Vayu (vie-you) finding spirit through logic

A moment must be taken to talk about Vayu, an absolute gem of a human being, and the only man in this party of hormonal yogi women. 

Vayu is a tall slender Korean guy. He is supposedly forty-something, but with his delicate gentle open nature, and his youthful curiosity I genuinely thought he was in his late twenties when I first met him. Vayu is like a giant grasshopper with glasses -if grasshoppers could be handsome, and is so aptly named (his name means air -vata) he practically floats through the world, his giant mind always turning gently in the wind.

Vayu is a pharmacist in Korea, and teaches Ashtanga there. He is also  a life-long student of tai-chi, and practices both here. His goal- he says- is to marry both Eastern and Western philosophies...were East is Asian, and West is India. He carries enormous books of knowledge in his head, and in the middle of all this girly feeling emotive intuitive blah blah, Vayu will put all experiences into his bank of knowledge and come out with something akin to a highly intuitive heart-felt process. All done with pure intellect and logic.

I have never seen logic perform at such a level, and could not have believed that it could be as magical and "true" as intuition. I have seen Vayu process the emotional woes of a long-time married woman, and through the power of his logic, the 64 elements (asian thought) and the indian equivalent( some very complex system that is designed around....gack... numbers) he comes out with absolutely brilliant, helpful, heart-felt advice that hits it's target every time.

He was explaining to us the 64 element system one morning. How all the symbols come from just the first two, yin and yang; all of the other 64 symbols are made up of various combinations of just these two. I love that earth is three yin, and sky is three yang. Water is one yang inside two yin, and fire is the yin inside the yang. the differences between water and lake (water is moveable, transformable; lake holds the water in it's shape) and earth and mountain. I was having a hard time understanding earth and mountain and Vi-u said:

" The best way to explain is to use the symbol for a humble man. The symbol for a humble man is mountain under earth. That is because a humble man is one who can go under the earth, even though he is a mountain."

Another day, we were talking about how I am fire, and he is air: I am intuition and he is logic. And Vayu said,

"It is like aristotle and Plato. But you know Amanda, I used to be like you -like aristotle, but then i was so angry. I was in fact the leader of a student revolution, and was hunted by police for two years, and finally thrown in jail. It was then that I realized that I needed to find some plato" So Vayu started his quest towards pure logic in order to balance out his emotional, heart-based fire.

What is interesting is that it is  transcendental logic. I would never have believed that  pure logic and rational thought can transcend its limitations as completely as pure heart and intuition. It is the kind of magic we imagine out of great men, the minds of great men, but rarely see.

And he makes a mean miso soup too.