With the shortest day gone beyond*, and as a year in practice knots the thread of its ending to that now beginning, now continuing…

These informal notebook thoughts have taken a direction, a bearing, unexpected by their writer… How these traditional Forms – our training – begun largely as means of expressing a facility(?), an aesthetic, a moving; then becoming a way of skill – the martial virtue; now sublimating their maker/teacher/doer… as in a mighty wave that never drowns.

With almost thirty years at play in the fields of Tai Chi*, the discovery that studying an Art of movement has brought him to a place of Stillness. It comes as such a gentle knowing.

Everything flows, where nothing moves: nunc fluens, nunc stans.
Invisible truth, invisible wisdom.
The marching-on passes by; the drum-beat fades…

As after such movement, stillness; as after such sound, silence.

*from the Heart Sutra: Prajna Paramita… a tiny quote and reference.
*a nod here to the eminent, now elderly, Peter Matthiesson: thank you.

late December 2012 ©