silent thunder

Interesting, I hadn't ever thought of the first playground. I sure love em though. My son being 11 I've spent the last years really relishing them. Some of the features now are incredible too. I recall an unplanned stop we had to make, to go explore a playground we were driving past... it had a full viking ship surrounded by forts, all made of wood, painted, incredible. I had as much fun as my son. We have three parks within a short walk/bike ride from our place and each have some cool features. One has three full on rock climbing walls, another has a three story rocket ship, and the third features a series of rope bridges and a water fall. Just incredible for a city kid to get some good climbing, tumbling fun. In the Southwest they've taken to making many of the features out of plastics which don't heat up so much in the summer sun, which helps a bit, otherwise for the hot months these things are only useful at night. I sure appreciate how they've developed the new soft mulched recycled rubber material they ground the places with, to protect tiny noggins and bodies from damage when inevitably tumbling.

Yea Minnesota is pretty magical, if you don't mind massive clouds of flies and mosquitoes :). The Pine forests in MN were just out the back door of my Dad's place. The Midwest in general is still covered in much forest we are blessed. I'm always struck when I go back 'home' and take my first breaths coming out of the plane. It's amazing all the moisture and the quality of the air. I can taste the trees in the air. In Brooklyn the forests were an hour or more upstate by train, but Parkour has skillfully proven that cities are rife with structures useful for natural movement. For the seven years I lived there, I used Prospect Park and a few other city features for that training then. The park was amazing and had a myriad of trees for skimming and some of the building features, pagodas, stepped terraces in amphiteaters, foot bridges were great for training natural movements. Golden years for sure.

always

beloved ally!

Potent stuff! Thanks for sharing. And what a great idea Marbles!.. If I could, I'd live in a tree in a heartbeat. I spent many of my best hours getting strong in trees, then napping in their shade. Amazing beings all together. Natural movement seems to be healing and strengthening simultaneously to me. This type of movement engages the full being and encompasses true presence. Mind and Spirit while inseparable from body, are not always engaged actively when we train indoors or move in familiar safe paths. With outdoor, natural movement the mind and spirit are naturally engaged with the body... and the body moves in ways not easily experienced in the dojo, or the gym. Flexes, extensions, rotations, balancing while climbing a tree, or bolder hopping are movements not easily replicated in a gym or with a partner on a mat. My inner teacher taught me early in life that to train in a (dojo) room with people is good. Is useful. Builds skill. To train moving through nature was supreme. Is transcendent. As the world is not a square box with a flat floor, my inner teacher said often and loudly to me. Get outside! Engage! Engage the whole being. Move in nature. So in the 80's I was heading out to the river lines to train, I called it bolder hopping and tree skimming, parkour wasn't in the lexicon yet. What it really was, was a lot of fun and great training at the same time. I suffered from some boredom in square rooms. I'd often coax partners to come with me by asking if they wanted to 'go for a hike'. They either got hooked or never showed up again. So rather than endless forms, I opted to spend my out of school training hours intensively climbing trees, weaving in and throughout the boughs and limbs of trees at speed over and over again to exhaustion. Pick a branch, get a running start, kick up and pull yourself into the tree and climb to the top as quickly as you are able. Weave your way through and down, leap and roll out of the tree. Reset and have at it again, but take a new route to the top and back. Above all, be engaged and move with intensity and surety... engage the entire being, affect true motion and as a result use the full range of strength and flexibility inherent in a human form. There is an entirely different matrix engaged when climbing a tree than standing on the floor of a dojo mat repeating steps. This is not a knock on dojo mats as I love them and they are wonderful and necessary. But the scope of movement on a flat floor in a room with no wind or sky or animals, is not equal to running through a tree line engaging bolders and animals and wind. The mind must be engaged when climbing a tree as it is not when standing on a floor. Mindfulness as one is constantly assessing, adapting and responding to the flow along the line of action, or falling if not. That evolved into Bolder Hopping, which is where we'd run off trail through the bolders, cliffs and treelines of the river with similar intent. Total presence. Full engagement. Natural movement. The supreme was when the body was forgotten and there was just the flow, just awareness and movement, condition and response... over, around, under or through the next condition in the trail. I remember this particular stretch along the St Croix river where we would train by running parkour along the cliffs/bolders and through the trees that line the river there at the Wisconsin/Minnesota border, then leap from a 15 meter cliff into the river and swim down stream to our 'starting line'. We'd do that again and again until it was time to head home for dinner.

