"It's the magic of risking everything for a dream nobody sees but you."

The circumference
to the circle
we are

we never
get to
see

John Phillips

Competition

At my son's birthday party on Saturday, attended by 10 burgeoning 12/13 year olds (all boys) I was struck by just how much a retreat from the world self-image is. Much of their energy now is going into the production of a personality (from Greek persona – mask) – a front with which to confront the world outside, and the more they thrust this forwards the more their true nature is able to retreat and slumber within it. In a way the ones having the best time of it (through oblivion as much as anything) were the ones able to glory in their own physicality – the ones who loved expending their energy in the rough and tumble of the football game, and then replenishing it with the burger, chips and cake afterwards – the coarse ones. The sensitive souls didn't get invited – unfortunately my son finds nothing of worth in such people (he's nothing if not masculine) – although this crowd had their sensitivities and vulnerabilities of course and it was alarming to watch these qualities being constantly battered by the egos around them. Cheap victories abound – bringing yourself up by putting another down – competition. It's all about not really letting your energy out, or letting some out and then withdrawing just as it's about to be accepted – baiting. Not wanting to lose. This all happens unconsciously as often as not, and often by accident – in a way not-listening works, it encourages the deceit of self to reinforce itself.

The Tai Chi class is a refuge from all this, a place where softness, sensitivity and listening are encouraged. This is why those that stay value their class so much – it is the only place where they can safely relax and be themselves. Doing the Form together you feel the group energy and begin to realize that there is not a great deal of difference between that and your own. The group energy wakens you to your own, which mingles and becomes, and you begin to feel not what's coming in to your receptors but what's out there. If there's anything amiss, a fellow student having a hard time, then your energy puts it right even before you have a chance to register it. In the pushing-hands, which is (or should be) too close for comfort, the only way you gain (improve) is to become the other and let your hardnesses (defences) dissolve. This happens by opening to the other's humanity – taking a real interest in who and how they are – rather than concentrating on what you're doing. If you chat it should be because you're naturally inquisitive about the person you're with – you want to know them better – and because somehow a little verbal exchange diffuses lingering tensions. The Tai Chi class should be the place you put things right. The place where your faith in the beauty of human nature and in connexion is replenished and reinforced.

Omnia Vincit Amor

My teacher once said to me that the fundamental principle on which to build all the others is Love Conquers All. It was years later that I came across the full quotation (from Virgil): Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori - Love conquers all so let us yield to love.

    our aloneness
    who we are
    that it is landscape

The Cage of Conditioning

Yesterday a comment appeared on the short dialogue quote from The Two Towers. The comment quoted Yevtushenko

A child of captivity is too weak for freedom.
He who's conceived in a cage will weep for a cage.

This is so true. The domestication of civilized humanity has come at a cost. My teacher often used to say to me, “People would rather die than change.” Such people are defined by the cage they happily exist within. Take away the cage and suddenly they have nothing. The Hollow Men. Kinship nowadays is just a common cage. Walking through the City of London this morning I was struck how all the large modern buildings are steel structures clad in a thin veneer of polished pink granite or some other gaudy stone. And all the shops, vying for custom, are desperately presenting the glossiest surfaces imaginable. Fashion. Only ever skin deep – it's so easy to see or feel the vacuity beneath. Christmas. In a way its all topsy-turvy. When the meaning of life is to locate, nourish and develop one's essential nature so that the cage of conditioning can be released and one's energy and spirit can be free, instead society presents us with the opposite message – concentrate fully on the surface and you need never face up to the emptiness inside. Obsessing on the cage, whether by polishing it to make it look as attractive as possible or by aggressively trying to break it down, is not correct. We need to concentrate on the jewel at the heart of it all – our own essential core and the same in others. Communication happens when these touch and dance together. When these jewels become the focus of our hearts and minds then the grip of the cage (its grip on us and our grip on it) gradually releases and the hard shiny surfaces dissolve and we enter the realm of true softness. When you touch another, either physically or with your mind, heart or energy, unless you can abandon your cage then you will never be properly with that person and you will not be soft. A world without landmarks. A frightening prospect, but also an exciting one.

Once, after dining on a rotten fish,
I saw that the door was unhooked;
toward the stary abyss of flight I leaped
with a pup's perennial recklessness.

Lunar gems cascaded across my eyes.
The moon was a circle! I understood
that the sky is not broken into squares,
as it had been from within the cage.

Another thing my teacher used to advise was always try to have the courage to follow your first thoughts or impressions, and try to ignore the second ones - they're usually signs of fear creeping in.

Mr Blake is 248 today.

"What do you fear my lady?"
"A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valour has gone beyond recall or desire."

Louis, Finnegan and little Sam Kent at my son's 13th birthday party. Sam is the one in blue with the ball.

Laying Alongside

Basically, at its deepest level, this means compassion. Technically it means facing up to what's there without confronting it head on. Entering with soft surfaces that nestle into & onto the oncoming energy, never perpendicular to it, always along it. The energy is coming towards you and you are advancing towards it, your surfaces meet and twist (not just turn) in such a way that the friction between you is minimized and you either slip under and uproot or you draw down and roll over – undermine or overbear (at an advanced level you'd do both at the same time). Compassion requires you never to lose heart – never let anything knock you back or off balance. The flow of heart energy issuing out of you, forever thrusting forwards, must somehow accommodate and transform oncoming energy. Yielding. The sooner you can do this the more likely you are to succeed. So soon that it is before. Before and beyond – two words my teacher uses all the time.

Two ways of practising this when you're on your own. Firstly, within your own Tai Chi to investigate and work with the principle of dynamic equilibrium: how do those opposing forces at work within your body actually interact? They don't just meet and grind to a halt (or they shouldn't), they constantly writhe and twist around each other like two battling snakes, the figure of eight being the most accurate simple depiction of such an action. Turning one way and immediately turning the other, and so forth. Single-weighted. Each action you take should automatically generate the opposite action, so each time you sink energy should spring up from the ground into you, and each time you turn to the right to give way and allow the imaginary opponent's energy through something in you should be advancing and turning to the left to sneak behind them. It is only by working and becoming familiar and comfortable with these oppositions that you will be able to deal appropriately with the real thing. Also, by working in this way your surfaces are rubbed raw and begin to bleed into each other. A mingling becomes possible. This brings us to the second way of practising laying alongside when you're alone. This is just compassion. You're now sitting at the computer, so try this. Imagine you have a switched off light bulb in your chest cavity (heart) – become aware of that area. Now just switch that light bulb on. The light should immediately cast out and illuminate the objects in your environment and as it does it should turn on the lights in the hearts of those objects, inanimate though they are, and you should all glow together. You feel warm, your heart fills with love and compassion and your face beams with giving. Quite quickly you settle into these wonderful feelings and spoil it all – the light dims as it turns inwards in enjoyment and self-congratulation. Now imagine the sort of person you'd have to be for this giving from the heart to be constant – every moment of every day – no let up - and for it to motivate and govern every action you ever make. This is the warrior's way. Vigilance is not just being ready it's being out there touching and transforming with the light of your heart – the mist of fingers (see how a different image immediately changes the mood – the imagery is everything). We need to become party to the secrets objects share.

The wise have no motives
Fools put themselves in bondage.

The Touching Heart

To live in the world of connectedness the student must be supremely fluid and supremely light. This means shedding all the baggage they can, or at least not clinging to what little baggage they chose to maintain. This is why Olson said a poverty stricken ambiance is the best for living and for loving. The teacher's job is far more destructive than creative – he breaks down the student until all they have left is what has been eluding them all along – their connexion to the internal. Compassion is feeling the heart of things – all things. Why limit yourself to sentient beings? Feeling, for us, is more a giving than a receiving. The martial artist cannot afford to wait for things to come to him – it'll always be too late – he'll always be on the back foot. He has to be able to throw out his heart and touch with it. He must develop what my teacher calls a mist of fingers. A mist because this sensitivity must be a fact of his being rather than an act of volition. Invest yourself beyond yourself. Compassion invests with heart to such an extent that everything in your life and in your environment should be brought to life in the same way that your teacher has brought you to life – by stripping you bare. Remember the story of Chang San Feng walking in the snow, his feet a few inches from the ground, leaving a trail of exposed grass from which small flowers were beginning to spring and bloom. It may seem that when you touch the internal not much has happened – but it is the greatest gift you can bestow and is the culmination of all your work. The whole of life hinges on such subtleties.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.
Lorca

