This morning I watched a YouTube video hosted by two friends of mine. They had invited a Taoist internal martial arts teacher to join them and she shared her understanding of Tao and this Chinese new year, February 2026, the year of the fire horse.
Rather than try to put into words how that conversation landed with me, I am going to use it as a prompt to share how I found myself becoming a follower of the wisdom of the Tao.
I don’t have a purpose or a plan or a desired outcome with this, and am noticing that whenever I write anything about my relationship with the Tao I often start with the first words of the Tao Te Ching;
“The Tao that can be named, is not the Tao”
So, bearing this in mind and body and heart and gut, I am going for a gentle wonder through the lands that showed up for me somewhere around the mid to late 1970’s.
As a teen I smoked cannabis and enjoyed what it offered me. I also quite liked the community of people around me who smoked it too. It led me into spaces where we could sit and share ideas and thoughts and feelings that didn’t show up so much in the other social spaces I found myself in.
When I first moved from London to Newcastle someone introduced me to a tall gangly guy who lived in a first floor flat in Jesmond.
Let’s call him Shifu T. Or, Mr T. for short.
He sold really good cannabis and whenever I went round to buy some, or just to catch up, I found myself spending many hours there.
I met several people who became friends at Mr T’s place and probably had my first conversations around Taoism in that big front room.
These days Jesmond is an expensive place to live and now the homes of students with wealthy parents, or well off families with easy access to the prestigious private school, the Royal Grammar School. Most often referred to locally as RGS.
Back then, in the 70’s, Jesmond was more of a mix, old people who had raised their families there and now living alone, a few middle aged geeky lecturers and academics, and a whole bunch of hippies, artists and drops outs who found cheap and liveable flats in the big old Victorian houses there.
I lived in a second floor flat in Brandling Park, not far from Mr T’s.
The view from my kitchen window was of the RGS playing fields.
That flat at the time suited me really well. It was a short walk from the city centre where I worked, and gave me easy access to the pubs and clubs and music venues that were my main social spaces.
The memories of the times I spent in my flat include, getting home from a weeks work on a Saturday afternoon with a couple of new albums, sitting with the big window open and a joint, while playing my new music and enjoying the thoughts around what I was going to wear that night and whether I was going out to a gig or a club or both.
I also can’t help noticing memories of getting naked and intimate with people who encouraged me to understand how between us, we could share our bodies and mix excitement and energy with stillness and calm… in ways that were new and big for me.
That flat held me well during my gradual transition from naive child to clued up young adult.
As in any transition, there was smooth and gritty, exciting and scary, comfort and awkwardness.
Meanwhile, as Mr.T shared the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes, with me, I realised that the history I had been taught at school was only a very thin slice of what had been going on over the last several thousand years on our planet.
Mr T. and others in his front room often riffed in stoner conversations around how to use the I Ching, what Taoism was about and how we could all transcend and find opportunities for equilibrium.
I would sit and listen, role joints, put on another album, make herb teas and coffee in the aromatic kitchen, and throw into the conversation, whatever came to me.
Many of the people hanging out in Mr. T’s gaff were probably in their mid twenties, or older, uni grads, working in a “profession” and grew up with parents who also went to uni and had a profession.
As a teenaged hairdresser, working in a trendy salon in the middle of town, having moved from London where I had been hanging out with fashion designers, musicians, street wise villains, models, photographers and assorted well known flamboyant hipsters, I guess I was a bit of a novelty to Mr.T and his crew.
Regardless, I liked being there and learning from what to me then, were wise elders.
The I Ching fascinated me, as did the Tao Te Ching and it was in Mr T’s flat that I first came across both these books.
I still have copies of both on the shelves behind me while I type these wordy words, and I consult them now and again still.
Anyway, cut to the chase… voice in the head;
“Are you fucking kidding Mark, this is not a chase, it never has been, it’s a slow meandering, a recollection and re-membering of your bumping into the philosophies that have given you a sense of that fine line that we all wobble along having been told not to fall… as the word fall equates with the word fail for many of us… these philosophies freed and encouraged me to embrace the falls as an opportunity the step out of the trap of getting caught in myopic.”
Ok, cutting back to the meandering pottering dawdle set in the 70’s… winter, late evening, probably after a couple of mild joints, and maybe a few mushrooms, me and one of Mr T’s pals, went for a long walk that ended up in Leazes Park. It was around midnight when we got there and there was knee deep crispy white snow covering the park.
The big lake was frozen solid and I remember getting disoriented when I lost my bearing standing close to the island in the middle of the lake, there was no ice visible, it was just all one big space covered in beautiful white snow.
As we walked towards the exit of the park, I noticed a tree, standing alone with its winter nakedness silhouetted against the big bright moon. I walked towards this tree and when I was a few metres away there was part of a broken branch with a few twigs showing above the snow just in front of me. I found myself walking around and around the branch and twigs. Allowing myself to quietly just notice the patterns they made.
The contrast of the perfect blackness of the twigs set against the backdrop of the untouched crystal white snow, bought me with a sharpness back to the hexagrams of the I Ching and also to the calligraphy of the Tao Te Ching.
I can clearly remember saying out loud to myself something like;
“It’s the contrast of the black against the white, the yin and yang, the need for these extremes, this diversity this difference, I have no need for explanation, I am a Taoist.”
That was it, I realised in that moment that I had no problem describing myself as a Taoist while in that same timeless place, knowing I have no idea what that means, no need to ever know… and had found some small understanding that this knowing/not knowing… was all I would ever need.
So, whether I was stoned or tripping I don’t know, or care.
Whatever was felt and understood from that walk in the snow covered park that night, I can feel that here in me now, sober, awake, alert, and smiling as I recall those times of falling across the genius and the frustrating paradoxes of Taoist philosophy, and there is something that keeps me connected and open to all that via watching Mimi and Gabriella and Sam inquire and share around Taoist understanding and practice this morning on YouTube.
I am tempted to dig deeper into the link between the mid 1970’s, the tensions we all felt then here in the Eng lands…and the tensions we feel now in the 2020’s while we welcome the new year of the fire horse, but I am done here for now, and you have followed my meandering too, so lets call this one a wrap.
Thanks for being here with me on this.
Best wishes, solidarity and happy new year, Mark This.