work as a poetics of growth

In the labor of the fields 

longer than a man’s life 

I am at home.

The natural, generous confidence that emanates from good posture is preferred to the smug, blinkered swagger that comes from believing our own, and everyone else's lies. And there are lies everywhere, at every level, except the deepest, the level we call soul. The work is to discover, uncover, recover the soul by exposing the lies everywhere else.

Our first misstep was agriculture, the second, industry, and the third AI. It's highly unlikely there will be a fourth.

Empty of tension but full of resilience.

Silence is a giver, noise a taker. Seek the silence.

As long as curiosity is greater than fear, you will move forward.

Head, heart, gut. Thinking, feeling, being. Being (the ruthless silence) must come first otherwise thinking and feeling risk running away with themselves into fantasy and falsehood. This is why the first instruction in Taiji is always mind in dantien.

The instant is the giant lamp we throw / our shadows by

Thinking to oneself – what we call worry – is the opposite of prayer. Worry runs round in desperate circles. Prayer beams outward in simple, confident adoration.

                             Having come 

the bitter way to better prayer, we have 

the sweetness of ripening.

Physical work, when conducted with good posture and content heart, naturally lifts the spirit and releases it upward to the Heavens. To drag that spirit down and redirect it into our own pathetic narratives and commentaries requires both skill, learnt whilst a toddler, and a hard heartedness, also picked up early, from our parents mostly.

Visualise the sacrum/coccyx as plough share, furrowing the Earth as you walk. As well as digging into the root, this casts the heart and gaze up and out.

the gush of life that spills forth from pen or spine

We spend our formative years building a strong and solid platform from which we experience the world and express ourselves. Spiritual work endeavours to break up this platform and replace it with broad, elusive, fluid virtues like faith, compassion, humility, hope. This is a difficult process – a courageous journey into uncertainty and darkness, punctuated with fleeting flashes of insight. It can take decades before one fully sees the light.

Our journey must begin right where we are by seeing the ordinary, everyday world we live in, in an extraordinary new way.