Perception

I arrived in San Francisco last night to complete a long weekend of work, and a weird thing happened. Since joining the program, I kind of lost touch with one of my closest friends from when I lived here. I hadn't seen him since November. He got himself a sweet new apartment, upgrading from a closet sized studio, and invited me to crash with him while I was in town to work. His windows overlook a pretty busy intersection in one of the nicer residential areas of the city, near where I used to live. Shortly after I arrived, we heard a strange noise out on the street. Almost instantly, before it even fully registered, the words "that sounded like a biker being hit by a car" popped out of my mouth. I've never heard that sound before; there was no scream of pain or anything. I don't know why I said that. My friend and his girlfriend were pretty sure it was just a car trying to parallel park that had hit a neighboring car.

However, when we looked out the window a few seconds later, a biker lay unconscious on the road. He appeared to have run a red light and gotten nailed by a car on the cross street. No helmet. I always bike to the office with no helmet, so that was a harsh reminder of the risk I take. The driver had gotten out of his car and a crowd from the sidewalk quickly surrounded him. In less than 3 minutes, there were 6 police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck on the scene. We watched it all play out through the window for a while. After so much time spent at the retreat center, isolated in the woods, its incredibly fascinating to just watch people. Especially so after a sudden, intense, and traumatic event.

I still don't know how I knew it was a biker being hit. It reminds me of a few months ago when I drove Shifu to the SF airport. Heading south on the 101, I drove past a CA highway patrol officer who had set up shop in a hidden alcove on a turn, hoping to catch people speeding. I was driving a reasonable speed, luckily. Shifu was in the passenger seat, eyes closed, head turned away from the window. Without looking up or opening his eyes, he said "Be careful, don't get a ticket." I was shocked. I had thought he was asleep, and could clearly see in my peripheral vision that his eyes had not opened or looked out the window in the stretch of road leading up to the cop. I asked how he knew, and he said he just sensed it, could feel the danger. He said that so many years of martial arts training heightened his sensitivity to that level.

That blew my mind pretty hard, and as I go through the same training, I wonder how my perception and feeling will change.

Intermission

The last post was pretty intense, and I have another intense post I wanted to share. I thought I'd break it up with some of the more mundane happenings lately.

I've decided to make it a priority to post regularly. The act of expressing myself with words has always been cathartic, and has helped me to process my life experiences. It is of course also nice to have a written account of my experience in this program to look back on later, and I'm sure outsiders who are interested in the program enjoy the insight offered by our blog posts.

We've had a few visitors over the last month.

Manu came to us from Germany, though he lives in Canada most of the time. I really enjoyed having him around. His sense of humor, lively energy, engaging conversation, and warm presence were a welcome addition to our family. He cooked us a dish he called "reisflinzen." We had a lot of fun with that word. It sounds so harsh and angry, so stereotypically German. We enjoyed clenching our fists and yelling "REISFLINZEN!" with the best accent we could manage. While counting repetitions during staff training, he normally counted in German. One day I asked him to count in Canadian. Without missing a beat, he began "1, eh? 2, eh?" all the way to 45. I couldn't stop laughing. Despite being 33, he had the energy and spirit of someone 10 years younger. After all the people I've met in offices who seem to be aging and losing their youthful spark before even that age, it was an insight into how much your lifestyle affects you. Sit on your ass in a chair all day, and you start dying earlier. He's lived an interesting life - full of physical activity, travels, active work, and interesting projects, and you can see it in his eyes. I'm glad I got out of the office before it was too late.

Manu had a lot of experience with chainsaws, and Dr. Yang coerced him into taking down some trees for us. I did not enjoy that experience. Not only does using a chainsaw freak me out, but it just doesn't feel good to kill a tree. It looks so sad once it falls. After it's been chopped up, the ground littered with branch fragments, leaves/needles, and sawdust, it looks like a helpless creature has been butchered. After an afternoon spent chopping up 4 50+ foot trees, I had some disturbing dreams that trees were conscious and not at all happy about us cutting them down.

Manu left yesterday, and he will be missed.




As much as I enjoy the company of the full time residents of the retreat center, it really is nice to have guests. If you're reading this and thinking about visiting, you should!

We also have Dr. Wittman visiting, our surrogate mother from Germany. Trained in conventional medicine, she's spent the last couple decades focusing on acupuncture, TCM, and energy medicine, and her skills are pretty impressive. She diagnoses by feeling your pulse and waving her hand around your body to feel your energy field. I had been prescribed some herbs by a Chinese doctor in San Francisco, and I showed them to her without letting her see the bottle or telling her what they were for. After waving them around my body for a second, she told me what they were doing and what organs they were helping, quoting exactly what the other doctor had said. In addition to being warm, loving, and full of laughter, she tends to our medical ailments with treatment that must be considered torture by any civilized definition. I thought acupuncture was supposed to be painless, but with Dr. Wittman, its an exercise in masochism. She's been very helpful to me in my physical and energetic development, despite the painful treatments. She'll be with us for a few weeks (her first visit was in October) and it is great to have her back!



In other news, we had about 12 young children from a local elementary school visit the center for a demonstration. They were interested in having us teach a class up at their school, but the looks on the kids faces as they watched us perform didn't bode well for that plan. We demonstrated Qin Na (joint locks) and Shuai Jiao (take downs), both of which are pretty intense. I don't think those kids have ever seen grown men visiting violence on each other in person. One of the kids started crying by the 2nd or 3rd technique. It probably didn't help that all but one of them were girls.

Also, our little Meowgi caught and ate his first mole! He savored the entire thing, skin, bones, and all. Except the intestines, he somehow managed to eat everything around that. Good kitty =)