Listening to My Own Heartbeat

As I continue to pick away at a memoir for twenty five years and counting,
it has occurred to me that I should share some of what I’m trying to write about,
so Dear Reader, thank you for signing into my blog again.
​I hope you enjoy this entry.

I Took the Test.

Stairs to the sacred grounds.

It was a test I had resisted as much as I could, until the cardiologist in charge of the team leaned over to me and softly said, “This is the best I can do for you. Trust me. If you take this test, I’m relatively sure I will be able to find a surgical solution to your problem.” The test was the catheterization, a procedure involving a slight incision made in the right coronary artery, slight but ever so serious. Afterward I would have to remain in bed as much as I possibly could so that I did not cause the incision to break. In a matter of minutes, I would bleed out and begin to enter the world of my ancestors. In fact, my mother, who had been in that world for thirteen years, appeared to me in a dream and explained that I could come home if I wanted to, that it was easy. Behind her stood a row of relatives who had all crossed over, or “made their transition,” as folk say these days. 

​When I took the test, it was in a tech room at University of Pennsylvania Hospital in West Philly, where I lived in a third floor apartment I called The Treehouse. My third marriage was ending, and although I had just received tenure with distinction at Rutgers University, I felt empty, as if I had done much in life for someone who was forty three years old.​

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My Life Had Fallen Apart

As a child, I discovered life through books.

It was not supposed to be this way, according to my plans. My life had fallen apart a few times before, and the most difficult I thought was the tragic ending of my first marriage, where we lost our first son to Down’s Syndrome, and although we had a healthy second son, we were not strong enough to bear the grief that came when my PTSD manifested and I collapsed under the weight of my own machinations. It was at that time, struggling under the broken pieces of my dreams, that a coworker gave me a copy of the Tao Te Ching translated by Gia Fu Feng, with photographs by his wife, Jane English. It was a door to Tai Chi Chuan, and thought I had found a way to being at peace with myself, and accomplishing my dream of becoming a great poet. How foolish, how incredibly joyful and full of dreams.

At the suggestion of the principal of my junior high school, my parents placed me in an accelerated program that landed me in the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 1968, when I was sixteen years old. After two years, I dropped out to be a factory worker and study my craft as a poet, and in three more years that coworker, whose name was John, handed me that copy of the Tao Te Ching. As a child, I had learned to discover life through books, and books led me to Tai Chi Chuan by Douglass Lee, a book I consider a classic from that time when that generation of us seekers found our way to this mysterious slow motion martial art.    

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My Heart Was Failing. The Prognosis Was Grim, but I Found
​My First Long Term Teacher.

My Tai Chi teacher's storefront.

In early fall of 1978, I found my first long term teacher, a man from Taiwan by the name of Teng Fang Lin. On Howard Street in downtown Baltimore, he was standing in the doorway of storefront he had converted into Lin’s Kungfu. When I asked if he would teach me the long form of Yang Style Tai Chi, he agreed, and the fee he charged now seems more than a bargain. For five hundred dollars I learned the pattern that is central to most styles of Tai Chi, and there is a whole universe of styles. It is as much an art as any, which is to say it requires practice and a dedication to Chinese pedagogy with its emphasis on self-study.  It gave me focus, a stability medicines seemed not to provide, and with that stability I was able to write and publish, enroll in a low residence program to complete my bachelor’s degree, and to the astonishment of many, not the least of whom was myself, win an NEA fellowship in poetry and admission to Brown University’s graduate writing program, one of the top programs in the country at that time.

In HUP, Hospital University of Pennsylvania, the diagnosis was congestive heart failure, and the prognosis was grim. They believed I would need a transplant. The catheterization test showed that my arteries were all clear, but my leg ventricle was worn out. The imagined sound of my own heartbeat became frighteningly real, as the end of it would be the end of that sound. It would be over for me, but I was unwilling to let go of my faith in Tai Chi Chuan as an aspect of Chinese medicine. As soon as I was able to travel, I took the train to Baltimore to visit the man who had taken over the school from Teng Fang Lin. His name was Huang Chien Liang. I had known him briefly when he took over the school, but he did not remember me. It was not in the cards for me. My return to the school was not practical as I was thinking of moving to Boston, so after a few trips to Baltimore, one of Mr. Huang’s assistants suggested I look up Yang Jwing Ming. I had not heard of him, but when I moved to Boston I found him and resumed my studies of Tai Chi with him.

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The Tao Te Ching: My Chinese Connection

When I walked out of this truck yard for the last time, I wept all the way.

If I mark my engagement with Chinese culture from the time I received the gift of a copy of the Tao Te Ching, I am in this Chinese connection of mine for fifty two years and counting. I have taught in Taiwan, and lived there on several occasions. When I was fifty one years old, I summoned enough gumption to start studying Mandarin as a faculty audit, and then packed up and moved to Taiwan to study more intensely. If that were not enough I competed in tournaments enough to get a few medals, and more importantly, I inspired Kala, my son, to admonish me, “Daddy, you better give that stuff up before one of those young guys hurts you.” The strength of young men can only be dealt with the superior skills that come only with age and the deepest of all practice regimens. One must become like Oogway, the grandmaster turtle in Kungfu Panda, that is to be able to rest on the handles of our walking sticks for months on end, and other such undocumented powers. Aside from, or inside those experiences, I have written poetry about my innermost life as a trauma survivor, and been rewarded for that poetry. 

If this memoir gets finished in fine enough fashion, maybe it will help someone. 

Meet me at the finish line!

Afaa
尉雅風

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In the years I lived in Somerville, Mass, I went to Fellsmere Park in Malden when the weather allowed. It was my Sacred Ground.