Graduation

I didn't blog last week. This whole wind up process I'm finding to be really overwhelming. Packing up our room felt so good. Brandi and I are more or less ready to leave. We did a preliminary pack today, and I think all is going well. I'm trying not to think about all the things I'm going to have waiting for me when I get home. It's hard though.. I'm excited about all the new things I get to experience, but I'm also feeling a lot of anxiety about trying to get back into a normal lifestyle. I mean normal by my standards anyways. So I'm not sleeping great, and I'm pretty exhausted. Thankfully, all of my classmates and I are sort of dealing with this at the same time, so everyone's been really supportive of one another. The funniest thing about it is, that as far as a class goes, we're pretty much done. Many of my classmates haven't been going to training for almost two weeks, and sometimes I don't even see them for days. But emotionally, we're all so much more in tune than we've ever been before. Strange how we couldn't seem to manage that over the years... Anyways, I'm going to share a quote that I've been repeating to myself pretty frequently the last couple of weeks.

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”  ― Dalai Lama XIV

Gansu

Well, I went on a totally awesome holiday. I haven't blogged in ages due to lack of VPN, but now I'm back!

Went to a province in China called Gansu which ethnically is very interesting. There's a lot of minority groups including Tibetans and Muslims and so everywhere we went was very culturally diverse. We stopped first at a town with Tibetan grottoes and I hiked my butt off. After our first day My calves were literally too shaky to hold me up if I straightened my legs. It was so beautiful, but very freezing at night time. I also managed to get a sunburn at the same time. High altitude is funny like that...

Next went to the rainbow mountains. Fantastic, although there were an incredible amount of tourists there. Some of the viewing platforms were so crowded you couldn't even move. Reminded me of taking the metro. Watched the sunset there and it was truly awe inspiring.


After this went to a town called Dunhuang which is located in the Gobi Desert. I've never seen the desert before so this kinda blew my mind. We spent the first night sleeping in the desert with a small tour group. I haven't seen the stars like that in I don't know how long. There was no moon also so I could see the milky way really clearly. Hiking up sand mountains though.. hard.  I was sweating, but since it was so dry it was like I was just pushing salt out through my pores. Also riding a camel.. not comfortable. After the desert we went to some Buddhist caves built on the ancient silk road and the art there was pretty incredible. Went to a desert oasis and watched the sunset. It was an amazing experience.

The best thing about the trip though was the reminder that Chinese people are really interesting and that there's so many fascinating places in China that I've never seen. There's so much history here and different landscapes to explore. You can go from desert to jungle, to mountainous to ocean side. It's really an amazing country but it can be easy to forget when you feel like you're training in a zoo (due to the numerous photographers/spectators at the temple), and when you feel trapped in the place you're living. Sometimes a change of scenery can really change your perspective. 

The Shower

So living in China often presents many difficulties while trying to be environmentally conscious. There's no phosphate free soaps, all of the prepackaged foods have like 4 layers of packaging, the tap water is undrinkable, so any short term students just buy bottles of water.  There's so many things every day that really bother me, but I have little communication skills, and so I mostly end up bottling up a lot of the words I want to say.

Brandi and I do our best to be conscious consumers. I reuse bags, I buy very little of the prepackaged foods, and we've bought a water filter. I try to every day make conscious choices about how much clothing I'm going to wear and how often I'm going to wash it. It's summertime here now though and it's usually around 40degrees, and training outside you sweat a lot and don't smell too pretty. So in the past I've been showering twice a day, once after morning practice, and once in the evening. I wasn't satisfied with this, so I've exchanged my morning shower with a 'French' bath. Which is really just me washing myself with a cloth in the sink I just try to make it feel fancy.

You know it's funny. We're all so obsessed with our hygiene at home, it probably seems normal to many people to be showering twice a day, but it's something that I can't imagine I'll pick up. If I can more or less roll around on the ground and sweat all day, and not really smell too bad, then I can't imagine, while living at home in my nice clean house, going to nice clean gym, and sitting in some nice fresh grass, that I would be all that dirty. Now I'm not saying I don't intend to bathe anymore, but I think if we all just let go of our ideas of what clean is, we could really do the earth a favour. I just read an article, that's got some old school ideas that we might want to consider reusing.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/15/why-modern-bathroom-wasteful-unhealthy-design?CMP=fb_gu

The Struggle

So I've been struggling to think about things to blog about recently. My training's sort of in a place where I'm not learning anything new, but instead I'm learning new things about the old stuff I learned. I'm really enjoying having the time to review my forms, and to be conscious of my movement.

