My Week in Beauty

Coastal Sunrises on My Morning Runs

The inter-mixing of light, sky, wind, water and earth. The same stretch of coast, yet so different one day to the next.

Tuesday: the sky a pastel palette of soft pinks and blues, the surf silky and smooth velvetizing the sand on contact. The feeling is of elements coming together, bleeding into each other.


Thursday: the sky shades of light grey hidden in places yet distinct behind clouds, the sea swelling and crashing -- seeming to come apart from itself even before knocking up against the beach. The feeling is stirring and emphasizes separation.

Music immersions

Ana Vidovic ( this one kept me up past my bedtime - guitar artistry from a guitar goddess)
The Pretenders ( Precious ) , ( Mystery Achievement )

Philosophical Discovery

Isiah Berlin - This is a philosopher I had not been previously been acquainted with. His ideas would need more than a brief summary, and I am far from well enough versed in his thought to do so. What I have been able to grasp so far -- his treatment of liberty, freedom, and the plurality of values, his dislike of any kind of fixed dogma-- all strike me as beautiful and connected to the thought of Zhuangzi. For example

Political action should be based on a ‘sense of reality’ founded on experience, empathetic understanding of others, sensitivity to the environment, and personal judgement about what is true or untrue, significant or trivial, alterable or unalterable, effective or useless, etc. Such judgement necessarily involves personal instinct and flair, ‘strokes of unanalysable genius’. In the realm of political action, laws are few and skill is all (1)

1- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Whats in a Name?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...(1)

In a recent tai chi class that I was leading, the topic of 'naming' came up. I have long been a great fan of practices that allow for an escape from the stories we tell ourselves—stories that can seem to have a life of their own; and if not attentively curtailed may descend into destructive ruminating loops. Over the years these practices have included basketball, juggling, tai chi and meditation, and more recently endurance running. It is also a reason I became enamored of eastern philosophies which prize embodied engagement in the world and warn of the ways in which an over reliance on mental abstraction can separate us from that embodied footing.

And yet, a vital aspect of human nature resides in our capacity to manipulate symbols that refer to our world of experience. I think it is difficult to overstate the all together overbearing magnitude of the role this capacity can play in the way we experience our wold and our place in it. It is also a capacity that commonly operates below the surface of our conscious attention. To reacquaint ourselves with the power which symbol manipulation contains—a capacity to open up our world—I offer the words of Helen Keller describing her discovery for the first time of this capacity:

 Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.
I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! ..... As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.
On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.........It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come. (2)

Yet, if we do not bring our attention to this capacity in process, we ourselves can become vulnerable as subjects of unexamined self-manipulation. The quote at the top of this post is the lead sentence from Joan Didion's classic essay 'The White Album'.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience..... Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.(3)

In that essay, and in many others Didion plays out this paradox— a conflict between the importance and necessity of telling ourselves stories contrasted against the recognition of the likely self deception the stories engender. Didion felt she could only really understand her own thinking by writing about it. Perhaps this is why even more strongly, she felt that self understanding required a mastery of language; a capacity to whittle those stories down to their core essence.

I am not without some sympathy for Didion's view, a view for which her own writing presents the best case. While Didion's writing is often described as detached, cold and sparse, I experience the opposite as I read her. I find myself gaining a clarity of detail and nuance as I reconnect and engage with common experiences and perceptions such as my current surrounding environmental climate ( Didion wrote often about California and specifically about Malibu.) Didion was expert at using the tool of language to gain a deep, subtle and layered appreciation of her physical, social, and cultural surroundings. This type of appreciation can certainly assist our self conception as it embeds within the world.

