Scrolling back through my Facebook Timeline I see I started posting much more in 2009. These posts frequently refer to “burning thighs,” “evil training methods,” “awesome sessions” and “we rocked the floor.” There begins to be more pictures of sweaty workshops, students training hard, fogged up dojo windows and the pipe that abutted the ceiling and west wall dripping condensation down onto that amazing floor. Clearly, we are all finding our groove in 2009.
I’ve written a lot about my teachers so far, but there is a whole other love letter that needs to be written about my students. All students suffer their teacher’s shortcomings and it was no different for me. Still we students stay, and many people I knew then are still staying to this day. Despite my shortcomings, still they learn, still they forgive, and still they teach me not just how to learn and how to teach, but how to be a better person. One post from 2009 struck me, “As Dogen lay dying his students hungered for one last lesson, "great Teacher," they asked, "please tell us, how did you achieve enlightenment in your lifetime?" To their eager queries, Dogen replied, "One mistake after another." I think perhaps a teacher cannot become a real teacher without many such mistakes and much forgiveness of her students.
Being a martial artist over decades affords one a precious and unique glimpse into mistakes and forgiveness, but also into what that all looks like over time. This story is the story of 25 years of my Tai Chi & Qigong school, but it is not the story of how I got started in the martial arts in the first place, 42 years ago. For now, suffice to say I was at a personal threshold and had a hard choice to make about my life going forward. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go forward, to be frank. The martial arts saved my life not just because it gave me an anchor in untethered times, but because all my teachers were much older than me when I began. I could start to see what being a martial artist, a person of self-cultivation, looked like over time. I could see who I might become if I stayed the course.
For many of my early years teaching, most of my students were older than me, some by many decades. Like I studied my teachers for clues on how to life a long and robust life, I also studied my older students (and still do) to see how they lived their life, to see who they are that they might come to the Moon’s floor as a part of their intentional living. In many ways it has not just been the day in day out training in the martial arts that has both saved and enriched my life, it has been my teachers and my students too. The people they created themselves to be.
A man named George was a Moon student for many years. No one who met George will ever forget him. He came to the school in his 80’s, but looked 60. He was very fit and very skilled. He started Aikido in his 50’s and stayed with it until wet macular degeneration forced him off the mat and onto the Moon’s floor. During his five year tenure he took most all the classes & workshops, training hard with Gaspar, Chen Xiao Wang and Andy Dale. He created a cane form for himself for the inevitability of his blindness. He said his main goal was to be able to take care of himself until he died because that should be everyone’s main goal of training.
It was the Moon’s great fortune to have George on the floor. His tenacity, grace and elegance impressed us all; he was completely intentional. He was in many ways, our guiding light, illuminating a path for a possible future if we so chose it for ourselves. From a Facebook post in October, 2009: “Yesterday I asked one of my fabulous, gorgeous, extremely fit 80+ year old students - who comes to train every day at the dojo, "what is the difference between you and your peers who simply sit or shuffle, waiting for the end?" He said, "it is very simple, they think only about the past. I think only about now."
George moved back to California to take care of his former wife as she died. He’d be well into his 90’s now and I trust if he is still alive, he is taking very good care of himself.
2009 was robust for the Moon’s evolution and for our overall training. We continued to host CXX, CB, Gaspar and of course CXW. 2009 is when our community of training pals was really growing and bonding. We travelled around the country for any Chen Xiao Wang workshop we could get ourselves to but also to see our friends. CXW always came in the fall in time for the birthdays of Betty Dong, Allison Helm and me, so for years were all together, attending workshops in San Francisco, San Diego and Phoenix. Betty Dong and I also began attending seminars in Florida together, hosted by James Cravens. In 2009 we were to meet “The Tennessee Boys.” Earl Morgan and Joe Rea Phillips are two brothers who remain good friends to this day.
2009 is also the year where one of the few renown female Chens, Chen Gui Zhen, aka, the “Queen of Double Swords,” slept on my couch and taught me her double sword in the park across from my house. It’s a story in and of itself, but suffice to say it begins with CXW asking me after dinner, “how long does it take to get to the train station?”
George, Chen Gui Zhen, San Diego, Seattle, Tennessee