May 9, 2016

May 9^th.  For the past seven years this has been a day of special remembrance for our family. There is no greater way to honour great beauty than to place ourselves together in the mountains, streams and flowers of God’s magnificent wilderness.

Very subtle Kung Fu photo bomb 

Earth Day

Today is earth day, and I feel fast.  You should too.  We are both flying at 107,182 km/hr as passengers of earth around the sun. It’s a dangerous place to live also.  Half a million detectable earthquakes each year, average of 100 lightning ground strikes a second.  With only .003% of its available water available for humans, and one third of its land mass deserts, it can be a pretty inhospitable place.

But it is also magnificent. 3.04 Trillion trees, give rise to a precise gas mixture that keeps my skin from melting off, and which makes the smell of a fresh rain wonderful.

A precise distance from a star, with an orbit and rotation of mathematical genius.  Allowing for the only place in the universe to support water in its three states, liquid, gas and solid.  I ponder this while breathing the moist air and drinking a glass of ice water…..mmmm good.

With an estimated 10,000 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on every beach on earth; you would think finding a substitute would be easy peesy.  According to scientists much smarter than I…it’s not.  So let’s take today to contemplate the gift of life in such a miraculous setting and use every other day to love it, enjoy it and protect it.

Rice flour, my new best friend

I was lost in a particular thought last week while savoring a most tender and delicious glazed donut from the Italian Bakery.  Over the past couple years I have followed the journals of I Ho Chuan members and received enlightenment when it came to challenges of the dietary order. Huge changes from giving up meat entirely, to increasing water consumption, to removing gluten.

Realistically though, how hard could a gluten free diet be? Seeing how well my 10 year old adapted to a dietary restricted way of life, made the whole process look fairly easy.  Over the past couple years, we have had our challenges, with a few minor arguments, and a bit of frustration.  All in all he is an amazing little guy that has adapted and taken on the responsibility like a champ.

I, as a father that is supposed to show empathy, especially in the early stages of the adaptation of my child to a gluten free diet, was a complete failure.  Recognizing that failure over a most wonderful and glutenous snack, I decided a dose of empathy was in order.  Perhaps a little rash, I decided this was the week that I would strike out on the same dietary restrictions as my son for the next seven days.

It isn’t just the constant reminder of the things you can’t have, like the smell of fresh bread in the morning bakery department, the oodles of garnishes and spices that are on the restricted list, the craving of rich thick homemade pasta.  That is the mind over matter part, which is acerbated by the warped and twisted physical response of my body.  A constant hunger, or at least the feeling of an empty tummy, an apparent loss of energy, change in sleep patterns and mood, a ravenous search to find a suitable substitute to fill the carbohydrate demand you left behind.

 

There are substitutes, and in a lot of cases more healthy ones.  It has meant more fruit and vegetables, more water consumption, alternatives to wheat flour carbs (most I would argue are an acquired taste).  I am not sure if this gets easier, or weather a week is even close to long enough to find out.  At the end of all this though, if nothing else, I will have a greater appreciation for what my son has accomplished, and is continually challenged with.

Personal goal number 1

This past week found me making progress toward one of my personal goals.  What started as a personal goal devoting volunteer time a couple years ago, has led to a really cool goal for this year.  Camp Teepee Pole is a youth camp near Sundre Alberta.  Last year a building was donated as the start to an Environmental Awareness Center.  The building will be a place for teaching about plants and animals, water conservation, ecosystems, preservation, and whatever the heck else I can think of…

The building itself is eventually planned to be near free energy, collecting rain water, solar energy, wood heated and so forth.  It is definitely going to be a work in progress for years to come.

I am really excited for this project, the sky is the limit, but…I am feeling a bit overwhelmed.  My goal this year is to have the center with some content for the kids by July camp time. Others with much more skill in the construction field are looking after the building development.  So, this is a bit of an appeal to the I Ho Chuan group to those that have experience with this sort of thing, or those that don’t but just have some good input, or potentially resources that might help me out.

