Spring
Hello friends,
Happy spring! The equinox just happened, and at this time of year I really feel the days getting longer. We’re also in a short break from taiji classes, so here are some reminders of what’s coming up.
The spring taiji session starts on April 1st, and registration is now open for then and for a short July-August summer session. The classes page has the full schedule and registration links.
Qigong is continuing at 2pm on Mondays, though I will probably take April 7th off.
Sam Masich will be teaching a partner form workshop in Esquimalt on the last weekend of March.
As the solstice was coming up, I wrote about yin and yang as things that are both always present, and the balance between them is always moving. I was writing things that I always need to remind myself about when winter is at its darkest.
At this time of year the movement is much easier to see, and yet when the change is fastest there’s still a lot of grey sky and bare earth. I’m enjoying the cherry blossoms downtown and the daffodils in front of my house, while many trees are still bare and a lot of plants are just putting shoots or buds out now. Much of the work is happening out of sight, inside the bark or beneath the soil, as the plants get ready for their big growth spurts.
I find it helpful to take the same approach myself. As we put winter behind us, I can get impatient and try to do all the things I didn’t have energy for in January. But trying to do everything leads only to exhaustion. What works better, when I can manage it, is to pick a couple of things and try to use this time to set some habits which I can build on for the next few months. This is a time when pushing ourselves a bit can be very productive, as long as we don’t spread ourselves too thin.
Of course I’m talking about taiji practice with this, but not only that. Next week I plan to literally dust off my broadsword and pick this form back up after some months of not making time to practice it. But the habit I decided to restart first, this week, was simply to meditate after work 2 or 3 days a week. Much like the spring new growth, any new or restarted practice takes patience before we start to see the beautiful flowers. It’s easier to have that patience if we remember that the process is the point. For my two examples: I have no expectation of attaining Enlightenment, or of ever using a sword for anything but practice. I just know that I feel better when I do these things regularly.
I ended the solstice newsletter with a piece of music, and I realised I have the perfect one for today’s too: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s Existence in the Unfurling.