Truth is the integrity of action not the correctness of speaking for the first is the spirit & practice of truth & the second only the preparation & theory which like the title of a book often leads us to expect more than we meet with.

John Clare, 1820's

To be possessed of a thought —
it is as if there were a station in time
at which one could have a recess from its passage.

Charles Stein

let it dance between Mind  /  moving and not moving

Front heart receives, back heart gives. Hollow-chest and ward-off rolled into one. Maintained with a ruthless sobriety. Developed in living a disciplined life. Forget it – it'll reverse – and you'll become a victim controlled by emotion and feeling.

The process of domestication that constitutes civilized living wears us down through lack of spirit so that, energetically, we become smooth eggs, pressed into imposed forms maintained by our own anxieties. When we are truly alive: charged, intense, wild, ready for death as much for life, our energy is supremely intricate and delicate, as far from smooth convexity as can be imagined. Fractal, prickly – as though covered (especially back and neck) with hackles that rise and penetrate the enveloping space at the slightest stimulus; a hair-trigger sensitivity that demands immediate response rather than deep meaningful feeling.

We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy.

...there are both clearings and glades. A glade is a space you find. A clearing is one you make or that has been made. It is a common perception of people now that they don't have time and space, that life is taken up with making money, working, getting from here to there, rather than the primary process of leading a human life. So the clearings first of all make time and room for that to happen. They are little spaces of quiet where things can be seen clearly...

from an interview with Thomas A Clark

A spiritual element grounded in detour slipped like an effect into my consciousness.

In doubting the possibility of a tidy afterlife, I have come to compose a fragmented system of believing. I call this poetry.

Spirit manifests when time is compressed or stretched beyond what is reasonable.

Pray you don't flinch.

the magical in-between

The radical impossibility of immortality.

In taiji the body (and therefore the mind) contains both full and empty (substantial and insubstantial) all the time. As the classics say, full and empty should be clearly distinguished. One side of the body is full and the other is empty. One side stable and secure allowing the other to be free and expressive. This is cross-energy – the line from weighted (stable) foot to opposite empty hand behaving as a whip. The freer the line is of tension (holding-on) the snappier the energy. Without this principle of single-weightedness taiji contains no lightness – no humour – and becomes what my teacher used to call "sack-of-potatoes taiji."

The only goal is the fulfilling of your own soul's active desire and suggestion. Be passionate as much as ever it is your nature to be passionate, and deeply sensual as far as you can be. Small souls have a small sensuality, deep souls a deep one. But remember, all the time, the responsibility is upon your own head, it all rests with your own lonely soul, the responsibility for your own action.

DH Lawrence,  Aaron's Rod

The equilibrium we search for is one so delicately poised, so utterly sensitive, so close to collapse, that energy readily resonates throughout, setting up beautiful shimmering structures. A low entropy equilibrium – a field in which energy plays, expresses and becomes visible.

A supple intensity. Supple in the sense of open to any course of action, and intense, not in the sense of a readiness to explode, but more a willingness to dive into crisis.