We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for a while.

meditation: feeling the different minds – headmind, heartmind, bodymind, spiritmind

your practice is a laboratory

becoming hunter – a hunter of/with spirit

I fell in love with poetry at school. The English teacher would sometimes give us a handout at the end of class containing a short poem. Our task was to write something about it for homework. When I got home from school I would read the poem through, and panic would immediately set in because I really didn't have a clue. Like my daughter says when I read her poetry: Dad, it's just random words! But, with repeated reading, maybe with rests between, meaning would slowly reveal itself, and eventually I would understand the poem. Not fully, by any means, but enough to be able to write something intelligent about it. But as the year went on I realised that I loved the poem much more before I had unpacked it, before I had robbed it of mystery with my clever dissecting mind.

a lonely predator of the adoration

the teacher's main job is not to teach but to awaken your spirit

spirit then becomes your teacher – the only reliable guide along the way

meditation: mind quiet, spirit smouldering

meditation: the easiest thing in the world to do

Talking (including talking to oneself) induces tension. Relaxed people say the barest minimum. Language misrepresents. I am anxious that I will not succeed to say what I want to say, partly because I lack facility with language and partly because I'm not sure that I actually know what I want to say. Plus I am anxious that I will be misunderstood or not believed.

It’s a rite of passage, to move past the pain.

we talk to ourselves (in our heads) because we are lonely, and we are lonely because we have forgotten how to connect to the natural world

a way of working that re-enchants the world – poetry

the teacher confounds expectations – that's their job

Whenever I get feedback on what I write here, which is very rare, what becomes clear is that people have misunderstood what I am trying to say. Partly because they read selectively, partly because my vocabulary doesn't correspond to theirs, and partly because we inhabit very different worlds. We use language to communicate difficult ideas across unbridgeable chasms, and it's never successful. We'd be better off talking about the weather.

once upon a time is always this moment

feelings are for the other
emotions are for ourselves