Nevertheless, I ultimately find a linguistic based conception of self-understanding to be overly narrow. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle was famous in part for valuing not only linguistic  knowledge ( 'knowing that' ), but also the knowledge of practice and performance ( 'knowing how' ). He went so far as to suggest that 'knowing how' is prior to 'knowing that' — that 'knowing that' is dependent on 'knowing how'. This is not actually inconsistent with Didon's method. She had a writing practice, and through that practice her mastery of language helped enhance her process of connecting to her world —gaining self-understanding. In my view, however, not all self-understanding enhancing processes need be language based (although language often imperceptively intertwines with all others.) For example, I feel immersion in the non-linguistic based practices I mentioned at the beginning of this post enhanced my self-understanding. Another practice I enjoy is music appreciation. I have come to love and appreciate many musical genres from various times, places, and cultures. I think this appreciation allows me to better understand people from those cultures and thus better understand myself.

To conclude, I feel it is a mistake to think of 'naming' as a negative, nature deforming activity as if it were something we somehow could do without. There is a danger in harboring either a thoughtless neglect or a compulsive obsession with the stories we tell ourselves. Believing the stories real in isolation from our engagement with our world can become a form of fantasy while practicing the art of pruning and refining the stories may enhance our imaginative world connecting capacity.

This book can tell you nothing; the Tao leaves you where you began.
A maiden can leave things nameless; a mother must name her children.
Perfectly empty or carrying ten thousand words, you still return, and return, and return.Naming things loses what unites them.
Failing to name things loses them into what unites them.
Words are limits that make experience possible.
But form and formlessness are the same.
Tao and the world are the same, though we call them by different names.
This unity is dark and deep, but on the other hand it is deep and dark.It opens into the center of everything.  (4)

1. Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (Kindle Location 28). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

2. https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Helen-Keller-Recreated-Scene-at-the-Water-Pump

 3. Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (Kindle Locations 33-36). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

4. Tzu, Lao. Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching (Kindle Locations 65-73). crispy press. Kindle Edition.

Stirring the Imagination ,Piercing the Veil To See Clearly in New Light and Sending Down New Roots

 "Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue."(1)

Language arose in beings like us—beings embodied in the world attempting to capture their experience and communicate it to others. Iris Murdoch leads off her seminal essay "The Sovereignty of Good Over other Concepts" with the following idea:

"The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision."(2)

The contemporary philosopher Steven Asma sees imagination (especially improvisational imagination) as filling in the gap between concepts and perceptions.

"I will be arguing that the manipulation (improvisation) of information-rich perceptions/memories/image schemas/bodily gestures is born out of our primate social, emotional needs. Our intellect is a product and servant of our social life, and the improvising imagination—our early intellect—gave us the behavioral/mental scaffolding to organize and manage our experience long before words and concepts." (3)

I think it could be said that the employment of metaphor, imagination and improvisation brings us back from the world of symbols to the world that overflows our capacity to grasp, capture, enclose or confine it. If we imagine this process bridging both ways— body to thought, thought to body—might there be particular ways of moving our bodies in the world to help bring clarity of vision to our unresolved concepts?  What I am trying to get at here is the way these two forms of communication—artful imaginative bodily movement and artful imaginative use of metaphor—reach towards each other. There is an ambiguity of meaning embedded both within the pre-verbal dance of the body as there is in the beyond-verbal pointing of the metaphorical, and yet somehow there is a promise of clear vision suggested in their union—a transcendence or resolution of the ambiguity.

The movements that follow may aide in the process of discovering this sense of resolution.

Stir The Whirlpool – Draw from the Inexhaustible Source

In this movement we create an oblique circle with the wrists starting low by the left hip and extending out and up towards a point level with the right shoulder before spiraling back towards the point of origin. The movement is directed by a smaller circular motion emanating from the body's physical center (the lower dantien).

The metaphorical image here is of discrete fragments (yet to come together) swirling around each other on varying planes, inter-relating in convoluted ways in a complex mix and manifesting a shape that winnows itself down towards a transcending unifying singular resolution. Imagine that in the upper reaches of the whirlpool the fragments are more numerous and on the swirling descent many find their place dissolving into the clear liquid flow. Imagine further a second level metaphor in which the fragments are representing our unattended, unconscious, unresolved, attachments (fantasies, obsessions, anxieties, fears...) . When these fragments remain unresolved and disconnected from the real world situations we encounter a dissonance. This sense of dissonance then accompanies our experience in those situations. So as not to become slaves to these fragments the idea is to mindfully keep the dissonance in play attentively re-stirring the pool allowing ourselves to be surprised by the creation of some new unanticipated consonance.

