Good Metal quotes

I have just found these good Metal quotes, to be added to my quotes for Earth and Wood (my blogs of 31 August 2014 and 18 September 2014)

 “He grew in the shadow of this absent father, admired from afar.”

 

                                                                        Laurence Scott:  Witchbroom

Gone

 Nothing of grief was said

Only there was a space in the night sky
Where a special star no longer shone, a space
Was there and made him cry
And it did not help at all if anyone said,
Who had never watched her face,
“You will get over it, others have their dead”,
He did not listen, perhaps he did not hear,
The last thing he wanted was to get over it.
She was not there.  One star was now unlit.”

 

Two Together

It will always go with love, this delicate sadness,
Almost delectable sometimes as in Autumn
When the copper and gold and yellow leaves surrender
To the afterglow of Summer.  I can recall
Feeling sad in September, thinking of school
And wanting the long holiday extended...

                                                                        Elizabeth Jennings:  Tributes

 

“So that, to this day, I feel almost as if I am a product of an immaculate conception.  Like Jesus who didn’t know who his biological father was either.  I have often thought it was this lack of knowledge of his earthly father that led him to his “heavenly” one, for there is in all of us a yearning to know our own source, and no source is likely to seem too far fetched to a lonely fatherless child”

                                                                        Alice Walker: The Temple to My Familiar

 

Sixth seminar in China

Guy and I are off to China again on Sunday for my sixth visit there and Guy’s fourth.  I had to tot up on my fingers the number of visits, and was surprised to find they were as many as that.  Luckily there is now a non-stop British Airways flight from Heathrow to Chengdu where, again, we will be met by our lovely Chengdu group of practitioners.  They shepherd us beautifully around from one airport terminal to another, and invite us out to a lunch in-between.  Then on to Nanning, where Liu Lihong and his group of practitioners will be waiting for us at the airport, with the usual huge clusters of flowers and warm cries of greeting, rather to the bewilderment of the Chinese travellers surrounding us.

We have a leisurely first day to recover from our jet lag (13 hours flight!), then the hard work begins.  Each day is full to the brim with teaching, supervising treatments and trying to give all those coming for the first time some idea of their element.  This entails observing them carefully throughout our two weeks there to see whether our initial diagnosis still feels alright, and, if not, trying to work out in double-quick time which other element it might be.  This is not something for the faint-hearted, and, as I have said before, it takes some courage even to attempt a diagnosis under such very rushed and quite stressful conditions.  I’m pleased, though, that at previous seminars I had sufficient time to correct any diagnosis I was not happy with.  And if these same practitioners come again this time, Guy and I will double-check whether we are happy with our original diagnoses.

As usual, there will be over 60 practitioners at the seminar, of which 40 have already been to previous seminars and 20 will be new people.  I like the mix of the more experienced and the total novices, and love seeing how the more experienced are now gradually stepping more confidently into the role of teacher.   

Publication of my blog book: On being a five element acupuncturist

I have just completed revising the final proofs of my latest book On being a five element acupuncturist, which will soon be hot off the Singing Dragon Press.  I call it my blog book because it includes the majority of the blogs I have been writing since 2010, and represents 4 years’ hard, but enjoyable work.  I find that seeing the blogs in book form is very different from reading them on-line.  Somehow by putting them together into a book brings something out from them as a complete text which differs from what I call the snippets which individual blogs represent.

Anyway, I, as a lover of books, and not a person who enjoys reading by Kindle, however necessary this can sometimes be, as for example when travelling to China, am enjoying seeing the blogs now in the permanent form of a book rather than the ephemeral form of a computer-driven blog.

The book can be ordered from Singing Dragon Press www.singingdragon.com for delivery in early January.