139. The new Weiqi (Go/Baduk) mat (☷/☴)

Last month I promised myself that if I had a highly successful and profitable tea business for that month, I would reward myself with a new Weiqi mat. And so, I made my financial targets for that month and at my local Taiwanese bookstore I bought a new Weiqi mat. Beautiful: Bold black lines printed on soft brown leather. Just beautiful. Finally I put aside my old Chinese-made plastic mat and let go of the symbolic elemental meaning of plastic. Plastic represents that, which is man-made and cannot be naturally found in nature. It represents the need for control over the forces of chaos. And so symbolically to play on a plastic Weiqi mat is to be either order/control or chaos. Now, I do have a beautiful wooden board, but because of its bulk, I rarely like to play on it. I prefer the portability and mobility of a leather mat. And I particularly enjoy the way the marble stones quietly hit it. There is a certain elegance in doing things softly like a powerful lion in the tall grass. Power and grace coming together for the kill! And so that was my month. This month I endeavour to exceed my targets by a couple of thousand dollars. And all to be done with grace and ease, while using the new may in the form of an abstract map to help guide the way forward. Already I have found the new leather mat to be better at differentiating the black and white stones into clear patterns of give and take. Something of which was hard to see previously. This fluidity-in-motion reminds me of Aikido, the highly refined Japanese martial art of being in union with the way of energy. Which in layman's terms means to grasp which way the flame is burning, regardless of the fluxing commentaries, because the master is above the immediate dramas that tend to captivate and then drown its victim ⚔️圍棋戰聖