I was thinking about all this while listening to Under Stellar Stream, the new album from Richard Youngs, which the accompanying press release describes as a collection of neodruid hymns and chants for the minutiae of homelife and fatherhood, poetic transcendance through repetition … in these atonal, spatial arrangements, each phrase is granted the room to work into the cerebral cortex.

As a nurse she was all too familiar with the fragility of life, the cosmic rug-pull, the shadow on the X-ray, but she felt now a sudden, bracing reacquaintance with her own impermanance.

When the splitting wind Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks.

Keeping these in mind and using his knowledge of Shaolin boxing skills as a technical point of departure, he is said to have developed a form of soft boxing called Tai Chi Ch'uan.