Full Circle~BaGua In The Snow
video
We had some snow here in Ashland one morning and when I arrived at the bandshell where I teach (all weather, all year 'round), I found my student and friend Neil Buettner practicing BaGua. The circle he was walking reminded me of a Zen "empty circle" brush painting and the whole scene struck me as very beautiful. I set this footage to an old song of mine called "Full Circle" that I recorded back in 1989 with my old musical partner Victor Cummings. Neil is doing some basic circle walking as well as some of the "Mother Form" palm changes that I learned from Andy Dale of Xin Qi Shen dojo in Seattle. BaGua is not my specialty, I'm mainly into T'ai-Chi, but our particular style of T'ai-Chi (The Symmetrical Yang Style of Grandmaster Tchoung Ta-Tchen) has some significant BaGua influences. T'ai-Chi is like my main dish and BaGua and Hsing-I are more like spices. They add a lot but they are not my main area of study. Neil makes this look fairly easy, but it was really slippery and slushy out t...