It's Just Dogs Barking
Hearth-riddles
‘That which circles moves from its centre’
1Perhaps you too have something like this: a conundrum from which you can never turn away, which you do not feel as a curse, but a generative, endlessly revealing, probably insoluble, puzzle. In Ancient Greece and Norse myth it is part of your Fate. In Old English, it’s part of your Wyrd. It’s a now-smooth pebble you can endlessly turn over in your hand, replete with crooked hole through which you can peer, to see the horizon transformed through the-nothing-that-is.
In writing this piece, I wanted to name it, this perennial circling of the heart-mind, as I know it’s not just me who experiences it. I went downstairs and I knocked at my partner’s door, requesting a moment of his insight into the language he has been enjoying in Old English Word Hord and Beowulf.2 I said that I was searching for a traditional two-word phrase to name the centripetal dance around my life’s great koan, (like the famous ‘whale-road’ for the sea). ‘Ah, you mean a kenning,’ he said. We talked of wyrd and fate, questions and purpose, interior places to which, no matter where you wander, you always end up returning: is it like a tor? A well? A magnet?
No, it’s the hearth, we realised. That bright place to which we will always be drawn.3
So, I will from now on call it my hearth-riddle (heorþ-rǣdels)4
Tangled life
No matter where I turn and how far I wander, the challenge and practice of yielding are always present. This is my hearth-riddle: how not to resist life, yet keep my centreline. How to balance softness and firmness, adaptability without flimsiness, stay in touch with things, yet not become enmeshed. In short, how do I stand my ground using softness, when all around the laws of iron5 and silicon6 are followed ten thousand times more widely than the rules of any wise well-tried path or the natural process itself?
It can seem that we are in a particularly terrible time right now with domination being a popular policy instead of dialogue, in so many contexts, whether at home or abroad. The great paradox of yielding in relation to this is how do we resist ‘evil’ (such as rule by force) without getting tangled up in it, or perpetuating it ourselves? If we constantly dwell on everything awful, do we not internalise it? If we ignore it and seek a safe hermitage somewhere, metaphorically or physically, aren’t we just abandoning our fellows to its ill effects?
In the New Testament, Jesus is reported as having said ‘do not resist evil’ or, ‘do not resist an evildoer’, but in closer investigation of the earliest Greek gospels, this is likely to have meant ‘do not resist by legal means’, (ie, do not drag those who harm or malign you through the courts). Alternatively, in David Bentley Hart’s translation, (quoted here by Chuck McKnight at Patheos) it reads very differently as,
‘ “I tell you not to oppose the wicked man by force”. It is the violence or the force in the aggressor’s attack that Jesus tells us not to retaliate against. But there are other, non-violent means of resistance, and indeed we must resist if we are not to stand idly by while evil goes unchecked.’7
You may ask, why am I, someone who is not ‘a Christian’ 8 still banging on about this tricky phrase, especially when English translations of the Taoist Classics seem more my home turf? My answer is that right now I need all the wisdom I can get. These turbulent times are marked by the return of empires, force, coercion, executions, torture and widespread propaganda. These were at the heart of the Roman Empire in the occupied Palestine of Jesus’ time, The Warring States Era in China (when much great Taoist writing was committed to paper) and now, too, with Russia / Ukraine, Israel / Palestine, and USA / apparently everyone else, (including most of its own people) as well as countless other conflicts and wars of words currently ongoing.
My friend Dan asked some good questions in a comment he posted to my recent piece, so I’ve quoted them in the footnotes here and have attempted to weave responses into this essay9. As with all good knotty questions and hearth-riddles, this is not a problem with a simple solution, it’s a predicament10 which must be lived through. How do we in our private lives, workplaces, political life or physical struggles deal with those who unjustly wield power over us? How do we face situations of grave danger? Personally, I have caved-in or run away as many times as I have stood my ground or successfully fought back. I’d say it’s about even throughout them all, with the ‘cave-ins’ not just confined to the life or death situations I have been in, but some of the subtler coercion ones too. Sometimes I have been the tyrant, lashing back at real or perceived attacks, certainly retaliating with verbal, if not physical force. I am neither proud nor ashamed of my responses as when I look back, they were the best I could muster at the time. I only had at my disposal what I had really practiced, I found.
