Tao

Whether it was He Jinbao or Dr. Xie Peiqi or someone even earlier than that, perhaps even Dong Huichuan, who served as the progenitor, it has been said that by training outdoors every day in the same location, you will learn the tao of that place. Usually, I have no problem turning or training outside in my yard all year long. I'm definitely more sensitive to cold than to heat, but with time, that should change. I'm unsure if I'll ever become less sensitive to mud, though, and I try not to turn much on my circle when it is a mud-ring in my yard. Still, important lessons are here, and some of them are those I ruminated on today while it rained and rained and rained some more.

I feel we're quite separated from the tao of our particular place, both on mesoscopic and macroscopic scales. By that I mean that the place we live is unfamiliar to us because we shelter ourselves from it, and the world we live in is unfamiliar, in large part, to us because we shelter ourselves from nature. I'm definitely not a "return to the cave" kind of thinker, but I do believe that we can help ourselves tremendously by getting more in-touch with our world and region. I couldn't help but notice while washing dishes earlier, which we do by hand at our house -- we don't even own a dishwasher -- that it is unbelievably artificial, for instance, that our modern homes are filled with seemingly unending fountains of clean, disease-free water and are filled with tens or even hundreds of long-lasting, relatively efficient torches that have separated us from darkness on the one hand and from the humiliating (in a positive way) experience of drawing water from a well or river and preparing it for our uses. We're also segregated from our food almost entirely, except that it usually comes in its ultimate or penultimate stage of preparation for us to eat, usually gluttonously without a second thought of what we put into ourselves or how it came to be that we had the privilege to do so.

These mundane tasks, like doing the dishes by hand, are the sort that our ancestors did in far greater quantities than in modern times. We like to believe that our quality of life is raised by being freed from the mundane, the boring, the humble activities that can easily consume a large part of our day, but it may be the other way around. Much of the musing in this short, likely-to-be-unread article came about while engaged in such a task, or rather in several of them throughout the day, during which time I thought. Many of these mundane tasks, I think, require little in the way of concentration, and so while full enough attention can be given to the task at hand to perform it quite well, the mind is semi-free to wander through the meaning of the things we do and have done. Again I'm reminded of stories about Dong Huichuan, who is said to have traveled while learning the roots of baguazhang from a Taoist and a Buddhist monk, to have had to dehusk for himself all of the millet that he wanted to eat that night, always after a tremendously difficult and long day of training. Surely he put attention into the task, and certainly he ruminated, even meditated, on the value of the exercises he was being taught and routines he was performing for long hours throughout the day preceding this deeply humbling and difficult exercise. Removing the husks from millet is apparently quite difficult, particularly without fancy machines, and so a balance must have been struck in his mind each day between what was physically worth the effort and the demands of his taxed body. Such things are unheard of in the modern world, and such gains in ability and character probably are as well.

For several weeks now that my (too heavily indoor) work has been settled down, I've been getting more in touch with the tao of my region by spending plenty of time outdoors (and away from this infernal contraption) and bringing that outdoors into myself, not just with training. The air in our houses, I think, is too stagnant and too treated for our own good. Most of the time, it sits and accumulates the oils and vapors of our cooking, our waste production, our washing, our building materials, and our exhalation. The air is too stagnant, and one really only needs to go outside for a few minutes to understand the difference. Many of us move our air, but it's merely stirring up the muck for the most part. I see into my neighbors' house sometimes in the evening, while I'm outside and they are all indoors. Their fans are running. Their air conditioner is on, and it's not even hot, for God's sake. We're too accustomed to our treated air and our own stink for our own goods. Therefore, I've taken to trying to be outdoors for a minimum of a couple of hours every day, if not more, if for nothing else than to breathe in deeply of the air that moves and which blows away and disperses my stink (n.b.: I don't usually smell bad, this is a metaphorical stink) nearly as readily as I can emit it. Much of that time is training or gardening, and all of it is worthwhile.

Gardening is a wonderful way to put us more in touch with our surroundings. The soil in our hands sometimes feels good and sometimes screams out to us, by its very feel, look, or smell, that it needs something, something it probably had before our heavy machinery terraformed our land into our neighborhoods. The plants we grow are almost extensions of ourselves, nourishing our minds and souls until the harvest is ready to nourish our bodies and our communities. It's humbling and challenging to squat down low enough for long periods to pull weeds, feel dirt, toss root-eating grubs, and preserve earthworms. For us today, it was even more so, as we did it for our requisite few hours out in the rain I already mentioned. At first we considered avoiding it, but it was rewarding to let it wet our hair and shoulders and feet through our shoes, and it feels all the better to believe that the garden and subsequent harvest will be all the better for our efforts despite a little rain.

I connected more directly while there, in another way I've been trying to keep up on a regular basis for some time now. I gathered several of the wild-growing things in our yard and made another cup of what I call "yard tea" today. The recipe varies by the day and by what I find, meaning both what I come across in the yard and what suits my interests. In the spring, it's easier. The dandelion leaves and flowers are still young and are readily included; the black spruce is offering its bright green new growth, which can be guiltlessly harvested from the lower branches to provide a semi-sweet slightly piny dose of vitamin-C; and several other plants offer their wild goodness to us. Today's recipe included dandelion leaves and blossoms -- it's funny they are now a bothersome weed but were previously a valuable and nutritious springtime food source -- the pine needles, a couple of varieties of mint we've planted and which are happily taking over, wild false strawberries, young bee balm leaves, rose petals, clover flower heads, wild grape leaves, honeysuckle flowers, and, though it does not grow in the yard (yet!), a pinch of schizandra berries and a bit of green tea. The flavor is fuller and rounder than that of usual green tea, and it's starkly pleasant, despite the wild and sometimes bitter ingredients. I feel more connected to the little plot of earth I live on when I walk in it, feel it, smell it, and ingest it.

Did I train in the rain? Yes, I did. I only did a few strikes and forms in it, though... no circling today. The reason was already mentioned: MUD. In the rain, my circle turns into a ring of very, very slick mud which happens to be dominated in staining ability by red clay, making my shoes, my porch, and the inside of my house poorly decorated. I like nature, but I don't like cleaning up mud inside my house. Also, slipping three out of four steps on the circle isn't really pleasant, whether I undertake the task in shoes or with bare feet. To top it off, my circle has a definite yin and yang character to it, being that no spot in this entire portion of Tennessee is flat. The high side, facing East, incidentally, is yang. The low side is yin in the West. Weirdly, by the lay of the land and our trees, the yang side is the eastern side, the higher side, the less shady side, and, obviously, the side that dries out first after a rain. The yin side is the western side, the lower side, the shaded side for more of the day, and the side that accumulates a freaking puddle in the rain and stays wet, slick, and potentially staining sometimes for days afterwards. I like to think of that when I turn after a rain: even my little circle is a beautiful demonstration of yin and yang, which brings us full-circle back to bagua. It's mentioned in the Yijing, the canon upon which baguazhang is based, that the tao is simply yin and yang.