Radiant Inventory

The world has become
a spectacle of absence,
a radiant inventory.
The sunlight that falls
on the margin of the lake
nurtures a deficit
in its clarity, its violence.
These waves are items are
a description of themselves
in discourse with their changes
through time. The sand
is a finite texture of
self corruption. Everything
interpenetrating, extensile,
at once continuous and discrete.
This sunlight both sustains and erodes
the luminous surface of matter
the precise miracle of life.

Now that I have been opened
I can never be closed again.
The reflection of the sun on the waves
is a shining path to the horizon
a dazzling lucent shuttle
of unknowable complexity.
A cloud over the sun
momentary camera obscura.
And as I move towards resolution
the world abandons its detail
in a theatre at once dark & light
where life is a kind of joyous shade
a shadow over the sun
a dark radiance.

Christopher Dewdney

The Internal

Poets express the inexpressible and it's always interesting to read what they have to say about their creative process. Here's Susan Howe from 1989.

Language is a wild interiority. I am lost in the refuge of its dark life.

Poets are always beginning again. They sail away to a place they hope they can name. Linguistic nature is always foreign. Grammar bales the darkness open. Only a few strike home. They remember and acknowledge each other.

When I write, words or phrases come to me. I don’t go to them or start with a plan. I start with scraps and pieces and something comes. I never know. I never sit down intentionally to say something. It comes to me. But as I work more on a poem a meaning is established and then I must continue until I feel it's done or undone. To an almost alarming extent - alarming for me - sound creates meaning. Sound is the core. If a line doesn't sound right, and I do always have single lines or single words in mind, if a line doesn't have some sort of rhythm to it, if my ear tells me it's wrong, I have to get rid of it, or change it, and a new meaning may come then.

       you are
       ungraspable

Special Times

The average person, in a whole lifetime, will probably have less than a handful of really life-changing energy experiences, and will meet less than a handful of living entities that really make their energy sing. The day to day grind of living one's life, the going to work, the eating of food, the shitting it out, etc. are not really that important, what's important is to be ready for these special occurrences - to be awake when they happen and not let them pass you by - and to spend at least a couple of hours every day preparing for them and honouring them. Popular culture is full of paeans and laments to such experiences – films about fleeting chance meetings with someone you feel more connected to than anyone else in your life (Hollywood always spoils them by having the characters live happily ever after in married bliss), songs about staying true to lost love (as if you really have any choice), and poems that express the perfection of connexion. When you're connected well with another then you're connected in that instant to everything, “And makes one little room an everywhere.” If you allow the practice to spring from this sort of feeling or yearning then a significant portion of each day is spent with the energy of connexion – with what's really there rather than with what we fill the day with. We have to constantly ask ourselves why we do the work. Do we do it because of what we want out of it – the relaxation, stress relief, power, healing ability, to teach, or do we do it because we know we have no choice. If your motives are truly noble – they come from a selfless need to serve the Dao (rather than a desire to have the Dao serve you) – then the work you do will begin to stitch the days and the weeks and the years into one seamless thread of service and devotion. This is the only way really to bring that vibration of connexion into everything you do. The regulating aspect of the work – the part that stops you disappearing up your own backside, as my teacher would say, is of course the pushing hands. The simple give and take, the touch, the laying alongside, the being inside another's ward-off, the impossibility of yielding, all tend to disarm the ego and focus one's attentions on what really matters – the miracle of the other.

One has to impoverish one's mind.
Carl Andre, b.1935