Contact Points
Consider less discourse, more sensing. Watch, listen, taste, touch, smell. Senses are the contact points between person and world. Relating is a physical act.
Three points of reflection for living in connection:
ONE: Eihei Dogen in Zenki (“The Whole Works”)
Riding in the boat, one even causes the boat to be a boat. One should meditate on this precise point.
TWO: Martin Shaw in Courting the Wild Twin
I recently saw a mist suddenly descend on my garden. It just rolled in out of nowhere. Everything changed, just like that. Very quickly, all appeared different. No shrubs, no apple trees, it was a foreign landscape. The dead felt usefully close, the silence deeper. In just a moment, the Underworld seemed present, as an atmosphere rather than a concept, a tangible, seasonal shift not a distant idea.
This world can be Otherworld, Underworld, heavenly, hellish and all points in between. It can still be Arcadia, Camelot, Eden almost. That’s why it’s confusing. We still get to go on holiday, drink wine, watch beautiful sunsets. We still pay insurance and kids still go to college. But there is something happening. An unravelling. A collapsing, both tacit and immense in scale.
We are frightened and do not know what will happen next.
And into that fraught zone drifts quite naturally the Underworld. This is not the dayworld, this is the night-world we are entering. The nightworld is not processional, tidy steps, and objective outcomes, but potent with insight, uncertainty and the need for dream-skill. The skill is witnessing the depth intelligence that dreams offer, the great plunge into soul’s magical disorientations. That’s how the earth tends to talk to us, rather than our strip-lit, strip-mined Morse code it has almost been plunged into silence with. It’s not the senate that talks with the earth, it’s the shaman.
But we are still using dayworld words. This is why so little works.
THREE: Joseph Chaiken in The Presence of the Actor
An actor should strive to be alive to all that he can imagine to be possible. Such an actor is generated by an impulse toward an inner unity, as well as by the most intimate contacts he makes outside himself. When we as actors are performing, we as persons are also present and the performance is a testimony of ourselves. Each role, each work, each performance changes us as persons. The actor doesn't start out with answers about living – but with wordless questions about experience. Later, as the actor advances in the process of work, the person is transformed. Through the working process, which he himself guides, the actor recreates himself.
Nothing less.
By this I don't mean that there is no difference between a stage performance and living. I mean that they are absolutely joined. The actor draws from the same source as the person who is the actor.
In former times acting simply meant putting on a disguise. When you took off the disguise, there was the old face under it. Now it’s clear that the wearing of the disguise changes the person. As he takes the disguise off, his face is changed from having worn it. The stage performance informs the life performance and is informed by it.