Before I speak about any insights I’ve gained from the practice of T’ai Chi, I’ll return to the Saxon saint, St Wite, of whom little is known beyond what I have compiled here, which you can read first, for context. In facing the invading Vikings killing her townspeople, she was not avoiding or running away from danger, but was instead mindfully walking towards it. So, we cannot say that she was choosing the ‘hermit option’ and staying out of trouble but she was also not running down to the beach, sword in hand to launch a vicious but suicidal attack on her enemies. Of the many things I have written about how her example inspires me, the main one is that she was moved to do what she felt must be done (go to speak with armed foreign invaders) as a response to what was happening to her fellows (murder and pillage). It is not about herself at all, she could have hidden in her hermitage.11 I feel much of today’s hand-wringing about ‘what shall we do about the problem of evil?’ is abstract. It’s about wrong thoughts or politics, opinions on what is happening thousands of miles away without knowing the full context. We are deluded if we think we know the full context of anything at more than one remove from ourselves.
What we can do about ‘evil’ is act according to our principles in the present moment in the place we are in, and this needs to include considering our effect on all the people (and not just the humans, but often the wider effect on other than human life) there with us in that moment. If we think only of ‘what must I do?’ rather than ‘what is the best thing to do for us all?’ we will be caught in solipsistic motivations. It is true that we can also sometimes act in a limited way with our resources (time and money, say) in ways that effect people at some remove from us. This may sound facile, but how much energy do we spend thinking abstractly and having opinions about what we are not studying, practising, experiencing or engaging in daily?
I cannot join in with those who advocate only one way of behaving in all instances. This seems to me against nature, which is infinitely varied, and contrary to the Tao, which is the way of change. In one context, responding correctly will be to risk our lives and wrestle to the ground the person who comes with a semi-automatic rifle to our school to murder children. In another context, right action is to sit down and negotiate and make peace with people whose comrades have exploded bombs in your cities for decades in response to cruel historic rule by your own countrymen. In yet another, concerted, long term non-violent protest is the way change will be made to happen. Jesus said ‘Love your enemy’, but as Giles Fraser amusingly pointed out on episode 5 of The Sacred, this implies that having enemies is not wrong per se.
If we engage deeply with ‘evildoers’ we risk getting tangled up in their machinations. If we walk away, we leave the weak to a terrible fate. This is one of the true predicaments of life.12 I don’t have any easy answers for you, so instead I am going to share some stories from my tradition.
Transformation, not machination
Whether you’re tackling in-fighting and corruption in your organisation, a citizen facing a seemingly monstrous regime change in your country, or a novice martial artist learning to investigate softness but getting mashed by hard-arts practitioners in the meantime, knowing when to engage and when to step back is not easy.
wrote well about this recently in a great piece (which you can read here):Monsters were a very useful way of thinking about these recent failures. Deriving from the Latin word that means “to show,” they were originally seen as divine warnings or supernatural signals that something had gone out of balance. And rather than something to fight or destroy, a monster was a call for healing, a restoration of right relationship between humans and each other and especially humans with the rest of the world.
I’ve always thought this fact to be the underlying truth informing Nietzsche’s admonishment, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” But there’s also another saying I’d hear often as a kid in rural Appalachia that describes the problem just as well:
“Don’t wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, and the pig will like it.”
In T’ai Chi we would say ‘don’t enter the competition’, which was something Dr Chi Chiang Tao would say to my late Grandmaster John Kells in training. In class, my T’ai Chi teacher Mark Raudva would remind us of this, and tell us another story of his T’ai Chi brother H, when training with renowned Taiwanese sword master, Eagle Claw Kung Fu master and deeply soft T’ai Chi master, Sam Tam. H was upset and dispirited when he would get beaten and overwhelmed in push hands with other hard martial artists, and then hear them bragging about it, while he trained in Sam’s soft method. Sam, knowing that the softness and skill required to neutralise such bullies takes time to learn, but once learned, makes such hard force simple to deal with, encouraged H by saying, ‘It’s just dogs barking.’ Some dogs and all bullies love the sound of their own voices. They’ll bark whether they have anything coherent to say or not. Mark said we were not to let it get us down, or interfere with our study.
