The Praxis of Intension or Danny’s Dilemma

In a manner of speaking, and from a certain angle, body leads in archery.  Discipline of form carries the student through the usual awkwardness to a wonderful sense of rhythm and ease.  The archer’s body gradually awakens, pivots from reaction to response––wasting tensions dissolve into the joy of holding a purposeful draw. Engaged with its own sensuous knowledge, the body savors a new kind of tension––the range simply an extension of the archer, as the web is of a centered spider. 

Here, at point-anchor, where vertical and horizontal, spacial and temporal, where stillness and movement meet, the patient moment can ripen into the deeper praxis of surrender.  To what?  What does such an archer be-hold and see?  “Look before you leap,” so the old trope goes.  On re-cognizing the Mark, its established in the devoted eye––a visual Anchorpoint to compliment the body’s harmonic twin.  Twinship is only resolved in unity’s mirror.

A beloved teacher of mine once concluded the story of an old archer who’d been invited to share his art:  Students were assembled alongside a long range giving the old man the sublime support of silent regard.  When the archer’s deliberate arrow––his only one––flew and struck ‘Bullseye!’ my teacher was not the only witness who suddenly broke into tears.  “He’d shot himself!”    

In the Platonic mysteries, its said that “the fruit is the cause of the tree.”  What then, dear one, is the archer’s intension?