I have asked the reader to use their imagination here with respect to metaphorical language. In the end I think that the movement 'Stir The Whirlpool' is itself an excellent metaphor for the imagination, and the faculty of the imagination or the capacity for improvisation might itself be thought of as an 'Inexhaustible Source'. To cultivate a capacity to improvise without artifice in response to the changes we face is to cultivate a capacity to be free.

Here Murdoch advocates for art to serve as the medium in which a similar process might unfold (she calls the process 'unselfing'):

"I think good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is  not ourselves."(4)

Searching for the Needle at Sea Bottom – The Yin may Overcome the Yang

The primary bodily movement now attentively sinks down into that swirling mix towards the point of inner convergence—not directly looking down—but instead maintaining connection through alignment to what might be outwardly liberated. The sea bottom itself is dark and the needle that might pierce our overly self-centered consciouness is not to be found by looking down into it. The conceptual metaphor involves looking with the yin sense—mindful attentive unforced imagination—as opposed to the fantasy of trying to force unseen thoughts into place. Think of gentle open evaluative attention  as opposed to forceful rumination which tends toward bias and expects a confirmatory end. The opening that follows is a result of the attentive work.

“it is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power” (5)

"if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over"(6)

Diagonal Flying/Cross Hands Twisting into Resting Stance  – Straight but not Offensive

This movement begins crouched low and contracted and then opens up diagonally with straight lines through the body. The opening entails an extended vision into the distance and then a twisting back to a humble crossed position again close to the ground. One metaphorical image I suggest here is of a plant opening to the light of the sun, taking in light and then sending down new roots and contracting with  sun-setting.

We could also consider extending the prior metaphor. The prior metaphor involved a whirlpool of thoughts and dispositions mostly suited to the flow of situation being encountered, but still containing some selfish, fixed, unresolved fragments. These fragments had then been stirred up and attended to. Now they are finding alignment, 'unselfing', dissolving into and opening up to the wholeness of the situation, creating a new vision. This new vision is then also released and settles into it's new roots creating an improved capacity for future virtuous expression. Murdoch  makes use of Plato's metaphor of the sun as a representation of the 'The Good'.

"The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness....‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful."(7)

"What does seem to make perfect sense in the Platonic myth is the idea of the Good as the source of light which reveals to us all things as they really are. ... in the end the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of ‘goods’ and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world."(8)

"True vision occasions right conduct".(9)

 I don't think we become enlightened by looking into the sun, but instead we become partially so by attending to world that is revealed through the suns light. Similarly, I don't think our goodness is to be found in some internal location, but instead in the way our cultivated perceptions and conceptions connect us to what lies outside ourselves. 



1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9 All can be found in - Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Kindle Locations 6521-6523). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

3- Asma, Stephen T.. The Evolution of Imagination (Kindle Locations 183-186). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Changing Perspective, Valuing Suppleness, Retreating into the Unseen—Staying Whole : Tai Chi 8&9

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.” 
― Martha C. Nussbaum (1)

Fundamental to both Taoist philosophy and also to Tai Chi is a concern to correct our tendency to become stagnant; the tendency to become attached in a rigid or fixed fashion to objects in the world or to thoughts in our minds. Many can agree to this idea on the surface, but deeper reflection reveals how elusive the application of this simple principle can be. Often we take for granted and are blind to what it is that fixes the limits of what see, what we feel, what we think. Even when reflecting, the tendency is to do so within the same limitations (this is known as the 'blind spot bias': see this post I wrote on the topic contrasting introspection and mindfulness here).

