I think I saw a hitchhiker on my drive to school this morning. It was foggy, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses as I turned from our dirt road onto the main road into town. Off to the side of the road there was a man walking, and I only caught a vague glimpse of him before I passed him. I think he was dressed in business-casual, and as I approached, just before I noticed him, he started walking out toward me in the middle of the road and gesturing with his thumb. A second later I had driven past.

I kept arguing with myself all the way down the road, telling myself to go back to see if he was okay. Was he a hitchhiker? Did he need help? The situation was kind of ambiguous. He was more aggressive than your normal hitchhiker, actually walking out into the road; but he wasn’t waving his arms, as he might if there were an emergency. I didn’t see any broken-down cars in sight. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, I couldn’t get a sense of his emotional tone in that split second.

If I had noticed him sooner, I might have stopped. I was already late for class, though, so when I missed him by a second, I decided to keep going. But I argued with myself all the way to school nonetheless. And true to form, class started late anyway.

Strange how a random non-encounter triggers all these feelings in me. It opened a window into just how unaware and closed to spontaneous encounter I am, and how, like so many of us, I get locked into routines and habits that resist interruption or deviation.

I’ll never know what happened to him. That one non-encounter will forever be a point of Mystery in my memory.

The late Dr. John Shen is my “grandfather” in the particular lineage of Chinese medicine that I’ve been privileged to be initiated into. I recently discovered an article written in tribute to him, and it told this fascinating story, which gives some of the flavor and the magic that come with the medicine I’m learning:

In the few years that I was able to spend time with Dr. Shen in both his New York City practice, and in Shanghai before his death, I felt like I was given a glimpse into the past history of Chinese Medicine — before it became systematized and formulaic. What I learned from Dr. Shen, I mostly learned from watching him. Watching him ask questions, feel the pulse, and then tell the patient — not ask them — when, how, and why their disease or problem developed. By using facial diagnosis to determine the chronology of the disease, and using pulse/tongue and eyelid diagnosis to assess the state of the nervous system, digestive system, and blood, then using probing questions to fill in the rest of the blanks — Dr. Shen was uncanny in his ability to unravel even the most mysterious and stubborn conditions. The following brief case will illustrate what I mean:

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I think I’ll have to admit that my relationship with martial arts will always wax and wane: I just started taking Shaolin kung fu again.

Of course, the same issues that drove me to quit kung fu before are still lurking. I suppose this time I have a little more insight and therefore am a little more honest about what I’m doing.

One thing that continues to be invaluable about this particular kung fu tradition is its effective teaching of qigong and building of energy, providing concrete experiences of qi that are then used and built upon. As I’ve said before, the qigong, particularly the stance training, has been the single most helpful activity to boost my physical energy. And since I’m finishing school and likely moving away in just over a year, I thought this was a good time to put in a little more time in another qi-building endeavor.

But of course, kung fu is still training for violence. And what of that?

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Lily Dale is a small, quiet community in western New York that is distinguished by the psychics who populate the town. Specifically, this community is a center for the spiritualist movement, whose distinguishing feature is

the belief that the spirits of the dead can be contacted by mediums. These spirits are believed to lie on a higher plane of existence than humans, and are therefore capable of providing us with guidance in both worldly and spiritual matters.

I first encountered mention of Lily Dale simply because I was living in that part of New York a few years ago. It mildly intrigued me, though I never did find the opportunity to visit. The town was evidently famous or strange enough to elicit a book devoted to its exploration, titled Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead. I read it, and got just a bit of flavor of local history.

Then we moved away, and I forgot all about it, until we moved to Florida, and I started hearing about another spiritualist community named Cassadaga just a few hours away. It turns out that Cassadaga is actually a sister community to Lily Dale, with the same roots.

Recently Abigail and I decided to go dip our toes into the scene, to play tourist and see what it was all about.

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I never really learned how to be spontaneous with my body. I was an indoor boy as a child, a couch potato, in love with my Nintendo. I was a pure academic. Now, I don’t necessarily think it’s too late to learn how to use my body well, but it’s a lot harder when you’re older. You’re not given as much time or permission to experiment. Plus, I know I wouldn’t be interested in a lot of activities, like sports or dancing — at least not as a primary focus. I tend to be pragmatic; I want to do things that fit in with my values and goals, something close to home. I don’t watch football, I don’t go clubbing. I meditate, I do acupuncture, I relate to people, I want to live sustainably. What sorts of physical activities fit with that?

What I really lack is a way to orient my physical self in relation to the world according to some meaningful principle. What can I use this body for, to what purpose?

Honing my tennis game, or going for walks, might be helpful to my fitness, but where does it lead? Does playing tennis fit in with my values and goals in life? Not really. Doing qigong has been one of the single most beneficial activities to my health, but where does even that lead? I end up with more energy and still not a clue as to where to put it to use (especially since I’ve sort of backed away from the whole martial arts thing). I’m all dressed up and I’ve got nowhere to go.

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This picture just says so much.

The world sometimes feels like a child’s drawing. Everything is crudely drawn in basic outlines, neatly categorized into simple objects. Sun. Grass. Tree. Car. Person.

When I allow it, though, those black-and-white outlines into full, brilliant, multidimensional detail. The grain of bark on a hickory tree. The shades of red and yellow that the sun bleeds as it sinks low in the sky. The posture, the expression, the feeling of a person who’s half-facing you and has something to say.

I really can’t stand the chaos of detail sometimes. It’s too much information, it gets overwhelming. I have to remind myself that I’m just someone blinded by light after stepping out of a dark room.

That serves as an apt metaphor for certain themes in my life up to this point, actually. It’s a little bit like I’ve been imprisoned since childhood. Mind you, I wouldn’t characterize my prison as the type filled with overt abuse or even threat of abuse by anyone in particular, but one made of subtler and broader stuff still. It’s rooted, perhaps, in a relatively fragile physical constitution combined with precocious intellectual development and unusually high emotional sensitivity. I’m small and weak. I feel things strongly. I get pushed, other people might push back, other people might shrug it off, I’ll cry.

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