Taiji Day 178: Not So Fast

I did the Five Gold Coins, the Eight Pieces of Silk, rather slowly.  Inhale on the expansion, exhale on the contraction. All very regular.  Boring, even.  This is what my lungs feel when full.  This is what they feel like when almost empty.  Full. Empty. Full. Empty.

By the time I got to the form, though, I was raring to go.  I mean, why wouldn’t you be? Topped off with energy, raring to go? And somewhere after the first few formalities I opened up the throttle and starting pushing to the limits of what was possible, in terms of speed… and… heel kick, followed by bend the bow…

I came down with my foot at a funny angle and I realized I couldn’t step onwards into the next motion, which for perverse reasons is called Bounce Baby On Knee.  It wasn’t possible to “do next action”, as David Allen might say.  Stuck.

Harumph.  I backed up a dozen postures, and started over again.Even with all the rushing at the first, it took me almost exactly the same amount of time this morning that it takes me most other mornings when I’m trying to do it slowly.  There wasn’t any point in rushing.  It was all going to take the same amount of time.

For the purposes of being a teacher, this is a good reminder in the first week of school to slow down.  The kids can’t absorb any more information than they already are, and rushing things now just invites mistakes later.  Better to keep it clear and slow, than fast and muddled.

Taiji Day 177: Wholeness

Sometimes, when I’m doing the form, I have this sense of being a skeleton, with muscles over that, and tendons; and over that, skin.  It’s a series of very discrete layers, which move in synchrony with one another, but aren’t necessarily connected. There are external signs that this is so, on those days — I hear joints creaking, tendons popping; I feel stretches in one muscle or another; I see the surface of my skin moving.

Then there are days like today.

I didn’t hear any popping or thunking sounds from within my body. The floor creaked, a little, but the creaks weren’t coming from me.  The motions were fairly fluid; I was able to stand with my pelvis tilted most of the time.  I can put my fingers on the floor (though not my palms yet) when I do the toe-touches in Five Golden Coins and Eight Pieces of Silk.  There’s a growing sense of integration.

I’m a collection of parts.  But those parts are a whole, too.  Increasingly, the parts are operating in a way that makes me more wholly me, as well.

Mars: For assertiveness and dedication

A Mars in white-board marker

So, here’s an experiment for the magicial practitioners in the blog audience.  Classroom practitioners can skip down a bit if they want to get past the woo-woo bits.

One of these images of the ancient Roman god Mars was produced during an astrological window determined to be of good quality for creating talismans or images of this being, which would aid in improving assertiveness and dedication and focus to a cause — namely, the cause of learning a language deeply and clearly, and understanding the underlying linguistics of languages related to Latin.

The other image was produced about fifteen minutes after the window of opportunity closed.  Without clicking on the pictures (and going to the text on the Flickr site, which gives the answers…) which of these images was produced during the astrological window, and which was produced afterwards?

It’s not an idle question, because — if I’m right — this is one of the ways that the Ars memorativa — The Art of Memory, or the ability to remember large quantities of information — functioned in the ancient and medieval eras. There are occasional references in medieval occult texts to the Notary Arts, or the ability to draw pictures that hold and transmit information in a form that makes it easily recalled to mind.  Likewise with this image, which my students copied today into their Latin notebooks next to the pronunciation key to the Latin alphabet which we constructed in class today.  The image of Mars with his sword stands guard over certain key information — the change of the letter b to the sound “p” when preceding s (as in Urbs, meaning “City”), for instance, or that V is pronounced as “w”, and that ae is not two vowels sounded separately, but one which sounds rather like “eye”.  And so on.

Mars on lined paper

Knowing the correct pronunciation of words is critical to learning a new language.  Given this astrological window, which I found out from a mailing list I was on; and the fact that it fell during my two Latin classes today, it made sense to try a little drawing practice, and to strongly connect a student’s learning process to visual cues in their own notebook.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that the image is empowered with astrological portent.  Maybe it does.  I made it with the intention that it would serve as a reminder of the dedication and intentionality that goes into learning a language… and then I copied it into my version of their notebook, so that I can use the notes I’ve given them to help spur them on.

