Once In A Blue Moon,

you get to visit a place you wanted to visit for a while back and it's surprisingly different in some respect to what you expected: Collioure at the winter solstice for example.

Once In A Blue Moon ,

you may walk by the willows and enjoy

Once In A Blue Moon,

I appear here, 3 yellow willows surviving the new works, a white anteroom is painted afresh and pictures hung, some old, some new. Plans are crystallising for next trip, our first to Venice.

It's a grand day when you ...

paint a picture

help a friend

sink and relax

practise forms and ba juan jin

replant your rosemarys to roomier, classier pots

Seeing Colour

Our colour vision developed a long time ago to enable our ancestors to identify the newer shoots. Two books, "The Making of the Fittest", By Sean B Carroll and Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish", both of which I read with much interest last year, make this point.

My next photo is showing an exerpt from the former, which interest me as one of the 8% mentioned, having difficulty with reds and greens, but not always. However, I'd probably fail on a navigation test!

At 8 pm

al aire libre, de nuevo

A walk in the aroma of "coconut"

"a magic dwells in each new beginning" - HH

Zen proverb: Enlightenment

"Before Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water." So straight-forward, so simple.

Zee

"I do like to be beside the seaside,
Oh, I do like to be beside the sea ...", I was humming to myself the other day, walking on the beach, when I came across these lines in the sand:

The moon, at this point, was ebbing the tide, and so the interface had moved away from where the child(?) had drawn the pointer.

the sun hung lowest

The sun hung lowest at my place at 12:04 yesterday. Here's what it looked like at Drom Beag two years ago.

separate right foot

I’m always grateful after class. I enjoy going to share in the practice with others. It's good to synchronise my movements with those of my classmates. I find this gives me a feeling of being energised and relaxed at the same time.

When teaching class I’m thankful each time for the opportunity to deepen my own practice as I’m demonstrating the details of the form for the first time to a learner.

Lately it has been Separate Right Foot. Stepping back from Golden Rooster Standing On Right Leg, forming the ward-offs, transferring the weight, crossing the hands, turning the waist, kicking, arms unfolding “as do the edges of an opening fan”, exerting no strength from the shoulders. Wonderful!

standing like a mountain

taichi: standing like a mountain or standing like a tree on the slopes of a mountainside looking out over the ocean. We try to cultivate this rather than resisting purposely. Becoming rooted is the key.

tai chi: wrestling versus dancing

Marcus Aurelius said, in Meditations, with, I assume, no knowledge of tai chi: "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in that it stands ready for what comes and is not thrown by the unforeseen."

This is a constant tension in our practice, are we going through a form or are we practising applications?

I'm in the latter camp really, it's wonderful to read this book.

(My copy is by Penguin Classics, trans. by Martin Hammond)

la papa creciente

51º 23.3’ North 9º 36.1’West

Chance is always powerful

As Ovid said: let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. I practise each day to get my hook cast. When we practise together, we emphasise hooking each other, joining our intention to make the interaction more alive.

In a few days I will give a class, an introductory class, to complete beginners. Always a special challenge to take a short time and a crowd and see if something clicks.

Does anyone, me included, walk away the better for it ...

The finger or the Moon

I'm reading The Elements of Tai Chi, by Paul Crompton, at the moment. In his introduction, he says Tai Chi developed at a time when Taoists influenced thinking and conduct at many levels in Chinese society but that now the total situation into which Tai Chi was introduced is gone.

Tai Chi is like a finger pointing at the Moon. The student can either study the finger [Buddha] or look at the Moon [Buddha's teaching].

This seems to be the idea behind Yoshitoshi's picture, done circa 1892, and which I saw recently at the Chester Beatty Library.

His own haiku reads:

Holding back the night

With its increasing brilliance

The summer moon

(Yoshitoshi’s death poem)

Pushing Hands

Pushing Hands is such an essential part of tai chi for me. Dealing with the other person is what it's all about. I'm lucky to be able to push hands at least twice a week - the interaction shows me how much I have still to learn.