Showtime & the Swedish/Danish connection

I've come home from an eventful weekend in Sweden, where me an fellow Wing Tsun practicioners held some succesful shows friday and saturday. We filmed a lot, so hopefully this will result in a well-cut video sometime soon. After the shows we went out eating with the Lund guys and girls and discussed future events.

Meanwhile, at the WT Center, Dai-Sifu held an instructor seminar with a lot of swedish instructors attending. So, it was almost like an exchange-program this weekend.



Our Swedish Friends:
http://ving-tsun.se/
http://lundswingtsun.se/

Catfight anno 1901

The Gordon Sisters boxing on May 6, 1901. If anyone's counting, that's 108 years ago.

Reading Books

I highly recommend Alan Gibson's books, "Why Wing Chun Works" in three volumes. Lucid explanations and a lot of pictures makes it an utterly worthwhile read.

"follow the rules of Wing Chun and train for maximum effect, with the minimum of effort" (from Why Wing Chun Works II)





Here is a link to the homepage of Alan Gibson's club: http://www.wingchun.org.uk/home.htm

Sifu Wong Shun Leung

Respect!

Painting

I'm painting Hall 1 "The Yip Man Hall" from grey to nice soft sand-colours.

What's in the I-Phone? The soundtrack for Miami Vice. I know how to follow a theme!

Resurrection time!

I'm back in the blog! My Creative Writing-course ends on tuesday, which means that I can write for FUN again! Not that the course has been fun, it has, but at the same time I have been forced to focus and write my assignments. So I have forgotten about my blog and it's now to be changed. Resurrection time!

Today I've worked and worked out. Kristina came in early and kept me company in the bar for a couple of hours. Time just flew away because we had so much fun. Then I trained with her after work, an acid-burning leg session in the gym. I'm gifted with a pair of very muscular legs (thank you Ares!) to begin with, so they need a lot of challenge before they really burn. I'm not satisfied with myself if I can walk home afterwards.
I will prepare som nice food now, I feel I could eat a kilo of raw meat in one take.

Happy Birthday to me!

I turn 27 today!
Birthdays always give me a bit of anguish, I think about that I'm getting older and all the things I want to do, and how fast time goes. And all those moments that I would like to freeze and keep forever.

Time is strange. I feel like quoting Marvell:

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

But it's also nice to have birthday, to be celebrated by loved ones and get special treatment. And the older I get the more happier I become, I know myself better, know what I want. I get better at not wasting time on unimportant things. Focus sharpens.

But the most important thing remains just to enjoy life.

Fight with words

There has been less update than usual on my blog. The reason is probably that I try to wring out the words on the tasks of the creative writing course. Right now I'm working on an essay on the wooden dummy. I will not be finished until the end of the week, but here is a sample, feel free to comment on it:

I invite you to come up close. Come on, step inside, and take a look at the strange figure, its heavy trunk of lacquered wood, its rigid arms without hands, still pointing finger at you, beckoning you. Let me introduce to you the Wooden Dummy, a very special kind of training equipment belonging to Kung Fu. But before you trace your fingers against its shiny surface, let me go into depth with what this piece of wood is all about.
...

Alone I enter the kwon, the Kung Fu training hall. Alone I approach the strange figure at the end of the room. This is my new enemy; this is my new best friend. I have seen him so many times before, but he looks different now, bathed in moonlight, with his dark shadow cast on the floor. It rests there like a black bridge between an abyss, or even the abyss itself. The sharp smell of chamfer that lingers in the kwon soothes my mind as it sometimes soothed my sore muscles after hard training sessions.

Actually, this room is the very temple for training, for striving, for trying, but not for perfection itself. There is nothing wrong with trying, I tell myself. But I can hear my heart beat in the thin silence, the heart that tells me otherwise. I can hear my careful footsteps; as if walking not to wake some sleeping beast, and I get the strangest feeling that I’ve done all this before.

Some Bart Cham Dao knives lies scattered on the floor by the big windows, someone has forgotten to lock them in, and now they lay there, shining in the moonlight. I’m tempted to pick them up, but the cold shine reminds me that they are way beyond my grade. I still have many years ahead of me before I can call myself master, and I’m once again reminded that Kung Fu is the Chinese word for “Hard Work”.

I stop in the middle of the kwon, past the knives, to look up at the picture of Yip Man, the founder of my particular linage of Wing Tsun. I clasp my palms in front of me and make a short bow, as is the traditional way of entering a Kwon. I paid my respect to tradition. Now I don’t feel so much like an intruder anymore, and it takes away the sour taste of sacrilege from my mouth. Why am I so nervous? Nobody can see me. It’s just him and me now. He’s cold and heartless, made of wood, and I reach out to touch him. He has three arms and one leg. My arms slide easily on the polished wooden arms but I cannot move them. In my despair I recall the soft warm skin of my training-partner, and his very negotiable body, arms that could give in, mistakes that could give me the upper hand. This is something entirely different.

Let’s knock on wood.

Hunting words

I have at last begun my novel-writing project, which will involve my knowledge in Wing Tsun, occultism and anthropology. I'm doing the outline right now, squeezing my brain for inspiration. I recall a good quote:

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club
–Jack London

That is indeed a Wing Tsun approach to writing!

In my case it means that I force myself to write at least one page a day, witholding nothing. I also go after my inner editor with a club or some chainpunches. I silence my inner editor and go crazy. It has proven to be a very efficient way, because among 30 lines maybe one is really good and worth using. And that one good line might inspire a new one, and a new one and so on.

I'm also starting a course called Creative Writing at Malmö Högskola now in january, which will hopefully yeild some results in my word-hunt.

Got Power!

I had a day off from work, made a few fast sketches in carchoal, trying to get the inspiration going for some artistic project. Later on I went to the gym where I trained like hell with Kristina, the awesome personal trainer i got: http://www.kristinadybdahl.dk

It was leg-day, which means I will probably not be able to walk tomorrow.

I love lifting weights! Many people find it boring, and maybe it is in the beginning, but as time goes on a new insight and feel for the body developes. To find that spot of concentration, where your mind goes into the muscle, and you seem to feel every single fibre... swelling with power then burning with pain. Ah, nice!

To me, that is meditation, and I go about the rest of the day happy, relaxed and looking forward to the next session. Of course it's not my only meditation, I do practice my asanas as well. And Wing Tsun of course, which sometimes drifts of into meditative flows as well. WT is not generally regarded as being an internal martial art, but still body and soul changes, still all this power rushing and resounding... Internal/external dichotomy becomes superficial, it's more about your own focus and will. Your martial art can be just as spiritual as you will it to be, you don't have to dress up like a shaolin monk to accomplish it :-)

Be true to yourself, how your body is responding. If it feels good it's probably right for you. "Energy is eternal delight".

It may sound like I only do weightlifting now, and no WT :-) hopefully, I will post something about my WT training soon. The goal is 1:st tech. sometime 2009. It should be possible, I train with the best.

New Year!

Once again it's a new year. With it comes renewed ambitions, new dreams and goals. It's a bit strange that a number, 2009, can have that power. We like to think that a new year is somehow essentially different, 01/01/09 different from 31/12/08 but it's really just 24 hours like any other.

Speaking of which, I started to watch the TV-series "24" last week. I got completely hooked, so I've spent most of the christmas holiday in front of the screen, but it's been a nice break from an otherwise very busy month. So many books I had planned to read, a blog to update, but... "24"is just way too exciting.