Imperfect Forms Are Just What We Need
See With The Body Eye pt3
It is summer 1985 and I am crouched in a dusty attic bedsit at the top of a large, run-down Victorian building in Bournemouth, peering at the bookshelf wedged behind a potter’s wheel. Worn paperbacks I have never seen before are in a row: Tao - The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts, Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphries, several books by Idries Shah including the exploits of Mulla Nazruddin, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi, A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach, poems of Hafez and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps. 1
‘You can borrow what you like, any time. Just bring them back when you’re done,’ says Pete.2 I pull out The Watercourse Way and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones and start flicking through them. I am drawn to the picture of an empty circle and look at it, transfixed. What is this? I ask myself. Why are the drawings of ox herding interrupted by an empty frame? Slightly horrified by a creeping sense that I might not know anything near as much as I think I do about… anything, I pick up the second book, and read,
“[T]he world as described is included in but is not the same as the world as it is. As a way of contemplation, it is being aware of life without thinking about it, and then carrying this on even while one is thinking, so that thoughts are not confused with nature.”
What is life without thinking? Who am I if not this narrative voice telling myself everything as it happens? Hastily, I stash the books in my army-surplus satchel and offer to make a cup of tea, already always the serving girl. These are questions I’ll shelve for twenty years, while I make myself busy with doing.
Pete is in his late thirties but looks about fifty. He’s a gentle and thoughtful potter, an addict and a diabetic who rarely goes out but stays in his tiny room and smokes weed. He throws me simple stoneware pots and I embellish them with bracket fungi and perforations, until they resemble a dining set from the forest floor. He sends me out for butter and parmesan to put on a simple supper of macaroni cheese. I return instead with margarine and a cardboard shaker of freeze dried cheese, as I don’t know that it also comes fresh, having never eaten it. We talk about the nature of reality, of God, of what a life is for, of friendship and infinity, all of which thrill and scare me in equal measure. I am not staying at my brother’s bedsit downstairs, which is what I have told my mum. Instead, I am all this summer consistently at most three millimetres from disaster.
And yet, I remain always on the right side of that line.
Pete practices poor calligraphy on good paper with a Japanese brush and genuine sumi ink. He asks me which one I’d like to take home with me3. I say, ‘See with the body eye!’ What is actually written on the paper is -
‘Sea with the body eye
Tsu shin gen Bankei-o sho’
‘Sea’ for ‘see’ seemed so perfect a mistake, with us at most 200 metres from the shore at the bottom of Sea Rd. Pete says he chose the quote ‘Tsu shin gen’, written by Zen Master Bankei (1622-1693), as a good phrase to practice his brush strokes. I thank him, roll it up, secure the paper with my spare hairband, and tuck it into my satchel, the end sticking out. I am thirteen years old, and nothing will be the same again. Zen, Tao, Sufism and a certain shape of friendship4 have entered my life, the last one of which will become the focus of my learning and practice, and a kernel of my joy, 35 years later.
The calligraphy’s slightly lop-sided Kanji lettering and cramped English translation followed me everywhere for the next 37 years, sometimes on my walls, sometimes tucked away in a portfolio. For me it was a way to recall the moment when the road forked for me, when the possibility of desire for an ordinary life fell away. I already knew the strange and heady feeling of not being bullied nor talked down to by my brother’s friends, who were mostly in their twenties, from the alternative and underground scenes of 1980s Bournemouth. They treated me like a whole person, not ‘just a girl’. They didn’t make fun of me for my earnest questions nor tease me for my overshot lower jaw, massive orthodontic double braces and Goth makeup. They asked me to paint things on their walls and to mend clothes, in return they made me tasty, heavy, vegan food, or played me records - Bauhaus, Eno, Zappa, Joy Division, Dead Can Dance, Virgin Prunes, Art of Noise. They took drugs, mushrooms and drank home-brew, and I joined in with the former, occasionally, but not the latter, finding my paper round impossible to do with a hangover, but no problem while in acid-comedown-induced toytown.
Upstairs at Pete’s, it was always tea, books and deep conversation, a far headier brew than any cocktail and the mix to which I am still addicted all these years later. Even this morning, before I wrote this, I had my hit of that special triple mix...
Eventually my brother moved to a better set up with his friend Kevin, a flat without scabies, bedbugs and only one shared toilet for four flats. I never went back to Argyll Rd again. The ‘Anarchy A’ I had painted on the wall above the mattress would have to be dealt with by the next tenant, or taken as part of their £18 a week decor. With no phone to call Pete on and no reason to return, that summer faded from memory. The Head on the Door came out in August and up town in the new flat we played it on the Marantz stereo through the B&W speakers and hung out in the living room - a whole extra room - imagine.
A year or two later, the local Quaker meeting house hosted a talk entitled ‘The Magic of Findhorn’ and a very sweet new friend Rachel asked me to go along. She had joined my school for the sixth form5 and was always dressed head to toe in multi coloured clothes, like a pony-tailed rainbow amongst the dark outfits and asymmetric haircuts of the rest of the sixth formers. I looked up to her for her gentleness and openness, (intuitively appreciating even then how much it cost her to remain like this, now she was no longer at a Steiner School). At the talk, we were impressed by the slide show of organic gardens full of huge vegetables, pictures of people holding hands or meditating in circles, and of the bounty of the land, seemingly improbable so far north in Scotland’s Moray region.