After all, what was it we were attempting to cultivate, ineffably subtle yielding or highly effective bullying techniques? So, Mark encouraged us in turn to ‘stay lightly connected to the other person’s struggle’.13 This has been one of the greatest instructions for how we can resist bad actors in the world and yet not find ourselves joining in inadvertently by using force. For me, it is at the heart of my Hearth-riddle.
I’ll describe it physically, as best I can, to give you a bodily image of it. Imagine you are in a T’ai Chi class and you are standing in front of a much bigger, stronger person, who has their hands upon you and is attempting to push you over. The rules of this exercise are that you can’t run away and you ‘lose’ if you lash out, lose your centre line, start grappling, grab or control or resist the other person with force. You are feeling demoralised and a bit overwhelmed, what even is winning?! You want to stop being in touch with the other person, not have their hands on you. But then, you wouldn’t be able to feel what they were about to do, even more of a risk. So you breathe deeply and remember to feel your feet on the ground. Then you recall some instructions you’ve heard a hundred times, ‘turn the waist’, ‘allow the push to go past you and make your hips turn’, ‘don’t take it personally’, ‘prioritise your centreline’, ‘do not use force’ and most annoying of all, ‘relax’ (the first, last and hardest instruction of all).
This might sound pointless or impossible but it’s what we do, week in and week out. With a strong, skilful and trustworthy classmate, (which for me was often my great T’ai Chi brother Marcel Theroux), we can see where we are resisting, we can safely try softening, ask for harder pushes, learn how to neutralise those too, slip grabs, evade sneaky attacks, and finally, in a spirit of mutual learning, we can both stand our ground using softness. That’s when the play really starts!
Apart from very occasional clips of myself or my teacher doing certain forms for the students’ study purposes, there are no videos of me showing you what I am describing. Perhaps one day this year I can meet up with some old classmates and record something relevant (after many hours reminding my body about the feel of partner work as all my practice is solo right now, 100 miles away). In our schools we were always about ‘doing it’ not ‘being seen on the internet’, which is great, I know, but means you’ll have to use your imagination today.
This traditional, laborious but extremely effective way of working is a method of training what is now termed the relaxation response, and is related, in the mental and emotional realm, to exposure training / ERP which is also used in treating OCD and severe anxieties. 14
My experience is that consciously choosing some discomfort or difficulty for the sake of developing resilience (or better still, anti-fragility) helps us better face the bullies and forces greater than ourself in life. Importantly, in my tradition, this resilience is not about us becoming invincible martial artists, or ultimate lone victors. That would just be more of the same. It is about understanding power, transforming it and our situation via connection, attention and the ability to adapt in a heartbeat. The side-effect? Our relationships are also transformed as we can more clearly see when we are reactive, embattled or frozen, and then hopefully soften so that other options than digging-in are available to us.
Sometimes we may need to save our energy for creating good actions and outcomes where we are, rather than engaging ‘the enemy’. On occasion, we will have to face down wrongdoers, and risk much in the process. Discernment is the quality we need to practice most and I only ever gained any by engaging in gradually higher stakes situations, in a controlled environment, rather than running away from them. It is sometimes not much fun! I’d say it took me three years to stop being constantly caught in the run away / lash out mindset. Since 2020, there has only been one situation (of extreme threat) where I feel I have ‘lashed out’ and then ‘collapsed’, in other words, when I catastrophically did not yield.
I relate this to make sure any reader knows that I am not setting myself up as some kind of master or expert in the art of yielding. Indeed, my failures have been far more educational for me than my successes… Yet there is some satisfaction in knowing the fight or flight reaction is much further from the surface these days.