 

March 28, 2016

Our family is one of many impacted this past period by the downturn in the economy. As a generation that has grown up in the absence of much hardship (80’s kid I confess), I have been extremely blessed.  I haven’t seen wars that require conscription, soil that has dried up and blown away for years at a time, political unrest or violence, starvation or excessive poverty. Because of this fact, I often feel guilty at what I take for granted.

In writing on this, I by no means want to belittle the current situation in our province, with the understanding that although our family has seen impact, there are others that have seen two incomes lost, business failures, massive increase in costs and more families dipping well below the poverty line than ever, and I remain very empathetic to those situations.

I am reminded years ago earlier in my training when our family was looking at potentially moving to Grande Prairie for work opportunities.  I approached Master Brinker at the time because walking away from Kung Fu at that point seemed like the most viable option in light of the fact that there was no training facility of Silent River calibre.  Well circumstances have a way of changing, and things always work out in one way or another.  What I remember most was Master Brinker saying that the time away from the Kwoon could be the best thing for my Kung Fu training.  Notice how I said time away from the Kwoon, not time away from Kung Fu training.  At the time I really had a hard time understanding this, but I think after many years I may have a better appreciation for this.  I believe, (and feel free to correct my interpretation in comment!) was that necessity for change and adaptation would in the long run make me a better martial artist.  It would require added effort to make classes via video conference.  Less face to face accountability would mean more self-discipline.  It would require developing a system to be your own critic, and to be more reliant on being self-taught.  I really believe that year in Grande Prairie was monumental in helping adapt with my time in and out of town for the years to follow.

To bring this back to my original thought on current economy, I could regard this past year and a half as turmoil, terror, and the year upcoming as doom and gloom, or I could I approach this with the same positive and wise perspective that was gifted to me years ago.  The fact is the current situation will require some major adjustments to our way of living, but at the end of 2016 I can be sure that we will be streamlined into a more efficient, leaner and meaner, version of our current family.

March 20, 2016

This week was the perfect example of how not to blog.  Somewhere this week I forgot the secret to blogging consistency; that being preparation.  Journaling is no different than any other part of training in the martial arts.  For me, it is a system of mindful notes that I take through the days that will constitute my journal entry at weeks end. 

That lack of mindfulness of the past week has caused two things.  The first being a lack of good ingredients for a journal entry, and the second being a feeling like I’ve ripped myself off.

Sometimes we need a reminder why things are important to us.  In this case it was good habits that yielded rewards that I began to take for granted.  Drop those good habits for even a week, and there is a sense that something is missing.  This week was just a reminder that taking breaks from good habits just don’t serve us like we think they should.

March 6, 2016

Well, I’m going to continue on with chit chat about weapons this week.  I really appreciated the discussion about the weapon challenges of the team members this past meeting.  Challenges like training the non-dominant hand, working with injuries, expectations in taking on a school form, vs. coming up with your own.

I didn’t speak much about working with the dart this past meeting.  I think it is because I am trying to wrap my head around where I am at, and how I am going to get where I want to be.  I want to learn new and interesting techniques, but I know under the time crunch for beta version at the end of the month, I won’t be able to do that. I have found that coming up with a rope dart technique is very very challenging. When something formulates, it seems to take an incredible amount of repetition to be able to duplicate just the single technique.  If I look at the basics, the simple shoot has so many little details that a person could spend a year simply perfecting the accuracy and power in that alone.

Speaking of the basic shoot, to me, the dart is a weapon that requires extreme accuracy and precision to be effectively called a weapon. Doing techniques that show fancy spins and wraps are entertaining, but if the dart cannot hit a small target (accuracy) and duplicate that result (precision) then it hasn’t been mastered. If the dart is flung with accuracy and precision, but lacks power or is canted off of straight from the body, its effectiveness is again minimized.  This is really where it differs from the meteor hammer which relies more on blunt force trauma.

So this is the duel going on in my head. The fight between flamboyancy and effectiveness.  In reality I know just perfecting the basics may take a lifetime to master.