Kung fu from dawn to dusk
Saturday was a long but very fun day of kung fu.
I got to the park before 7:00 to stretch and warm up and get in some last-minute review and watch the mallards chase the lady ducks. By 8:00, the park was packed with walkers for a diabetes 5K walk, some kind of get-together for golden retrievers (omigod those dogs are so pretty!!!), and bunches and bunches of us wacky kung fu people. Our school's elder masters came in from Colorado, and that brought in students from several of our schools -- from our own Phoenix school, and from Tucson, Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, San Jose, and Los Angeles. It was really cool getting to meet some of those folks.
The first item on the agenda was belt testing. I performed far from perfectly (very, very far), but the panel was generous and I made it to brown belt. The longer I do martial arts, the more I realize that belt ranks really don't mean much, but moving up to brown belt means that now, in addition learning new material in the upper belt class, I can start attending the lower belt class and instead of learning new stuff there, I can focus on reviewing. I am actually very excited about this, because I really want to feel that I'm doing the basic stuff well. So, Tuesday night, I am going straight back to white belt. Woo!!
After the test, a bunch of our senior students and masters performed some of our more colorful forms, like broad sword and chain whip and various drunken forms (I love those). A pair of sisters from the Vegas school (I think) did a two-person fan form, and it was awesome! You could really tell they practice together a lot, because their timing was perfectly in synch. Quite inspiring.
After a lunch break (Chinese food, of course), we reconvened, and for the next 3.5 hours, Elder Master David taught us a really cool preying mantis form. Mantis forms use a lot of pressure point strikes, so we learned with the aid of rubber acupuncture dolls (sorry, action figures), inserting map pins in all the deadly points we were learning to hit. By the end of it, it looked as though we'd been practicing shaolin voodoo. A fun form to cap off a very fun day.
Today, I rest my aching legs and possibly bottle the batch of beer that I've been letting ferment for the past week. Then it sits in the bottles for another week, when it will either be ready to drink or ready to explode in a deadly hail of shards.
I got to the park before 7:00 to stretch and warm up and get in some last-minute review and watch the mallards chase the lady ducks. By 8:00, the park was packed with walkers for a diabetes 5K walk, some kind of get-together for golden retrievers (omigod those dogs are so pretty!!!), and bunches and bunches of us wacky kung fu people. Our school's elder masters came in from Colorado, and that brought in students from several of our schools -- from our own Phoenix school, and from Tucson, Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, San Jose, and Los Angeles. It was really cool getting to meet some of those folks.
The first item on the agenda was belt testing. I performed far from perfectly (very, very far), but the panel was generous and I made it to brown belt. The longer I do martial arts, the more I realize that belt ranks really don't mean much, but moving up to brown belt means that now, in addition learning new material in the upper belt class, I can start attending the lower belt class and instead of learning new stuff there, I can focus on reviewing. I am actually very excited about this, because I really want to feel that I'm doing the basic stuff well. So, Tuesday night, I am going straight back to white belt. Woo!!
After the test, a bunch of our senior students and masters performed some of our more colorful forms, like broad sword and chain whip and various drunken forms (I love those). A pair of sisters from the Vegas school (I think) did a two-person fan form, and it was awesome! You could really tell they practice together a lot, because their timing was perfectly in synch. Quite inspiring.
After a lunch break (Chinese food, of course), we reconvened, and for the next 3.5 hours, Elder Master David taught us a really cool preying mantis form. Mantis forms use a lot of pressure point strikes, so we learned with the aid of rubber acupuncture dolls (sorry, action figures), inserting map pins in all the deadly points we were learning to hit. By the end of it, it looked as though we'd been practicing shaolin voodoo. A fun form to cap off a very fun day.
Today, I rest my aching legs and possibly bottle the batch of beer that I've been letting ferment for the past week. Then it sits in the bottles for another week, when it will either be ready to drink or ready to explode in a deadly hail of shards.
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