At the same time, though, I have to wonder — does the image of Mars made in astrological time carry more weight in the eyes of the viewer, even through a photograph, and can its purpose be discerned by those who claim occult ability?  And if so, can they confirm my own sense, that this image will do what is intended, for both me and my students — and likewise for all beings who view it and make copies of it, as was my intent?

For the Classroom Practitioner:

You’ve had kids make mind-maps before.   You know that kids learn stuff better when their information processes are tied to compelling visuals.  And yet you know that PowerPoint slideshows are the kiss of death when it comes to getting kids to tell compelling stories. The images are canned; their linkages to the narrative they’re trying to tell is sometimes only tenuous; it depends on how good their Google Fu is, and how much extra research they’re willing to do.

Instead, why not tie your notes clearly and compellingly to certain visual images, which you ask them to do their own interpretations of?  All I told the students for this image was that it had to be a man with sword, shield, some armor, a helmet, and the symbol for Mars.  If they had a red marker, they could add some red color. The images don’t have to be accurate; they don’t have to be real. They do have to be identifiable, and to some degree compelling.  Drawing books can help you get started, as they got me started a couple of years ago.

Let me say that again: Drawing guides can help you get started, as they got me started a couple of years ago.

I haven’t been doing this for very long.  It doesn’t take much to get started.  It does require a bit of chutzpah to put your drawings up on the board, and it requires confidence that you will get better with practice.  Don’t be afraid.  Start drawing sample work for your students to copy, and weave small but compelling images into your students’ notes.  The images will act as anchors for their memory processing, and they will remember what you have them write on those pages in much more clarity and detail.

At least, so says a good two thousand + years of memory practice from the ancient world up through the late Renaissance.  The worst that could happen is that you are made to feel like a fool, and your students learn to draw.  One way or another, the goal of improving visual literacy will be served.

Example of an Icon

Fortuna Major — a river coming out of a valley

This image of Fortuna Major comes out of Greer’s descriptions of the geomantic signs in The Art and Practice of Geomancy.  The signs are the sixteen four-bit “bytes” of an ancient divination system which probably originated in west Africa sometime in the 400s or 300′s AD, but possibly before that.

Fortuna Major has been described as the most positive of the geomantic signs, and represents success from internal strength. As I wrote over on Flickr:

In Geomancy, the sixteen signs are actually each a four-bit byte (in computer terms. This four-bit byte —rendered as double, double, single, single — represents singular bounty and excellence.

The image on the card represents the great good fortune of living in a river valley: well-nourished fields, prosperous towns, tall mountains that gather the rain, surrounding hills that protect and nourish, and provide the water power that bring industry and wealth.

In short, the valley represents success as a result of intrinsic strengths. Fortuna Major represents the greatest possible level of achievement, at least as represented in the geomantic suite of symbolism. It is associated with Leo and the Sun — which in retrospect I realize should have been in the image. Maybe they’ll get into the final version before I color it.

There’s a Geomancy list for practitioners (both professionals and amateurs) on Yahoo groups, and I offered this observation to fellow enthusiasts, that artists’ trading cards such as this one can be generated for each of the sixteen geomantic signs, using their dot-patterns (lower right), their names and their Zodiac and planetary and elemental correspondences.  These images can then serve as icons of a sort — windows into the potentials represented, to draw the desired energy toward the bearer.

Whether or not it works, it’s a great way to create some interesting thematic artwork.  At its core, though, this is something many magical traditions do in secret: provide training in other arts and sciences and technical specialities to people with curious minds.  In the process of learning how geomancy worked, I learned about binary mathematics.  In learning about binary math, I learned some artistic skills.  In learning artistic skills, I gained writing experience…. It’s sort of a continuous process of self-evolution, really, with creativity at its heart.

Who knew?

Taiji day 176: root and flanks

You may have seen those diagrams of chakras in the body: third eye, heart chakra, solar plexus and so forth. Today I had the root come alive. It wasn’t actually filled with energy, though: I just found the muscles that hold my pelvis in the right place while doing Five Gold Coins.

