It's almost 10pm and I have just spent 3 hours going back over almost 18 years of this blog, saving some photos, writing, quotes and links that I have been meaning to gather together for quite some while. I was not expecting to be so moved by seeing all our faces getting younger by the minute, as I scrolled back to when I started this blog in 2005, three years after I officially started teaching T'ai Chi.
If you are reading this, and know me from classes, whether very well, or just for a brief time, then I send you my warmest good wishes and hope that this finds you well and well-loved. How incredible it has been to immerse myself in memories of the wider T'ai Chi family by looking through this blog in its entirety for the every first time. There was the news that I was inviting my teacher to come and teach my students at Drumblair Lodge, Aberdeenshire, in the Winter of 2005-6. Wonderful to know that many of you still practise and teach what you have been learning all these years. This makes me so happy.
I recently heard back from Megan, who used to study with Mark a decade ago, and who remembered me as 'always being there'. Indeed! It was good to be able to share lots of what is in the school's Dropbox, so that she can practice at home, now she is far away. Every year someone drops in at Mark's who used to study with John Kells, as happened last week. Mark told me how relieved and at home the student felt being in his class.
There are so many people I miss, some moved away, some left, some passed on. Everybody left an impression. Some of my old students now study with Mark or Kevin, others elsewhere, others no longer practise. For those that do, I hope that T'ai Chi brings you a still point in your lives. Since the pandemic stopped me teaching in person in March 2020, I have only taught online, and currently I do not teach at all. After 20 years, it was a good time to take a break. Now, nature, writing, teaching craft and making art take up much of my time, but Central Earth is still fundamental. I am waiting for a dear relative to have a place I can stay in London in the near future, and then I will be able to come and study with Mark at Tuesday and Wednesday classes sometimes, with a quiet, safe place to stay, (which is essential for me, since last year's uprooting events). I plan to be at the November workshop if I can find someone who can put me up.
I had forgotten how much we had all shared here on this blog, news, poems, classes, photos, comings and goings, births and deaths. I intend to leave this blog here, as long as Google leaves Blogger here for free, I guess. If you'd like to be in touch, my email address hasn't ever changed, so you can find me if you want to. In the meantime I can feel it will soon be time to wend my way back to T'ai Chi classes, though probably not teaching in person. I am going to help Mark record an online course, and see how that goes. I may also do a short one for all the chi kung I teach, as it has been so helpful to my friends with long Covid, which was a bit if good news recently.
I have spent at least 20 years in rooms with people, wonderful people, whether for T'ai Chi, art, or before that, a decade of music indoors in studios. It feels like a combination of time outdoors, family time, and private time is still what calls me at the moment, for a bit longer. So if I don't see you in person very soon, but you are one of the excellent people I have had the pleasure of just seeing scrolling back through this blog, then may I wish you a very fruitful autumn and peaceful winter. Warmest greetings to you from stormy Bournemouth,
Caro.
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