exposed

1. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, and I still fall for it. You think you are getting comfortable with a form, then somebody has you perform it facing a different direction. Suddenly, you are not so comfortable.

I think I suffer more than others because I am very location-based in my learning. Not just martial arts, but everything – I am quite slow at remembering language students’ names, but I can easily recall who sat where. Likewise, I can remember where I was – and which direction I was facing – when learning various forms.

Learning the bagua swimming body form is a great example. Liu Laoshi taught us in Tokyo in 2007. It was a great form to learn but a little frustrating because in many spots, the directions/ facings were not fixed. Pretty common in Chinese martial arts, but my core may still lie in the Japanese arts I began with. And in those arts, everything is fixed, determined.
So we weren’t told to turn 270 degrees before swooping out from under with the left palm – no, you just turn an appropriate amount. So I fixed on one corner of the gym and drilled it. Months later, some people asked me to help them review. They wanted to know how many degrees to turn. I could only say that in my case, if you start facing this way, you end up aiming for the corner which should be here…
Liu Laoshi, with over 50 years in the business, can say something like “oh, no problem, turn 180 degrees, OK, turn 235 degrees, OK”. But not people like me. Not yet.

Anyway, I thought I was getting comfortable reviewing the Sun style taiji form. And I was always oriented the same direction in the little parking area next to my house. Last night for fun, I moved into the one-meter strip of ground on the other side of the house. It is narrow and confined, but trees hang overhead and the bugs make nice bug sounds at night – can’t say that for the paved parking area.
And there I was, stuck for a moment in the middle of the form, without my usual bearings. Obviously a ways to go before having learned it deeply…

2.) Tonight I had some spare time before dinner and went out to my preferred practice spot, a much larger public area a few hundred meters from my home. When next door in the parking stall, my daughter can open the door and yell at me if dinner is ready, if she must play cards with me NOW, or whatever.
But in the public space (kamisan hiroba), I have more seclusion. A line of trees makes a wall which almost blocks view of occasionally passing traffic. The night is full of sounds which help transport me out of the heart of the city.
Or so it was. Last week the city must have come in and trimmed the trees and tall grasses. The entire place had been mowed down, leaving only the eight or so trees – and their lower branches had been cut off as well. I was completely exposed, and much of the magic of the spot has been taken away. And it threw off my practice a bit, having to perform in front of those passing by, no longer hidden away behind a wall of brush and shrubs.
Maybe I have been hiding away too long and it is time to show others – this is my taiji, this is my xing yi quan…

picture snapped at the Beijing Olympics. fang song!