Vanilla SOUL

Most of the time in Tai Chi, I wear a light weight white shirt. It’s automatic. Sunday comes, I head to the closet, pull out one of the white athletic shirts and feel ready to head up to Seattle for three hours of qigong and tai chi, maybe even a bit comforted by the choice.  Recently I ask myself why the white shirt was important, and got the answer swiftly.

I immediately thought back to Dave Schenck. As I was discovering stretching and tai chi classes, Dave became my first true martial arts teacher. I had others, but he was the first in which I bought in to being his “student”. His studio became a safe haven, where I stretched out, practiced a rather active form of Tai Chi and applied form,  and started to feel that I might belong in the lineage, however tentatively. That lasted for about two years before I headed West from Ohio to where I live now in Tacoma, Washington.

Dave is gone now, a victim of prostate cancer. He passed when he was 57 years old, just seven years older than me as I write this passage and it looks, from his pictures, like he was in damned good shape until near the end. Dave was not an extremely educated man, but he was learned, very respectful of his art and lineage and he understood the importance and discipline of practice. He was also kind and many women, perhaps more than men, came to him to learn and to feel completely respected and honored in his dojo.

So I wear white, because I honor Dave. I honor my lineage, however informal that may be. I bring a little of my beginnings into a practice now with a teacher who is anything but a beginning style teacher. As kind as she is, she challenges us to go deeply into the experience of the art form, to feel what we learn, to remain available and to stay with our moments, however imperfect we might be mentally. She feels like the “next” teacher, the right one, the one (albeit twenty years later) that was supposed to come after Dave for me.  I am grateful, if not a bit apprehensive and challenged by this call to deepen. But I am heartened as well,

I “wear” Dave, my martial roots, in Kim’s dojo. I have not discarded or forgotten my beginnings, nor am I languishing there. On some level, it is getting harder, mentally if not physically, and perhaps because I am older, I understand the stakes and my mortality within those stakes a bit better now. I need my foundation and it comes in the form of a light weight white shirt, wicking fabric, that joins me with a man who died about three years ago, but has stayed with me even when I had not consciously thought of him in nearly two decades, except in passing.

So, perhaps, it is more than attire. Our teachers who bring us to physical practice, who awaken us, not just as for the sake of playing a role, on a team or event, but as part of a discipline–they remain in our muscle memory. We are influenced, we are altered, we are brought aboard, and those sequences, those ways of moving, those ways we hold ourselves, they stay with us. The lineage is passed right through our skin into our muscle and bone and gait and carriage and execution of each practice we pursue. Think of one “movement mentor”, one “be in your body” teacher. Think about what he or she taught you, what she modeled, what he provoked or inspired, and remember, you are a living composite. You have the ability to evoke the best of your teachers and bring that influence into the next dojo, or gym or yoga studio or softball diamond or soccer field, or heavy bag studio, running path or swimming pool. You are a vessel holding the influence of many who bothered to take time inviting you to be a physical being, to live in your body, to awaken and engage, to strive, to live consciously and physically. Whatever that history is, wear it. Wake up, drop down into your lineage and to head to your next stop, wearing what you have lived and what lives within you.

Next Sunday, I wear the white shirt.