Tung Nguyen (31 years old, Nghe An) is currently working and living in Sa Pa.
During the sharing session, Tung Nguyen told the story of a young man who lives and has a special love for Ta Van, Sapa. The breath of the Northwest mountains and forests appeared through the wild banana flowers he painstakingly brought from Sapa to Ho Chi Minh City. Or the beautiful handicraft products that Tung created from Po Mu wood pieces picked up along the road. The highlight of the sharing session was the rock balancing performance.
The vases are made from Po Mu wood he picked up on the roadside, and after carving, they become beautiful decorative products.
Rock balancing is an art of using rocks of different shapes, structures, and properties to build piles, columns, and arches without using adhesives, wires, or tools to maintain the structure.
Without using adhesives or structural maintenance tools, how do the stones balance?
"There are stones that are only balanced when they exist independently, but there are also stones that must be stacked on top of each other to reach a state of balance," Tung Nguyen shared. He thought of the connection between each individual in the community, there are people who will perform best when they stand alone. But there are people who need to coordinate and connect with other individuals to balance and develop together.
Sapa life appears peaceful and gentle through Tung Nguyen's story. "In the afternoon, the Mong people often find for themselves a large, extremely beautiful rock, sit on it for a few hours without doing anything. I see them sitting like that very often, wandering on large rocks with a distant gaze. I started to pay attention to the rocks since then," he said.
The breath of the Northwest highlands is expressed through the fragrant red-pink banana flowers.
Perhaps people are also enjoying the moments in life in a calm, peaceful way, letting their souls drift into an indefinite space without being bothered by the worries of everyday life. Is that also a lifestyle, a very simple idea of happiness that a busy life is making many people dizzy and hurried?
Stones of different shapes are abundant in Ta Van, where Tung lives. During the pandemic, he started to "pay more attention" to the stones. Tung Nguyen stacked them on top of each other, "The purpose of this activity is not to create tall and beautiful stone pillars, but to train myself to concentrate, persevere and calm", he confided.
This is how Tung Nguyen finds balance, practices concentration and calmness.
After a period of leisurely living with long days of fun, Tung thought he needed to start a new life with another activity. Tung started stacking rocks as a hobby to "kill time", gradually doing this regularly made him feel the rocks, grasp the center of gravity and the technique to balance them on top of each other.
Looking at this video, many people will probably think that stacking stones on top of each other is not difficult. However, in real life, connecting stones with different shapes, roughness, concavity, mass, and size in a balanced state is not a simple task. Just one second of losing your composure, everything will collapse, all the effort of "holding your breath" will disappear. "There are times when I forget to breathe, not daring to breathe hard for fear that my shaking hands will cause the pile of stones to fall," Tung Nguyen shared.
The audience who attended the sharing session also got to experience this sport firsthand. Basically, it's like a normal stone stacking game. But when you focus on balancing stones of different properties, it's a challenge to train both physical and mental muscles. If you don't believe it, you can try it at home with random stones.
This "seemingly easy" but "unbelievably difficult" subject will definitely make you discover more about yourself.
The technique of stacking stones is only acquired after many years of practice, but the first thing that everyone grasps is understanding the stone, knowing the center of gravity... and controlling your breathing. Even if something happens around you, if you stay calm, you can continue as if nothing is affecting you.
With Tung, he just focuses on stacking rocks, and tries to do his best at what he is doing.