So much of my time here has been spent working on group forms and performances, that this opportunity to figure out my own movement is something I've been needing for a long time. It's pretty incredible how you can practice something hundreds of times, and then you come back to look at the details of it, and you don't really even know what you're doing. Mindless movement is sometimes in it's own way meditative. But it's hard to improve what you're doing without being truly engaged.

I've also been working on my emotions, and I feel like I've changed so much since I've been here. Just recently my class encountered some turbulence in regards to what we are trying to accomplish and what our Master expects from us. I was proud of myself for not falling into the emotional traps he lays out for us. I handled it very calmly and I feel even more confident in myself now because of it. I'm strong enough to deal with these situations.

Friendship

I've noticed something about a lot of the Chinese people that live in Wudang. Most of the adults here don't seem to have many, if any, friends. At first it's something that you don't notice, because most Chinese people are very friendly to one another, so you'll see complete strangers sitting around talking at the park together. But when you really get to know some of the people, you start to see a pattern. There's many people that are business associates, or other sorts of acquaintances, but it's rare to see friends spending a lot of time together.

So I expressed this observation to one of my classmates, and he said something that I found confusing. He said he didn't find it strange because many of us think that we have many friends, but then in a few years, how many of them will still be around? So are they 'real' friends?

I've made so many new friends over the past five years here and I consider myself lucky to have met so many people from around the world. During my time here, I've also lost some friends. People that I've bonded with but never seen again from home that I just can't seem to manage to keep in touch with. Maybe they've started families and just don't have as much time to spend with their ol' pal Mel.

But when this happens, I've learned to accept it. People grow apart, and they change, and sometimes that means that you lose a friend. But to me, that has never meant that they weren't a "true" friend. They were a part of my life when I needed them, or when we had something to share with one another. Maybe now, that part of our lives is over. But I cherish the love and memories of every person that has impacted my life and helped me to become who I am today.

Apathy

I've been fighting my own personal battle against apathy for most of my adult life. When I'm disappointed in society and individual people it becomes very difficult to stay passionate and present in my own life. I think it can be so easy to become cynical and bitter. This state of mind leads me directly into feeling apathetic towards life in general.  Just sit down, and forget about the world around me. I find myself asking the questions like "why should I care?" and "what's the point?".

I've been disappointed so many times in the past 5 years here, and I imagine I will be struggling with these feelings throughout the rest of my life. I expect a lot from myself, and so have a tendency to also expect a lot from other people. It's hard for me to keep in mind sometimes that other people aren't me, and they have different values and ideas about what is important to them.

At the same time, I try to maintain the faith that people are inherently good. I've been following the news of the Enbridge Northern Gateway project, and in some ways, I'm so disappointed in the Federal governments' decision. But, I'm also really happy that so many people are standing up for their rights and what they want. I watched a pretty interesting Ted Talk recently about apathy and I thought it had a very valuable message.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy?utm_medium=on.ted.com-facebook-share&utm_campaign=&utm_content=awesm-publisher&utm_source=facebook.com&awesm=on.ted.com_stqZ

It's been too long

So I've fallen off track with some of my goals lately. Particularly, calligraphy and blogging. When I made these commitments at the beginning of the year I wasn't cooking for myself because I knew it would be really difficult to manage my free time to maintain these goals. But, since I've had worms, I've started cooking all my own food again, and it's reminded me how sometimes even when you're making simple things, it can take a fair amount of time. If I had proper equipment and a kitchen, I'm sure I could cut this time down, but I don't, so I'm just working with what I've got. Which is basically a paring knife, and a hotplate with wok. It can be interesting sometimes.

So this week I've been trying to reorganize my daily schedule a little bit and I've been able to pick up some of the things I let fall off. We've also been having a fair amount of internet troubles of late, which has thrown off my blogging schedule. I've discovered that I'm really becoming a creature of habit.

My good friend MoMo is back for the summer, so I'm pretty excited about that. We also had a great class yesterday on jump kicks and aerials (which I am far from achieving) but we were actually given some good feedback and also some steps we can work on to possible improve our coordination. When it comes to jumps, it usually ends up being the people that can already do them practicing, and everyone else kind of standing around watching. But this time we split up into two groups and spent some time working on the actual technique. I think I improved more in that one class than I have in the past few years.