Flicking through the brochures and course syllabuses on the table, I noticed that at an independent venue within the larger Findhorn Foundation Newbold House, there were a series of courses on T’ai Chi, meditation and embodied spiritual practice being offered by Kajedo Wanderer called ‘Beyond Form’. I was a year or so into my local T’ai Chi classes, and inspired by these and by Chungliang Al Huang and Alan Watts’ writings on Tao, I felt I’d received a clear sign that I was meant to head to Forres to deepen my practice. I have written before of my journey in T’ai Chi here and here.
Why I mention all these early threads in the fabric of my life is to show how returning to valuing wisdom accessible with the body did not spring from a desire to dance, a special skill with movement, or an aptitude for martial arts or sport. The stooped girl I was then always had her nose in a book or a pencil in hand, making yet another painstakingly photo-realist drawing of a flower, a woman in a long dress, or a character from Gormenghast, (or preferably all three of those in one image).
Even the route I came to Tao, T’ai Chi, nature, community or healing, (and the more recent route I came back to valuing the treasures buried in my early Christian life), all came from books and conversations, not from being out in the wilderness as a youngster, or from encountering these at home or in school. Books, (tea!) and conversation led me to excellent people, to spiritual friends6, if you like, which led directly to philosophy, movement and community. It turns out you can love sword form and word forms.
As I prepare to return for a rare day to my teacher’s T’ai Chi school in London to visit the summer workshop I organised for 15 years, I am re-evaluating my own personal practice, what it means to me, and what I want to share from it in future. 18 years teaching regular classes in London, Scotland and Sweden was a great use of my time but I do not wish those days back again. In committing to a future with my partner and to sharing what restorative practices I can from my tradition with as many as need it, the exact form of this has not yet taken shape. I have a strong sense that people who are sat in chairs and looking at screens, immersed in the digital realm more than ever before need something simple and hearty with which to return daily to the real. Not everyone can spend 20-odd years attending regular classes, as I did.
The materials and craft threads of my life took shape a few years ago now, with workshops and books, and so I trust that the format for sharing the movement practices will arise soon. In the meantime, if you are interested in an online class introducing some hearty, beautiful, movement practices that have sustained me for over 15 years, then keep 3rd August 2024 free. I’ll post a Zoom link for paying subscribers in the next week or so. The class will also be recorded for those who cannot attend live.
Our movement forms, like our prayers, do not have to be perfect. We are not perfect. It may be that we come to good things for dubious reasons. Or that we eventually develop a deep and sustaining practice because we are addicts to negative behaviours, rather than because we are pure souls with an unstoppable will, like Bankei. I believe that the ‘flaws’ in humans, even our seeming brokenness, are not design faults to be mended, but are an essential (and perhaps blessed) feature of our species. Because we are embodied beings-in-time, with all the joy and suffering that entails, we can long for, and be made long by life.7 The softness I am having to develop now requires me to let go of an internal image of the pre-arthritic woman who could leap through the air with her sword and land silently, and to give up the tricks and rhetoric of certain former ways of teaching. Instead it’s time to connect with real vulnerability and openness. I am not sure I can do that perfectly yet, or that I ever will. And I won’t say that the movements I want to share from my late Grandmaster are the best movements you can make with your body, that will make you ‘fitter, happier, more productive…’
They don’t have to be. Forms are like poems, remembering and repeating them does us the world of good.8 Next week I will start to lay out three ways of looking at embodied practice in our lives, why we might do it, what it might enliven and who and what it might draw us into connection with. Until then, here is something from the late John Kells that I have been mulling this week.
Softness is the dream in every ache to be a better soul.
This week’s good thing: Hob Moor in York. A moor in the middle of a city! I watched midsummer moonrises here and meandered through the trees around it today. I wish every city had more open spaces like this. All pictures this week are from the moor.
This week I recorded my voice on my phone rather than my microphone at home, so it is not quite as a high quality recording as usual, as there are some traffic noises and a generally boxier sound. Apologies.
I have changed the name of my late friend and all other names in this piece.
Apart from the silver cross given to me by my mother in 1980, this calligraphy was for most of my adult life probably my oldest possession. It was lost along with half my belongings in 2021.
‘The spiritual friend’, ‘the fellow traveller’, ‘the wayfarer’ - none of these familiar names are quite it, but approach the area.
That’s the senior two years of secondary education, before University, for my US readers…
Thanks to my Friends in the Wilderness godsiblings for meeting online this week to talk deeply about these things.
As beautifully mentioned here by School of the Unconformed, the original impetus for these Body Eye essays.
"Forms are like poems, remembering and repeating them does us the world of good"
I absolutely love this! Such a beautiful way to express it! 🙏
Thank you for this, Caro.