Sound of Silence: Moving With T'Ai Chi (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 205)

Carol Murphy recounts her personal journey of a T'ai Chi Ch'uan practice, the Chinese art of meditation in movement. In the process, she offers thoughtful and worthwhile discussions of such matters as the nature of God and the necessity of conflict. Of the latter, she writes, "Somehow we have to come to terms with the fact that the yin-yang cycles in the nature of tings, as in the T'ai Chi form, include opposition as well as harmony, dissolution as well as creation. This may arouse a tension in lovers of peace . . . Conflict is not to be eliminated, but kept creative. . . . We must often wrestle with God to find him, and in the encounter he appears as both Adversary and Comforter." Creation, by definition, emerges soley from opposition, she concludes.