To be fair, I’d been doing some deep breathing exercises beforehand. So I was topped off with good breath work, and I had this unusual sense that there was a strength in my lower abdomen that I hadn’t had so far. So I tried, as best I could, to work five gold coins and eight pieces of silk from there. The result was a much hotter workout than usual, even in these dog days of summer. I’m sweating.

I could not maintain this focus from the root all the way through the form. I got most of the way, but the muscles pooped out. I completed the form but not with the same drive or focus from this spot at the core of my pelvis.

On the other hand, I found that when I worked from that core, my flanks – the muscles along the sides of my body, from the armpits to the hips – did what they’re supposed to. They generated the twists and upper body bends. So, when the leg and hip muscles hold the pelvis properly, the flanks function correctly. Interesting.

Building the Loom

Today, while sorting papers and putting things away, I came across a scrap of paper with this drawing on it, on the right.
You can see from the drawing that

1. My drawing skills were not very good, and
2. I didn’t really draw so much as create symbols, and
3. I had no idea how to draw what I was seeing or thinking, and
4. I had a cruddy sense of what I was trying to create.

But, from this drawing, I was able to make the loom that you see here below, and on the left. It doesn’t look anything like the drawing, actually. There are radical differences in form between one and the other.  The plates in the drawing on the sides of the loom, the ones with the four curved grooves in them, are completely missing from the model below.  The box-like shape of the drawing is missing from the final version, and the cross-bars that help stabilize the ‘drawing of the loom’ are actually created in the ‘loom that was built’ by alternating the height of the left-right pieces and the top-bottom pieces. Maybe the words I’m typing here don’t make any sense.

But LOOK AT THE PICTURES, MAN!

the loom-as-built

I assure you, the drawing on the right (although only photographed today) was the basis of the design of the loom that you see on the left. The loom that’s been working in, and serving, my school’s second grade class for more than a year.

This is design thinking in action. My friend Matt and I looked at a bunch of photographs of looms, and tried to figure out the simplest possible design we could envision.  And then we drew it a bunch of times, and then we simplified that… All it is is a simple frame of wood held together with screws, a spacer rod to create tension at the bottom, and a heddle to separate the warp and weft threads at the correct arrangement to weave the cloth.

Deeply simple. Simply deceptive.

The drawing does not match the device.  But without the drawing, there would be no device.  Matt and I would not have understood how to create the physical object without the 2-d, flat description.

I hope that this brief demonstration helps to convince you, O reader, of the importance of teaching visual literacy skills to your students.  It’s not enough to help them learn to read a graphic, or understand a picture, or interpret a Renaissance painting. That’s part of visual literacy, yes.  But if you’re not teaching them to make back-of-the-napkin drawings, at the very least, you’re preventing them from becoming true citizens of the 21st century.  More than that, you’re preventing them from becoming builders and dreamers.

Sure, I know.  It’s not on the test. Even though the nature of the real test is changing radically.

But teaching them Dave Gray’s Semigram (Flows, Forms and Fields) in the first week of school, how will they know that visual literacy is important?

Teaching: Setting Up My Classroom

Tomorrow is the first day of school, and I am setting up my classroom today.  This turns out to be a challenge in some ways, and a useful exercise in others. Of course, much of the stuff is in exactly the same positions as last year.  I’ve reorganized the desks quite a bit, because there are fewer students in the class.  We get to have a round table this year, rather like Arthur’s knights.

I also made this lovely sign for my advisory bulletin board, which has a lot of Zentangle patterns in the lower part of the sign.  I like how it turned out.  I reorganized how my desk sits in the room, so everyone coming into the room has to greet me right away.  Also we moved the trash bins so that people don’t have to look into the trash to come into the room.  And I hung the paintings I’ve made on the wall above and behind my desk, so that they reflect out into the hallway.  Given that the paintings are abstract representations of positive spiritual concepts,  I hope that this will have a suitable effect on passers-by as they walk through the hallways.  I also cleared a small bulletin board so that I can post student work in the room. There wasn’t much space for that beforehand; now there’s more than there was.

