About twelve years ago I set out on a big adventure. My boyfriend and I decided to drive from Salt Lake City, Utah to wherever we ended up, which turned out to be Costa Rica, six months later.
That adventure is a whole other story, which maybe I will tell at some point during the course of this blog. Before we set out, however, we took our re-modelled school bus out on a test drive from where we were living, Montreal, to Boston. While there, I came across a cheap book in a remainder pile. It was a book on Zhan Zhuan, a type of Chinese meditation that essentially involves not much more than standing in the same place until every fibre of your body begs for movement.
I'd had a taste of what Zhan Zhuang had to offer a few years back when I'd started Tai Chi lessons in the basement of the Montreal Chinese community center. One day our instructor, Ringo, made us stand in a horse stance (legs shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, as though riding a horse) palms facing each other at waist level. We stood until we could feel a kind of magnetic force between the two palms, which really didn't take very long. Ringo, who came from Hong Kong and seemed to have been studying tai chi since birth, had a way of putting things simply. "Stand like this everyday for an hour outside at sunrise for six months, and you will change." He wouldn't elaborate, partly because his English wasn't great. Ringo had a way of using his poor English to his advantage. He had a boot camp rigour when it came to repeating particular chi kung exercises. Just when we got to the point where our joints were ready to seize up, he would shout "one last times." There was no point in correcting his grammar because "one last times" really meant as many more times as he whimsically chose to inflict on us, which could be five or fifty.
So there wasn't much to gain from prodding him on how we would change after six month of daily sunrise zhan zhuan. The only important thing was that we would change, and from his tone, it sounded like there would be no changing back.
