Spring 2017 Newsletter
(March 2017)
Dear Living Tao friends: Happy Spring!
We have just concluded our 4-year commitment to learn all 48 poetic movement motifs from the Ba Ji Quan during our Winter Heritage Seminar at the River House. These were given to my mother by her Sifu and are to be called “TaoChan LiShi Ba Ji Quan”.
Now, these renewed treasures are to be integrated within our continuing expansion of the Tai Ji Circles, which has already inspired us to begin exploring the “Fifth” Tai Ji Circle during the 2nd week of the Heritage Seminar.
Mid-March 2017
With the highly-anticipated Easter Week gathering this Spring in Winterthur, those who were with me at the Heritage Seminar will be eager to share our new learning with you. For this occasion of my 80th birth year and 40 years of Living Tao global outreach, we have invited my European seminarians and North American friends who are planning to cross the ocean to enjoy a long overdue reunion with the Living Tao International family.
I am especially grateful to our Swiss organizing team who have been so faithfully keeping the Easter Week seminars alive and thriving. To Beat Staedeli, Felicia Kraft, Pius Brogle, Barbara Willi-Halter, Hans-Peter Sibler, Andrea Dahlke and Astrid Brutsch. We bow to you with much gratitude and deeply honor you for your many years of dedicated support.
During this 4715th Chinese Lunar “Fire Bird Phoenix Rise” Year, more than ever, we are facing a critical time confronting “Danger and Opportunity” worldwide— awakening and testing our ability to extend empathy and compassion to the troubled world.
Two perennial poems have come to my mind. This potent monologue from Christopher Fry’s Play, “A Sleep of Prisoners”, and the powerful metaphors in William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”.
A SLEEP OF PRISONERS
BY CHRISTOPHER FRY
The human heart can go the lengths of God…
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God. Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake…
But will you wake, for pity’s sake?
THE SECOND COMING
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I also just read a review of a new book by Joan Didion, “South And West”, with a chapter using the line “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” from “The Second Coming”. In the NYTimes review, the author uses her own experiences—observations and anxieties—as a kind of index to the times, as America lurched through the convulsions of the 1960s and ‘70s. Reading them in retrospect, they seem oddly prophetic about the gaps of a chasm uncannily foretold when she wrote those notes in the 1970s, presage today’s divide. History must be learned again and again. How timely and pertinent these reminders are for us Right Now.
Prior to our annual Easter gathering in Switzerland, I will be invited back to give a weekend seminar hosted by my old friends, Karl Ludwig and Dorothee Schweisfurth and Inka Jochum in Munich at the Gut Sonnenhausen. Right after that, another cordial invitation from Dietmar Mueller-Elmau to re-visit Schloss Elmau where I had enjoyed teaching on many happy occasions, thanks to the able and caring organization of Claus and Ulrike Claussen. After Winterthur, I will once again spend a week in London with my good friends Victoria and Ian Watson who have been kindred spirits since we were together on the advisory board for John Denver’s Windstar Foundation decades ago. While there, I will be meeting with my Singing Dragon publisher, Jessica Kingsley discussing several future projects. It will be an eventful and heart-warming month in April in Europe, which I am very much looking forward to.
Returning in May I will go back to The Marsh in Minnetonka to give a series of classes, as well as a lecture at the University of Minnesota. For many years, the
founder-director, Ruth Stricker Dayton, a dear and close friend, has been a champion in promoting Wellness and Balance. I am honored and grateful for
her consistent faith in my work. The Marsh has become another “home away from home” every time when I return. Check the Living Tao website for information.
Shortly after, we will have our annual Memorial Day Spring Seminar at home in Urbana. We are counting once more on the faithful attendance of many old friends from around the Middle America. Gerry Bradley will again be our ever-attentive on-site coordinator.
June and July will bring me back to the East Coast to give a couple short introductory seminars for the Yoga friends around New York. And just before our August summer River House seminar, I will return to present another keynote for the National Qi Gong Association Conference the last weekend of July in Newark, New Jersey.
Now, something to share from my family… Suzanne and I celebrated our 52nd Wedding anniversary during the first week of March. Grandson Avery came of age “twenty-one” on March 10th and granddaughter Sylvia will be 10 in May. How time flies!
And last, I have often quoted how Confucius (Kong Fu Zi) felt and wished throughout the decades of his life span, but only up to age 70:
“…at 70, I can now follow my heart’s desire, without going astray.”
Now that I have overtaken 70 by another decade, what might be Master Kong’s wisdom and my personal follow-up from this moment on?
So far, I have been meditating on these Chinese thoughts, partly gratified to
know of these possibilities for sage-ing properly; and wishfully, to continue hoping to arrive at, or return to, such blissful states in my remaining years on this earth.
I will share them with you:
“..”
“At eighty, I shall nurture my heart/mind, body and spirit, to set my emotions/ sentiments free, to realize the wisdom of the Tao, as I return to simplicity and childlike naturalness, light and easy, spontaneously being myself to enjoy my remaining years that heaven allows….” Sounds good so far…. Blessings to All!
And, wish you ALL the Very BEST CHI-full year ahead and hope to be dancing with many of you in one of these programs mentioned above before the time slips by much, much too quickly, when I will be writing the Autumn 2017 newsletter to you next….
More CHI-eers,
