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I really appreciated this dialogue between yourself and Jena. It chimes with thoughts I have and it is good to see these so well expressed. I also believe that one way forward is through telling/sharing/showing our personal experiences, as they become authentic connections with others’ different experience and so we co-evolve. I particilarly liked:

I began to recognise that language makes a lot of these conversations difficult. When you say that you prefer to think of the universe as ‘magical’, I love the idea of it being ’slippery’ and ‘queer’! And, as you point out, we can mean radically different things when we use words like ‘consciousness’ and ‘soul’.

… and

...the falling away of ‘meaning’…

"Radical Acceptance" is now in my vocabulary and I should also say I like the sense of ordinary that was somewhere in the conversation, we are far too intellectual too often!

Thanks Elspeth

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Thanks Elspeth. I really appreciate your reflection on this. I realise that radical acceptance itself is language open to interpretation!! For me it's a kind of phenomenological 'being with' - even if the thing we're with is suffering. But it's not just acceptance. I guess it's about taking a position inside the thing that is. Standing up for the slippery, queer world, even as it's always changing and slipping away!! Do you know Timothy Morton's dialogue with Bjork? It's wonderful: "...and that might become the sub theme of our little quest: slippery-hand-reaches-even-slippery-tail". That line has become a bit of a manifesto for me... and it feels apt to thinking about my Mum dying - everything dying really....

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/gallery/20196/0/bjork-s-letters-with-timothy-morton

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Thanks Elspeth and Stephen for your further reflections and also for the link to Timothy Morton's dialogue with Bjork which is wonderful. I so resonate. So many thoughts there that I agree with.

I particularly like what Timothy Morton says about the importance of including joy, as it’s so easy to go to despair about the state of the world and then stay there.

Swiss cellist, turned sculptor Klaus von Kreutziger https://www.klausvonkreutziger.com/ once gave me a huge piece of this puzzle. He said joy isn’t a feeling state in itself. All of the other feelings are embedded inside joy. Joy is a movement, the experience of shifting from a dense feeling to a more expansive one.

Steve, I was reading your soul meditations booklet in the train yesterday, and noticed that you say this beautifully in your soul meditation # 21 titled “a paradox of emptiness”.

“…so when you reach a place where the pain hits, or the world seems to be screaming. You will need courage to meditate your way in. To stay with it. To come out the other side. Where there might be something like joy waiting…”

It is this alchemical process that’s vital now.

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Thanks Jena! Especially for the Klaus von Kreutziger link! I will definitely follow that up! And thanks for reminding me that poetry IS the practise. For me anyway!

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