Sharing Connections: Engaging Community and Voices

So Many Places to Share
We have many ways to share and disseminate connections made between regional communities and individuals: The Vital Force, the Guide’s newsletter, the Facebook group, and the New Mexico T’ai Chi Chih Association. It can be hard to know the difference between them or what to look for where. I see the content in The Vital Force as longer-form, insightful reflections. Often inspiring (and always heartfelt), the first-person articles share moments of discovery and accumulated wisdom. Why would you doubt your own experience, Justin would often ask rhetorically. And we publish event-related material, short snippets from participants, to allow more practitioners to have a voice. All are welcome, solicited or not.

Soliciting Articles
For perhaps the first time ever, I did not have to solicit articles for this November issue. Valuable material trickled in without me asking, which (in my opinion) reflects a lot of organizational movement from the top down (even though TCC is a lateral ‘non-organization’.) TCC is on the move. Although I usually try to limit writers to one article for any given issue, this issue contains multiple writings from a few writers: Adam Lacey, Amy Tyksinski, Jessica Lewis, Lisa Stroyan, Lorraine Lepine, and Marie Dotts. Their topics are timely and needed to be shared sooner rather than waiting until the February issue.

Diversity of Voices for February
I hope to read many other voices in the February issue — from all walks of our community, newbies and old-timers, students and new teachers, people up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and all around the world.

Year-End Contributions
Please enjoy the inserted, double-sided quotation card. If you feel moved to make a year-end contribution, The Vital Force (a 501c3) welcomes any offerings. Among other projects you funded, we digitized Justin’s video and audio tapes, and we are slowly making our way through editing them into bite-sized nuggets for a public archive. See taichichih.org/donate for how contributions are deployed. Next up (“abandon hope”): a detailed index of all Vital Force articles back to 1985.