Over the past few years especially, I have noticed a distinct seasonal component to my feelings of despondence, lack of motivation and despair. And in retrospect -- where SO many things are so much easier to see -- it is only natural that a lad raised in Florida from age 2 ½ to 10 would be at least partly solar-powered.
So in these cold, northern, and more importantly eastern, coordinates, when the days get shorter and the end of daylight savings time thoroughly screws anyone who isn’t up at 6 or 7 a.m. out of sunlight for most of the day, I really find my internal batteries running on empty quite easily.
Even protracted warm weather like we had in New England this year didn’t really help because it was often cloudy and it isn’t the heat I need, it’s the sun’s rejuvenating rays. Throw in a holiday, some sleep disruption and the benefit/curse of being able to set my own hours (and natural tendency to want to stay up late), and my system got all out of whack. And of course, I got a really nasty cold on top of everything else.
So December was a bit of a rough month for me. I maintained most of my obligations professionally and socially, but I didn’t attend a single Shim Gum Do class for the latter half of the month until the week before my test for Yellow Belt on Jan. 17th. Nor did I attend Quaker meeting either, missing both the pre-Christmas singing at Beacon Hill Friends Meeting as well as the special Christmas Eve worship.
Fortunately for me, the solstice comes before the New Year. And by the time everyone around me was turning their own thoughts to renewal, the days had been lengthening perhaps enough for me to feel like things were improving as well.
It was with that sense of optimism that I traveled to the Woolman Hill retreat center in Deerfield, Mass., for the Midwinter retreat of the NEYM Young Adult Friends (Jan 7-10), where the smell of the wood stoves burning for heat and the brilliant stars that can only be seen in a clear cold winter sky provided a welcome winter ritual I hadn’t realized I’d missed.
The retreat itself was also a wonderful, warm and caring environment for me to explore some of the issues that had been troubling me -- and to sneak away and practice my sword techniques just enough so I wouldn’t be going back to the temple completely cold and worying about having forgotten everything. Practice, as it turns out, is a pretty good cure for _that_ particular manifestation of anxiety.
As usual, it was great to see the wisdom and compassion they showed in leading workshops, interest groups and different styles of Quaker worship, especially the sometimes thorny issues that can (and did) come up in a meeting for worship with a concern for business. (Note, I use, “they” above, because with the exception of an interest group I pulled together on the fly that was more like a conversation than anything else, I was not _leading_ anything at the retreat). I’d go into more detail of my experiences, but this post is already verging on too lengthy and there will be a formal reflection with other YAFs this weekend (Jan 23) so I will leave those thoughts, as some Quakers are wont to say, for more seasoning.
This past weekend (Jan 16-17) was the first weekend when I was elligible to test to advance from white belt to yellow. The testing weekend consists of a mandatory workshop on Saturday in which the instructors, primarily Sa Bu Nim and Chong Kwan Jang Nim, can assess the students and ensure they are ready for the test, and then the tests themselves on Sunday.
I had been invited to participate in the last workshop in November even though I wasn’t elligible (or ready) to test then because of my work editing/translating Sa Bu Nim’s new poetry book. And it hadn’t been until that point that I realized that there are a number of other black belts and masters teaching their own students in other locations, which made the need for the workshop assessment more clear. Shim Gum Do tries not to bring a student forward to test until he or she is ready to pass.
So I was largely ready for what came Saturday: practice, but encouragement rather than criticism or nit-picking (I didn’t realize how to phrase it until later, but I was not going to be graded on the precise angles of my arms in each stance or the direction my feet were pointing after every step), along with some basic instructions of what to expect for the first test: the layout of the room, when and to whom to bow and to stop immediately if I made a mistake and ask to start the form over.
More important than any of that, though, was the meditation session. In meeting for worship, Quakers sometimes describe feeling the sense of the Holy Spirit or the Light moving within a gathered meeting, whether or not anyone speaks into the silence. Our belief in the divine nature of this feeling comes through the earliest Quakers referencing Matthew 18:20 (“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” KJV).
And although I was supposed to be “mind training” or practicing the sword forms in my meditation during the workshop, I had decided to use the meditation time as just unguided meditation. I was alone in the room with an unfamiliar master (who I later was introduced to as Hines Kwan Jang Nim) whose religious beliefs I certainly don’t know, but I still felt that same presence. To me, that was a welcome assurance that Shim Gum Do is, and will continue to be an important part of my spiritual journey for the forseeable future.
 |
| The (sharp) metal swords safely removed from learners like me |
There was also the cohort of Shin Boep students (including quite a few children) advancing, who made an impressive line when it came to test their fighting forms.
As for me, I completed my forms with only two major mistakes, and I caught myself both times. So I advanced to the rank of Seventh Degree Yellow Belt. The journey continues.
