WHAT MAKES US STAND

Past notebooks from mid noughties:


With every mark, gesture or expression there is a splitting that teases open, leaning outwards from a central core of indivisible unity. This is the necessary tension that holds

up any figure of speech, visual sign or coherent shape.

Every mark has its re-mark, the unseen shading that holds it up and pre-empts its momentary excursion into the realm of accredited meaning.

Every “sign” is bordered and nurtured by a twin that is not seen. Thus Contact is the heart of any gesture.

We do not remember sequences, we create each articulation as a felt emergence out of this contact which then begins a journey in the direction where our attention is set. But there are two directions. It is a splitting apart- like axed wood falling two ways.

For every angle there is a counter-weight. This is its safety unseen, its joy within.

The anchoring and the flourishing is thus intimately linked.

To go out we dig deeper still into our unseen sibling. Yet perhaps in another realm we are the unseen sibling they the flourishing aspect. From moment to moment at any rate there is an exchange, a playing back and forth of roles both in the aspect that we call our “selves” and in each body part that gives momentum and invigorates our every breath by successively emptying and filling limbs, organs and cells around a central pivot which is simultaneously the relay point for both emptiness and fullness. It is never either one or the other. Never a quarrel between what is seen and what is not seen. It simply is. The flowering is a kind of emptiness and the fullness or substance is really hidden in the rooting.

We play between sign and form This is our provision in the world and in relation to one another. It brings joy and pain. We must hold both between our two outstretched arms; and enfold back in our hearts and the circulation of our breath, this twinning. Yet our centre in the heart, is beyond such difference. It exists in unity before separation. Before home and journey. Before distance in the out-folding of our life’s` determination.