My advice, for what it’s worth, would be for everyone to study T’ai Chi with a great teacher, which has been without doubt the cause of most transformation in my life. I know for some of you, that’s not possible or desirable, but if anyone wants to find a good teacher where they are, I’ll be happy to attempt to help you find a good school, as T’ai Chi varies as much as Jazz… And there as many arguments about what is the real deal.
For those of you working purely with mind and heart15 on these matters rather than also physically, it is somewhat harder. We can trust that life will send you just the right challenges to work with mindfully, so that when a big bully comes to push your loved ones and neighbours you’ll have both the guts and the chops to respond appropriately and heartily. It’s going to look and feel different, every time.
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This week’s good thing: Am I late too the Breath party? Despite his sometimes somewhat annoying ‘Hey, check out my gonzo reportage'!’ tone, the research in this book by James Nestor, and the methods suggested, have cleared up some long standing health puzzles for me, sometimes by reminding me we had the exact same instructions in T’ai Chi. This is readable, accessible and certainly useful to all people who have lungs. Mouth tapers of the world, unite!
A quote from a quatrain of Rumi, version by Coleman Barks.
Nicely, At Culverwell, 1 mile from where I write this, lies the archaeological site of the oldest multiply-returned-to hearth so-far found in England.
Pronunciation: HEH-orth / ˈhɛɔrθ - RAD-ells / ˈræː-dɛls . Feel free to use this kenning for your own seemingly unavoidable internal quest, and to tell me what yours is, should you so wish, in the comments.
might, war, domination
abstraction, optimisation, the purely rational (as opposed to reason, which includes both rationality and intuition)
Quote from McKnight in his review of Bentley Hart’s translation, (which I am still reading, slowly).
But from Christian upbringing including most of the formation of my ethics.
Full comment here. Excerpt below.
‘St. Wite is new to me. I found some speculations about her — are there traditional stories? It seems more resistant than yielding to confront Vikings, even in peace, to request they stop their violence.
I was curious if you’d say more about Machiavelli after the jump. He was not wrong, unfortunately. Strength and being feared are necessary attributes of any power or force, even those that are good or benign — nature and the divine have been so reduced we don’t have a healthy fear of them, the way we probably ought to fear crossing someone we love or esteem, who like a traditional teacher, might let us have it.
Especially when it comes to defending your people from invaders, the spiritual morality of pacifism is no virtue and may increase violence and encourage evil. This is not to say that those two are the same! Evil is killing for the hell of it. Torturing. Killing is just killing; it is always costly and tending dark but not necessarily evil. Violence is in everything we do, and it must be managed — no group can simply refuse it, but it can be the saints’ calling to do so.
Would you say yielding to evil, to let it pass — the soft art of alternative options — is a form of wisdom? A force that knows limits and might, in another encounter, behead or wound the enemy?
A memorable statement I’ve lost track of from a philosopher: western civilization could not accommodate both Christ and Machiavelli. Perhaps it foundered and began failing faster when it deeply absorbed their two incompatible truths. It seems Substack is now full of this realization. People advocating withdrawal and ascetic holiness. Tolstoy and Christian anarchism named. Small enlightenments, maybe, but also the reactions of a herd. The ability to move through the world however it is and generally yield to all the typically greater powers and also the smaller ones is a state of grace and a more subtle, pragmatic path. Life on one’s own terms but negotiated terms with the world. There can even be surrender in it.’
Which was probably up on Golden Cap.
and religions historically have a lot to say about it…
It can sometimes feel highly unpleasant to stay in touch with life’s pushes (whether physical or metaphorical), it would feel nicer to pull away, but a bully will always follow up on our flinch.
All of these spheres can be illuminated in many ways, for instance by polyvagal theory and also by traditional meditative practices I have come across from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Taoism.
Or heart-mind (hsin / xin)
Without a doubt, my dear friend @SamMasich
Caroline, as ever your post is written eloquently and with wisdom and insight - I will be pondering on this sentence in particular, “I only had at my disposal what I had really practiced, I found. “ I will be in touch re guidance on finding a Tao instructor in Ireland? I practice and teach The Happy Body, which similarly insists on not pushing through. I think of it as a patient practice, and regularly need to remind myself of that. Thank you for your words on this Monday morning.