I have so many memories of road trips, hunting and camping around the Midwest and Canada with my Dad in his incredible camper/van... listening to Don Williams. There is always at least one cd of Don in the truck I inherited from my Old Man. RIP Don. Thanks for the soundtrack to life.

Nice belly laugh! thanks mate!

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar. ~Anais Nin

Really appreciate you sharing this. Potent stuff! Thanks!

Human, non human, we are all made of star stuff. As connected to the far reaches of space as we are to our own beating hearts. Look up and wonder. Look down and know. Is it any different?

Good point. I've never been one to diet. However, as sensitivity to signals increased, I became more aware of how certain foods were affecting my body and awareness and these foods were dropped from my diet naturally. Most striking has been the body's steadily increased craving for emptiness. Regularly and increasingly over the last few years, my body will emphatically communicate... let's consume only breath and water for a few days. Fasting is beautiful in these times. No missing food, no hunger pains. Clarity, lightness and bliss. It's very natural, not a struggle at all and the energy shifts are... potent.

I'd say you're left with 'justified'. Justified often seems to manifest the most severe, and gleefully violent activities. It pretty much bottoms the barrel for me, in its scope, depth of depravity, and the gleeful, required interference of /violence toward those/that who the 'justified' deem broken and are morally obligated to correct/fix.

Reality tunnels seems the most functional phrase for me to describe the process of how I as a human absorb, process and store sensory information as reality. The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth; rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The implied individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel. The term can also apply to groups of people united by beliefs: we can speak of the fundamentalist Christian reality tunnel or the ontological naturalist reality tunnel. As I seem to be unwilling to summon the energy put it in my own words this morning, I share this quote out of a desire to respond with a minimum of engaging the formative mind. I do contend that among phenomena, there seem to be phenomena that have objective parameters, such as the bench at our kitchen table, on which my ass rests now as I type this seems solid and anyone who's sat on it seems to agree to this... yet this bench causes my wife's bum considerable discomfort when she rests on it, and when I sit there, I'm comfortable... what is the reality of the bench? We all seem to agree that fire is hot, yet the thermal vents where extremophiles live in comfort, would boil the flesh from my bones. Which one is reality? Confirmation bias seems a driving factor that shades our subjective versions of some seemingly objective situational phenomena. ugh... that process was subjectively unpleasant... it almost hurt. [yoda voice]Maybe later again I'll try...[/yoda voice]

This sure resonates with me... I think I know exactly how you feel.

My take is... seeing isn't necessarily seeing reality.

your words are like a mirror letting go. It seems the only remaining action. Like all else eventually passes away, dissolves, resolves or transforms into release, or becomes blockage and tension for a time, experienced as dis-ease until released... And the work to release blockage and tension is no longer work. There is no work. no more transactions of effort for a planned payoff... no more sense of need for perfection of form... or correct ritualized processes... seeking dissolved long ago. only this abides release let go just be release and be let go

I love vinegar C I Am pickled now

My Uncle worked for the CIA. He died. Everyone who ate pickles in the 1800's... Died. CIA=pickles?

I play two Qi Gong forms that I learned from Master Zhou Ting-Jue and stillness/emptiness as taught by Master Wang Liping. Both are 18th generation of their respective Wudang/Longmen lineages. It's been tough for my monkey mind, as he really loves to chew bones and spend many hours contemplating and thinking then rethinking and overthinking things. But as I tend to dwell in my mind too readily by default for long periods, this is perhaps the better for my predisposition to over intellectualize processes that are only impeded by such tensions and added layers. Without all the language and mental projections to play with, the bored monkey quiets down and I am allowed space to embody the breath and movements. I find now, years into these practices that the less my mind is active/present, the less tension is present to impede flow.

I echo the sentiments of Wu Ming Jen and Ad_B. Dr Yang Jwing-Ming's writings have been quite valuable to me personally. Both of my wudang teachers speak almost no english, so without a translator always present much of my training is attention/observation based and then what small chinese I have picked up. Dr Yang is appreciated as when I read his books, I encounter his english descriptions of processes that I have experienced, but rarely talked about.

Not sure we've encountered any science, music or enlightenment in this thread... but I've encountered conversation.

I see familiar faces... So grateful that this is happening. *deep bow*

.... it's bliss.

that was timely... thanks mate.