In a few other posts I have described Zhuangzi's use of metaphor ( e.g., 'axis of the way',  'pivot of the Tao', 'center of the potters wheel', 'allowing both alternatives to proceed') as pointers toward a way of expanding limited ways of perceiving the world. Here, to address the issue, I am going to introduce a metaphor used by Ludwig Wittgenstein whom many consider the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein was very much concerned with the limits of philosophy, and he wanted to understand how we could untangle our linguistic confusions. He saw philosophy as therapy for our understanding, functioning through its capacity to separate sense from nonsense in the way we process language. For Wittgenstein, meaning was dependent on how we use words socially and culturally in different situations(in essence, meaning as use). He called these different contextual situations language games. Wittgenstein wanted to get to the bottom of how language functions by identifying its limits.

Here are some selected thoughts (which he numbered) from his last book 'On Certainty'.

65. When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology ...

97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift.

99. And the bank of the river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited.

166. The difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing.

256. On the other hand a language-game does change with time.(2)

There is a lot to unpack here. Wittgenstein plays riffs on the well known William James' metaphor,  'the stream of consciousness'. The image is of a changing river bank of seemingly fixed ideas that provides the boundaries within which our stream of consciousness flows. The river bank represents limits within which sensible thoughts can come together and flow within a given conceptual scheme. Conscious thoughts bubble up in the flow, but they are rooted and dependent upon our deeper system of beliefs signified by the river bank. The river bank itself is not an absolute ground, but a ground for the specific situation—language game—we are immersed in.



Wittgenstein is notoriously difficult to interpret. Here are a few points I would make as layman. 

• We often lack conscious awareness of our underlying beliefs and how they motivate our conscious behavior—language has its own unconscious. That unconscious system of beliefs sets the frame within which we can speak. It also seems to me that the more deeply fixed —the more rock like—the belief; the less available it is to conscious access.
• The river like flow of thoughts is also effecting aspects of the river bed. There is a porous boundary between the river and the bank—between the conscious and the unconscious.  
• Finally, we should also recognize the nature of the river—the type of language game we are engaged with—so that we draw upon the proper guidance systems of belief and action.

If the riverbed was not permeable in connection with the river, thought would be permanently cemented, unable to evolve, unable to form streams which might connect whole new waterways of thought. We might then be constrained to fit all our understandings of the situations we encounter within a limited, hardened, belief system.

Real clarity of thought then becomes contingent on a supple cultivated capacity to shift perspective and discern many types of situations; each situation supported by a sensible set of accompanying values and beliefs open to change. Wittgenstein also noted the limits of philosophy and language.

204. Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not certain propositions' striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.(3)

When we move on the surface of the earth it rightly seems stable and fixed—our movement is grounded in how the world lends itself to our use of it. From a larger more objective scientific perspective , however, the earth is spinning on it's axis and rotating around our sun; if a being had a perspective of the individual atoms that comprise the ground we are stepping on, that ground would be seen mostly as empty space, and from a quantum perspective the particles that compose the atoms can equally be thought of as real particles or as waves of probability ( not to speak of theories of multiple worlds). While each of these perspectives maybe valid within its given realm of discourse, each is a different language game, and in the end, it is our actual bodily engagement in the world that informs our movement within it. 

205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, not yet false.(4)

We need not confuse ourselves overthinking these different perspectives to make use of our relationship to the earth to play with movement in Tai Chi. The truth or falsity of the grounding quality of the earth and the expansive quality of the sky need not be justified to the practitioner—it is self evident. Zhuangzi calls this 'the illumination of the obvious'.




OK, now to the Tai Chi postures we are learning and how all this might relate.

Postures For Weeks 8 and 9

  In these two weeks we cover six movements (Brush The Knee, Grasp The Sparrow’s Tail, Double Whip, Shoulder Block, Fist Under Elbow & Repulse The Monkey) the first three of which we have previously learned.

Changing Perspective- Brush The Knee, Grasp The Sparrow’s Tail, and Double Whip

 “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” (5)
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

The basics principles, meanings and alignments that ground these movements are stable, yet there is something new about their performance and the consequent quality of the felt experience.
These three familiar movements—Brush The Knee, GraspThe Sparrow’s Tail, and Double Whip—previously executed on a line to the left are now cutting back against the grain from front-right to back-left. While the change in perspective may seem small on the surface, the opportunities to deepen the practice may surprise the student. This subtle change in perspective opens a new space of possibilities to play with the grounding concepts— namely, productive emptiness, complementary support, and formlessness within form.

