by Garry Williams

Garry Williams practiced Chen taijiquan with a teacher in North Carolina for several years before this post. He was a regular contributor to alt.meditation.qigong — practical, unpretentious, genuinely curious. On a Saturday afternoon in late April 2006, he went to his usual park, ran his form, and something happened that he felt worth sharing. The post is 424 words. The teaching is in what the geese decided.

Nimen hao!

I had an amazing, at least for me, experience at the park this afternoon that I wanted to share with you. I hope you don't mind. Of course, you don't have to read it; you can always skip on to the next post.

There are always plenty of geese at the lake, and they are pretty tolerant of people since humans feed them all the time. However, they are still wild animals and are very protective of their young. Which leads me to my experience:

I was alone on the upper soccer field overlooking the lake, practicing my form at a slow but comfortable pace, enjoying the warm sunshine, cool breeze, and deep blue sky, when I noticed 5 adult geese and about 2 dozen tiny baby goslings climbing the hillside and emerging near where I was practicing. At first the adults were startled when they noticed a human nearby, and kept the babies over to one side, away from me, further to my west, while they positioned themselves between me and their young. As I performed White Crane Cools Its Wings, the adult directly in front of me raised up on its toes and flapped its wings as if in challenge while the others honked and hissed at me menacingly. But after a few minutes, they seemed to feel that there was nothing dangerous about this odd human and stopped paying me any attention. As I turned back to my east, I focused on my form and forgot about the geese. Dan tian in, dantian out, low, slow, empty, whole body, breathe, stretch, step, shift, be mindful of your center... But as I started back to my west once again, I noticed that the geese were much closer, and they didn't really seem to care that their young were very near to me. At this point, the goslings had pretty much picked their present patch of ground clean, and they surged forward, surrounding me on all sides. I continued my form, moving slowly and taking care not to step on any of them. The 5 adults ringed me and the babies in, with their backs to me and the goslings, defending us from the passing humans and their dogs. The magic moment stretched out for an eternity....

Then the goslings, having picked their present patch clean once more, decided it was time to move on, and again they surged forward to my east, with the adults following them, leaving me to finish my form alone in peace.

Xie xie,

Garry

Colophon

Written by Garry Williams ([email protected]) and posted to alt.meditation.qigong on 29 April 2006. Williams was a long-time practitioner of Chen taijiquan, training with teachers in North Carolina. A regular voice in alt.meditation.qigong from 2003 through at least 2008, he contributed consistently — on practice, technique, history, and the felt experience of the internal arts.

Preserved from the Internet Archive Giganews Usenet Collection (alt.meditation.qigong.20141205.mbox.gz) for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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