I noticed last year that kids working at the two computer stations in the room often spent more time chatting with one another than working on their assigned projects. HAving the two computer stations right next to one another also prevented a second person from working on the same computer on a joint project.  So, I’ve physically separated the two computers, and I got stools from our annual furniture shuffle.  Now the two computers are at some distance from one another — two or three kids can work at each computer.  There’s also a handouts station — any time I give out a handout, I can print two or three extras for each class, and there’s now a place (near the computers) where the Latin classes and History classes can pick up copies of the forms they’re missing.

I’m really excited for what the next few days will bring.

Kavad 4.8 – last septad, Mansions of the Moon

Kavad 4.8 – last septad, Mansions of the Moon

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Not wishing to rest on the laurels of having drawn all of the Decanates of the Zodiac, I began working on the Mansions of the Moon on the Kavad. These are somewhat easier, because I’ve drawn a good many of them before. But it’s still proving useful.

The more that I make these Mansions, and the images of the magical traditions generally, the more that I’m convinced that this is a tutorial program in drawing and image-crafting. It’s a clever process for teaching ideas and concepts, for teaching memory skills, and for improving visualization techniques. Yet at least in part, it’s a process for learning how to succeed as an artist.

I’m thinking that at some point, I have to develop my own list of visualizations, so that I can do a similar visual exercise with my students both exoteric and esoteric.

Via Flickr:
Because there are 28 mansions of the moon, they are traditionally divided into four septads or heptads (groups of seven. Here is the last septad: Mansions 22 through 28. Mansions 24 (lower left), and 26 (middle column) have figures that are too small for their frame, but the figures themselves are essentially correct in rough outline. More work needs to be done.

Taiji Day 175: First Day of School

My practice this morning was a bit desultory.  How could it not be? Today is the first day of school! (I joke that it’s only an orientation day, but really… it’s the first day that the students who are new to the middle school arrive and visit as students.  My mind was on other things this morning besides getting my Golden Pheasants correct or having good form during Bend the bow to shoot behind…

The other challenge this morning was that my father needs me to find a record of something from several years ago, and I’ve been prepping for school.  So the office floor is covered with pieces of paper in stacks, as I unpack files and get ready to move.  In some ways it challenged my practice — I had to step around and over piles of work from time to time, without disrupting anything.  Ideally, my space should have been organized and ‘clear’ all the way through the day, so that I could do my main work without interruption. But the mark of good practice is, at the least, that your practice takes priority over other issues… the fact that the space where I work is a mess, is not an excuse not to practice.

I’ve done quite well this summer and spring at not letting anything — hotels, travel, staying at friends’ houses, visiting my parents — disrupt my practice.  On the other hand, I haven’t really been challenged by anything serious yet.

Taiji Day 174: Balance missed, then achieved

During the form, there are these two kicks that come after Snake Creeps Down and the Golden Pheasant maneuvers.  When the Snake Creeps Down in the form, I’m sinking down toward the floor, so that my back is straight but my knees are bent.  My left foot is slightly forward.  My left hand starts back by my right elbow, and then sweeps forward steadily and surely.

Then I rise from close to the floor, into the Golden Pheasants.  First I do the left side, then the right side: the leg on the relevant side rises until it’s parallel to the ground, and the calf and foot hang perpendicular to the floor.  The bicep and tricep of the upper arm parallel the thigh and the floor, and then the forearm and hand are perpendicular to the ceiling.  Phew.

And then come these two kicks. The foot on the left side balances on the big toe, and then the leg lifts off the ground from the thigh and buttock until the meat of the thigh is parallel to the floor.  And then you “kick out” the left foot so that the ball or sole of the foot will hit an imaginary opponent’s calf, somewhere off to the left there.  And then you hold it.  Then you “kick in” the left foot so that it’s hanging below the knee, perpendicular to the ground, and lower the foot back to earth.  You balance yourself, and then repeat that action but on the right side this time.

During the first of these kicks, I nearly fell over. I had to rebalance myself, and then do the kick again.  This time, I almost felt something going on in my right foot while I was kicking with the left foot, but then as I did the kick on the right side, I realized… I’m experiencing William C.C. Chen’s “three nails”!  My foot is balanced because I’m using my big toe, the ball of the foot, and the heel to achieve balance! How awesome!

I stayed in the right kick for several breath cycles before moving on.