The world is made of verbs

This from James Hillman in The Soul’s Code. An apt a description for what the process of practicing presence feels like.

The world is made less of nouns than of verbs. It doesn’t consist merely in objects and things; it is filled with useful, playful, and intriguing opportunities. The oriole doesn’t see a branch, but an occasion for perching; the cat doesn’t see a thing we call an empty box, it sees safe hiding for peering. The bear doesn’t smell honeycomb, but the opportunity for delicious feeding. The world is buzzing and blooming with information, which is always available and never absent.

Push and Pull

The movement quality of thought or life consists of – pauses, resistance, difficult bits, sudden jumps or leaps, changes of direction, etc. Drama and engagement come from watching this happen in the body. We cannot directly communicate thought but we can tell by watching someone move what he or she is thinking. Everyone can relate to the struggle against or with a thought.

(Decroux?) “The body is the battleground of the mind … Mime makes movement with stops and curves and straight lines.”

Speaking

“The word is like a little bag into which I put an image or an idea. We send it off into the air like a shell; it bursts, and the idea of the image is parachuted like radioactive fallout on to people’s shoulders. Speech is originally a pantomime of the mouth. There is therefore no break of continuity between a gesture and a word; both of them, physically, are part of the same creation, the result of a muscular contraction and a respiration.”

Jean-Louis Barrault, Souvenirs pour demain, (Memories for Tomorrow: The Memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, transl. Jonathan Griffin, 1974.)

Listening

“ … to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions.”

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922.

Movement becomes Thought

“… a walker stops sometimes. He pauses. He changes his objective. He was looking at the view – now he contemplates a blade of grass, or he withdraws into himself. … I invite you at these times to sit down with me, side by side, for the sake of the grass-blade, or the view, or ourselves.”

Jean-Louis Barrault, Souvenirs pour demain, (Memories for Tomorrow: The Memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, transl. Jonathan Griffin, 1974.)