Wind in motion
Sometimes it helps to look at a word from a different angle. Chi or Qi – that mysterious term so often invoked in Qigong and Tai Chi – can, if you’re in a poetic mood, be translated quite simply as wind. A movement you cannot see, yet unmistakably feel. Something that can brush gently across you or gather enough force to move you. And Qigong, then, becomes the art of moving with that wind, both inside and out. A kind of wind-movement. Not a trendy reinvention, but something ancient and deeply familiar. As if the body remembers how it once knew to move.
But before we continue, let me take you to a different expression of wind-movement. Not the soft tide of breath drifting through the body, but something you might encounter on the beach. Something that walks, sways, breathes – without ever truly living. Or at least … that’s the question.
Theo Jansen and his Strandbeests
For more than thirty years, Dutch art…
