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An utterance, a gesture, is clear if it is transparent; if it renders what is on the other side of the glass easier to understand, accept, respond to, or love; if it facilitates the integrity of our being in the world.
– Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy
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A gesture is meaningful to the extent that it addresses a being in its life, from out of the life of the gesturing being. Another way of putting this is to say that meaning lives through, or rides, the recognition of what is common.
– Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor
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A gesture is the immediate, untutored response of a human being to meaning.
– Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy
The skin is the outer stuff of the brain and the brain is the inner stuff of the skin.
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Gesture does not ‘think first.’ To respond with a gesture is to offer yourself nakedly to something; to become present to it, as it becomes present to you. It is an acknowledgement of the preciousness and losability of what is.
– Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy
Continually feeling down, down into your body, letting your awareness sink, letting the energy flows sink and settle …
You will be hovering on the boundary of the darkness of the unconscious; it is a completely somatic experience; just keep feeling down and down. At a certain point, something is likely to happen. Something may just pop up, erupt into your consciousness, out of darkness. It could be an image, a fragment of a dream, a vision, a physical sensation, a feeling tone, a word or a phrase, a gesture, a memory, a sound— it could be anything.
This is what we call the expression or expressiveness of the Soma.
– Reginald A. Ray Somatice Descent: How to Unlock the Deepest Wisdom of the Body
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Lyric is an attempt to comprehend the whole in a single gesture.
– Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy
Nature is always communicating to us through gesture and song. I invite you to spend a few days listening… how deeply can you feel the touch of the air, even without the wind? Can you feel the touch of the warmth, or the coolness? Can you experience it as a communication, as a keeping-in-connection, a holding, a caress? What are the gestures being made all around you? I am watching these letters appear, tic tic tic goes the keyboard with its happy cherry blue keys. Gesture on the screen, song below; the gestures of my hands connect them together.
Why should we assign so much majesty to the head, and so little to the hands?
What if we lived mostly through and with gesture and song, always making themselves visible, instead of with the invisible and tiresome thoughts that flood our minds?
What would it mean to develop the intelligence in our hands?
[Prompts for conversations…]
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