TREE TIME

It doesn’t take much for us to recognise ourselves in an animal. Just like us: two eyes and two ears, and a mouth that wants to bite and chew. Arms and legs, paws, wings, fins: a continuous evolutionary kinship. And then there’s that remarkable shared animal restlessness. We, as animals, are always on the move. When danger approaches, we run away. If we…

Plants are bound to the location where they first sprouted. Unable to dodge, run or flee, they have no choice but to resolve any difficulties that arise right where they stand. Plants have developed an endless array of self-defence mechanisms. Often without any outward signs of anything unusual, they use great creativity to fend off aggressive rodents a…

Halfway through your daily walk in the woods, you suddenly hear a strange whistling sound. Then it goes quiet, but you hear it again. You look around to see where the sound is coming from. The dense foliage blocks your view. There it is again. Where the woods give way to a single row of trees along the path, the view is clearer. And now you see it: the …

What do you see? A dog in the woods. The dog leaves. The woods remain.

Transport your thoughts to the origin of existence, to the beginning of the unimaginably long process of evolution. The very first life forms consisted of a single cell, without a central nucleus. Single-celled organisms with a nucleus would not appear until two billion years later. A tiny lump of life, surrounded by a wafer-thin membrane, separating an…

Imagine an earthworm with only three compartments. Rotate the whole 90 degrees, add limbs, and voilà, the energetic functionality of a human body in a reduced form. Three fundamental cavities are separated from each other and connected by intermediate areas with a regulating sluice function. The top of the structure is formed by the fontanelle and the b…

The performance has ended, and the theatre is emptying. It's not going very quickly. The audience were comfortably spread out throughout the auditorium, but now they are standing in line like sheep, waiting to exit one by one through the door. A narrowing leads to congestion, a delay to a traffic jam. At least, that's how it works with theatregoers, she…

Work on your biceps and, after a while, you’ll be able to show off your muscles with pride. Cycle against the wind every day – or get yourself an exercise bike – and before long the circumference of your thighs will have increased considerably. What you get is what you see. Carrying out such targeted physical activities is only possible when a connectio…

Within Chinese traditional internal martial arts, there is a remarkable training method: remaining in certain body positions for long periods of time. Not infrequently, such practices are viewed with a certain disdain. They are said to be static, detached from martial dynamics and actually naive. How could martial skill ever be trained by standing still…

Brocade (/broʊˈkeɪd/) is a class of richly decorative shuttle-woven fabrics, often made in coloured silks and sometimes with gold and silver threads …

It is still early in the morning. In the distance, the sound of a locomotive building up steam. After the oppressive heat of late summer, it has suddenly cooled down. The smell of mist, coal and musty jute sacks.

The search for the origins of Ba Duan Jin takes us back to the Southern Song dynasty and General Yu Fei. Nine hundred years have passed since then, and most traces linking the modern-day practice to that of Yu Fei’s troops have been lost. Similar to transference in an oral storytelling culture, the exercises were recounted and passed down from generatio…

A piece of elastic stretched lengthways simultaneously becomes narrower across its width. When the stretch is released, both the length and width return to their original state. This is the principle behind the stretching exercise with which the Ba Duan Jin

As you read this, there is no horizon. The letter your eye now falls on is super sharp, but slightly to the left, or slightly to the right, towards the edges of the screen, the world is already blurring. And still a little further away from the letter your eyes are now gazing intently at, there everything even seems to have disappeared. The space to you…

One of the renowned masters of the I Chuan 意拳 / Da Cheng Chuan 大成拳 tradition is Guo Gui-Zhi, from Datong, Shanxi, in northern China.