I start T'ai Chi Ch'uan (太極拳) tomorrow. First of all, what are these crazy symbols called? Chinese characters? Hànzì? Kanji? Hanja? 汉字? 漢字? 한자? I'm not sure what to call them. I usually call them kanji since I study Japanese.

I like learning Chinese characters. Although most are not pictographs (actually the majority are based on homonyms of other characters), they still convey a certain meaning and elegance that our clunky phonetic alphabet does not. So I hopped on Google to understand these three characters.

太 (t'ai): greatest, but with a nuance of extreme or too much, so usually it's translated as "supreme."
極 (chi): extreme, utmost, furthest, so translated as "ultimate."
拳 (ch'uan): fist.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan is a martial art. But how can a series of slow movements protect you in the fury of combat? Laozi (老子/Lao Tzu) said in his Tao Te Ching, "The soft and pliable will defeat the hard and strong." In a fight, if both opponents use hardness, both will sustain injury to some degree. On the other hand, if hard is met with soft, soft is met with hard...in other words not resisting an incoming force, but meeting it, and sticking to it and neutralizing it. Of course, it takes many years to become disciplined enough to know the Way of these things.

I think T'ai Chi is about finding balance--your center of gravity, your place in the environment, and adapting to the changes in the environment.

A Taoist saying goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step."

It has been raining since Friday night. The change of seasons here is dramatic. I'm used to Iowa's scorching summer, followed by about 2 weeks of autumn, then bitter coldness. Here I think the seasons are more equal in duration and more temperate.