itself. Softness befriends.

the path strewn with a storm's detritus

Sensitivity tempered by principle : principle freed by sensitivity.

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Simone Weil

Detachment sustains connexion : cool sustains warmth.

real & alive
life has
to turn

Without practice – the will to practice – the desire to practice – none of it is real.

Becoming is the path through a plethora of possibility. The path rather than a path because really I have no choice. What makes life difficult – unclear and diminished – is resisting becoming: the path is the same but wet and muddied. How the path is underfoot – firm or treacherous – depends upon my faith.

haunt the fringes

Practice: repetition with a difference

Friends comfort me in being who I am.
A teacher stimulates me to become something else.
Comrades comfort me in that becoming.

the limit and the infinite clasped together in an embrace from which things will come

Deleuze & Guattari

Destiny is not a call to act but a call to become

Spirit and heart are the agents of becoming

The heavens project onto body and mind as spirals.

Relaxation, if I get it right, settles me deeper – closer if not into the bone. The emotion associated with this still core is a cool granitic detachment. From here my attention registers and my intention caresses the world. I am the centre of each thread of intent – the more I intend outward the deeper my root, necessarily.

a change of heart

Spirit & solitude

Magical transformations of the world

Depth of feeling

Hardness is a mind already made

Motions & aspects

The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

School tells us things that have already been said, whereas real education releases the passion to makes things anew.

Love is the excuse we give ourselves for doing something crazy: throwing ourselves into the arms of destiny.

Destiny is a force compelling me to expose sensitivities out of kilter with those around me. These sensitivities define me in my singular essence – something facts can never do.