Practicing Qigong: on the way to the future

Dear Chiyan,

I just wrote this today (2/15/2018), after our (Thursday group) practice. Hope you enjoy it!

Best, Matt

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Practicing Qi Gong:

On the Way to the Future

By Matthew Sperling

Laotsu was a wise old man who road his water buffalo

through the Western gate.

We enter from the East, with the rising sun, asking,

“In the name of democracy and of the spirit,

“how do we manage to do so much harm?”

How have we, following in the footsteps of wisdom,

managed to arrive at the destruction of nearly everything?

How did we bake people like burnt crumbs in the ovens of the dead?

How did we lower the known universe to our level,

to the level of our desire?

Of course the wealthy will say that everything is going just fine.

What needs to be changed when nearly everyone else wants to be you?

We are being killed by the things we want, because we feel

the alternatives are not good enough.

But no one needs bodyguards because they have so much gold

it will tear a hole in their pocket then fall out and break their foot.

We do not need clothing made at a price that would feed

a family of four for a year.

We need love and sleep and dreams.

We need the healing of our pain.

We need to connect with the rare life,

all that life as rare as we are, sharing this

one inhabited planet circling an average star.

We need to prepare ourselves not only

to learn more about what we are.

We need to prepare for the discovery

of what we will become.

The old man and  his water buffalo

tried to teach us what they knew, and,

so far, we are not even as wise as that beast

lumbering into the future, centuries ago,

where we have barely begun to arrive.