Valuing Suppleness- Shoulder Block - To be Pliant is to be Whole - Fist Under Elbow- To be Curled is to be Straight.

“The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.”(6)

To become strong, yield.
To be straightened out, bow down.
To achieve fullness, empty yourself.
To be young again, allow yourself to age.
To learn, forget.
The wise person seeks the darkness and shines.
She doesn't boast or compete, so no one can compete with her.
There is an old saying that, like a tree, our survival depends on flexibility, that the rigid snap when the wind rages.
That is a mere commonplace.
is also true.
If you can let yourself go, you have already returned.(7)

In this movement for first time in the form both feet briefly leave the ground as we hop into the shoulder block. There is a natural tendency to tense the body during this application coming out of the hop while extending the shoulder. Instead the body should be relaxed and the shoulder extension elastic. I believes this ties into the top quote from Martha Nussbaum. All living things down to the level of the cell have permeable boundaries. This precarious exposure to world is what allows for our sustenance. Our vulnerability is necessary for our resilience, and while the fear of being exposed may be a sign of our fragility we should not deny its existence. The fragility is both real and necessary, it is present in all of us. Embracing our fleshy exposure to the world, and also, ultimately the vulnerabilities in our self identities as we engage with the world is not a sign of weakness, but a path towards psychological resilience.

Retreating into the Unseen- Repulse The Monkey - Progress in the Way may seem like Regressing

 “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
― Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (8)

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.” 
― E.E. Cummings (9)

The meaning behind the movement 'Repulse The Monkey' can be read in two basic ways. The first is the simple idea that for any type sustained growth to take place there must be a balance between an active pushing forward and a more passive retreat. We need to sleep, and we need to wake up. If we want to improve our fitness we need to exercise, and we need to rest. In fact the physiological adaptations that lead to improved fitness take place during rest, and if we try to exercise without sufficient pause we eventually break down. The second meaning deals with a number of overlapping ideas covered in this post including: embracing uncertainty, moving into unseen territory, and perceiving how it is the vulnerability of living a thing that makes it pliable, open to change and ultimately resilient. This second meaning is a bit tougher to grasp in its full complexity but I think is more profound. I believes this ties together the top quote from Martha Nussbaum, with some of Wittgenstein's ideas. Yhe actual experence of practicing Tai Chi then takes over where the limits of language stop.

The 'Repulse The Monkey' movement begins in a standing position, coiling and re-coiling the waist as the arms and shoulders alternate expanding and contracting. Simultaneously, the vision is moving with the waist receiving its environment. The movement then begins to retreat: the waist continues its turning and the vision moves with the waist but is not looking back in the direction of the retreat. The vision remains scanning the situation it is retreating from, while stepping backward. This fills the body with a sense of moving into uncertain ground as it relies on proprioceptive sense touching the ground first the pad of the retreating foot then smoothly settling the weight into the heel. 

The 'Monkey' in this movement might represent a certain type of over eager curiosity much like the one in children's book that is always getting into trouble. The monkey mind tends to want to travel habitual paths seeking the comfort of what is already known—also known as confirmation bias. 

I don't think retreat from the world is really possible, only retreat from one aspect or another—retreat from one aspect bringing the other into clearer view. Thus this form can also represent the stepping back from conceptual analysis when its productive limits have been exceeded, backing off from the clutter of rumination and allowing our senses to perceive the world moving through us as we move through it in novel ways.

When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.” ― Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam

1- ― https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/14/martha-nussbaum-bill-moyers-world-of-ideas/

2,3,4 - https://www.amazon.com/Certainty-English-German-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/0061316865

5 ― George Eliot, Middlemarch

6 ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

7 - Tzu, Lao. Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching (Kindle Locations 261-268). crispy press. Kindle Edition. See also Chapter 76

8 ― Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 

9 ― E.E. Cummings https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/282956-trust-your-heart-if-the-seas-catch-fire-live-by