Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear

Gerard Manley Hopkins

strange jubilation

social challenging
refigured losses
thus to the wind
divine letting go
beautiful space
bare faith
singular image
human light

to remain true at once to what is most intimate in us, and what is most universal

William Desmond

Whatever I relax into becomes a source of energy

To relax means to let go of resentment

going back from that which is thought to the fullness of the very thinking

Emmanuel Levinas

Thinking, done well, is the mind travelling at great speed along creative lines of discovery. It has nothing to do with language – that comes later, when we try to voice thought, if only to ourselves. The struggle is to keep these lines extending, because as their energy inevitably dwindles, they start to spiral around themselves – collapsing onto the last landmark (significant insight) upon which of course a world can be built but at the cost of the relative death of real thinking and real life. Once thinking has settled on a way of ordering itself it enters a consolidatory process of repetition – habitually thinking the same old thoughts. The average person builds their world around second-hand thought – those of parents, teachers, peers, culture. Spiritual teaching is all about breaking free of received patterns. In taichi we achieve this by working with strange concepts such as yielding, central equilibrium, natural movement, energy, spirit, and by endeavoring to lodge thinking firmly in the body – to feel the connexion between mind and body – how thoughts change the body. This is our ethics.

Stitch in time

reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it

William James

The Earth (gravity) is my means of propulsion, but it is the stars by which I navigate.

Intensity enables becoming. Without intensity I remain the same. Inner tension. Intensive, intending, intent, intention. The ability to hold myself together and let go : to be extraordinary, singular, heroic.

the body is two things at once. On the one hand, it is the set of politically acceptable, social and habitual acts which make up a person. On the other, the body is malleable and transient, without any fixed organization. It is in a sense the reality of living life otherwise, of being-otherwise.

Jonathan Roffe, in an entry on Hysteria in The Deleuze Dictionary

Delight in delight

Tai Chi bursts free of every constraint I put upon it. A life of its own.

The desire to practice at every opportunity.

set in motion

To connect is to release, and vice versa.

Ethics involves a creative commitment to maximizing connections, and of maximizing the powers that will expand the possibilities of life.

John Marks, in an entry on Ethics in The Deleuze Dictionary

We extract principle from experience to put it back and hopefully live a better life. Is this wise? The only thing we can be sure of is that plastering interpretations onto life will rob it of spontenaity and lightness. Everything connects, and our struggle is to ensure such connexions are good – honest and from the heart rather than cagey and manipulative – active rather than reactive – advancing rather than retreating.

Yielding is the act of sweeping the other off their feet and into the arms of love.

the subject exists in the impossibility of hiding itself

Emmanuel Levinas

Eye to eye

Harbour the element of surprise, that "sudden feeling of wonder or astonishment."

The essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing.

A N Whitehead

casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self

Beware being trapped by what others think/expect of you.

And you
touched me
as if I
did not exist

Göran Sonnevi

Beware synthetics – they rub you up the wrong way.

What contains is also contained.

I have the sense of being present at a point of absence

Susan Howe

Tap the root

the man of twists and turns . . . heartsick on the open sea

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Hannah Arendt

Everything contains something else. Every thing, action, thought, process, contains trapped within it what we call the internal. This is the most mysterious of concepts. It is not the history of the thing, or the motivation of the action, or the origin of the thought, or the energy of the process. Neither is it spirit or essence: all of these exist. The true internal neither exists in the way other things do, nor does it not exist. It is the tremor between existence and non-existence. The almost. The divine. The secret. Our job is to help it break free – expose it ever so gently. For this we need to become like it and of it – foresake the swagger of knowing for the sake of an ever opening softness.

you enter into something fully and, in doing that, you take it beyond its own limits or expose it to its own limitations

Jeffrey W Robbins

Seize the moment

Life is a power of singularization; a power to create differences.

Lee Spinks

The only way out of the morass was a radical leap of faith, a flight into the unknown.

Sylvère Lotringer

Reality manifests only through connexion.

in the game of truth, one undergoes changes

Michel Foucault

wordless companionship

It is precisely those parts of myself I take for granted and never question – assume to be fundamental and unchangeable – that I need to inspect, shake, unsettle, fracture, erode, and clear away. To go through the stiff instituted self and into the fluid and ever-changing essential self.

An instruction is not a signal to do but a call to become.

Like a stalking cat, bristling with intensity.

leave the furrow

I sink deep – into Earth and bones – of body and character – until I become of the Earth. Then, and only then, is my humanity released – I become both human and extra-human. Part of my humanity is the drive to go beyond myself – to exceed my self, and reach for the stars. For this I need more energy than my paltry frame can either harbor or muster – I need the Earth.

Principle – an unconditional statement

truth in the wild state

love laid aside / lest insufferable happiness impede / flight

Basil Bunting