Time enough for counting
Hello friends,
I started writing this newsletter at 4:17pm on Monday and it was already almost dark outside. I’ll have more to say about that in a moment, but first some admin.
I’m cancelling the Thursday evening class this week, because we haven’t had enough attendance. I will try evenings again in January because it’s always easier to get people to try a new thing in January than November or December. But it also means that we’re finished with taiji classes for this year.
There will be one more qigong class at theDock, this coming Monday, December 16th.
Meanwhile, registration has just opened for the January - March classes. Here’s the schedule and links if you want to register online:
Mondays 2-2:30pm, starting January 6th: qigong at theDock. No registration required, but you do need to be a Dock member, which starts at $20/month.
Tuesdays 10:15-11:15am, January 14th - March 4th inclusive: taiji at the James Bay Centre.
Thursdays 5:45-6:45pm, January 16th - March 6th inclusive: taiji at the James Bay Centre.
All three classes will take the week of February 10th - 14th off. Beginners are welcome to start at any time.
And now, back to the darkness. In the few minutes it took me to write the above it got almost fully dark. The winter solstice will be during the class break, though personally I don’t notice the days starting to get longer until a few weeks later - right about when the taiji classes will start back up. In the meantime, I need to keep reminding myself that it will happen. I find the Daoist approach to yin and yang very helpful at times like this.
It’s worth quickly defining the terms:
yīn (陰) describes a set of concepts such as recharging, nurturing, absorbing, and resting. It’s also associated with darkness and the shady sides of mountains and buildings.
yáng (陽) describes the complements of those things: expressing and releasing energy, as well as brightness and the sunny sides of mountains and buildings. Note that it’s a different word from the Yang (楊) family name associated with Yang Style Taiji.
In “Western” culture, these two concepts often get described as a list of polar opposites, such as black and white. This approach tends to confuse people. Pure yin and pure yang are abstractions that can’t exist in the real world. The “shady side” and “sunny side” of the mountain are more helpful images, because the sunny side still has trees casting shadows, and the shady side still gets daylight. The classic diagram is also clarifying:
While the black here is used to represent yin, and the white to represent yang, it’s important that there’s no radius you can draw which goes through only yin or only yang. Chen Bin, grandmaster’s son, encourages us to think of this circle as always rotating. If we imagine that radius line again, with the circle in motion as soon as it reaches its most yin, yang starts to come back in. As soon as it reaches its most yang, yin starts to come back in.
This has a direct correspondence to the back-and-forth movement of taiji. Every time we move to the most open posture, we immediately start closing it. Every time we wind a spring, it’s immediately followed by releasing that tension. To hold on to any extreme is to fight against nature, and one of the core principles of taiji is to work with nature, not against it.
Back to our short days. At mid latitudes like here, the cycle of the year behaves the same way. Days get shorter and shorter, but on the winter solstice we still see the sun, and then they start to get longer again. Imperceptibly at first, then a little faster, and by the equinox the change is noticeable from one day to the next. Then the lengthening of the days starts to slow down, and just as it feels like the sun won’t set at all, days start to shorten again.
As December grinds on, I always need to remind myself that we’re on one side of the circle but it will always roll on, even if we tried to stop it.
I also have to remind myself not to fight the natural cycle. In my first few years as a freelancer I put a lot of pressure on myself to bill some hours between Christmas and New Year’s, and to restart work in earnest as early in January as possible. It’s a very tempting trap, when every day not worked costs money. It was even more tempting when I lived in the US and many of my salaried friends had to do the same because they had so little paid time off. But it’s a lot of struggle for not much benefit, so these days I leave a lot more space to rest. I’ll be taking two full weeks off my dayjob, starting with the solstice. We’ll visit some relatives and old friends, but only in this region - no long trips right now. I’ll take at least a day putting a new warp on my loom, ready for a class in January. In other words, I’ll lean into rest and recharging for a while, and then once it’s been long enough I’ll go back to doing.
The break in classes will be longer than my break from work, and I hope you can do some practicing in that time. My last newsletter was all about how to practice, and it may be helpful to read that again. But at the same time, I encourage you to take it easy. Don’t push too hard, keep to the simpler exercises, and just generally let yourself recharge. For now: the dealing’s done.
I’ll leave you with a different song, one which helped me through some dark times before I had ever heard of Daoism or taiji, but now I understand it to be talking about the exact same thing: