Tai Chi y2d68: Unknowing

I was up late working on this painting, titled “Black Pillar”, and I think it’s coming along nicely. My morning tai chi routine was lackadaisical as a result: one qigong form done, then a bit of a walk around the apartment, then the other qigong form, then a bit of cleanup in the kitchen, then the tai chi form. There may have been some cleanup of the art supplies and drafting desk, too, although more remains to be done to clean up this house after the last few weeks of crazy. A lot of it will get done this week… Probably once the painting is finished.

I’m conscious that in the two months since my tai chi practice passed the year mark, that it’s been less and less interesting to me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s still hard to get up and do the work; it’s still hard to convince myself that I should do it. The Dweller on the Threshold still gets me front time to time, and I delay getting up and getting started. But sooner or later, I get up and out of bed, and I go do the tai chi.

But the actual tai chi is less interesting. There are fewer complications, and fewer barriers to success. There are times when I forget my place in the form, or I have to do a sequence over again — but I find that there are few parts of the work that cause strain or physical challenge. Which is sort of the point. I want to experience fewer physical challenges as I get older, and I want to remain flexible and mentally alert. And I’m getting those benefits. But there’s less to say about the work itself. And I wonder if that will continue to be the case, or if I’m only on a current plateau in my practice. Or if there’s a third option? Again, I don’t know.

Tai chi Y2D66: teeth and bones

What with one thing and another,I haven’t gone to e dentist in a while. Over two years. I went yesterday. The curious thing is, my teeth were in pretty not-good shape back then. They weren’t bad — i wasn’t experiencing bone loss or about to lose teeth, but was experiencing some gum infections, and I had some incipient cavities forming. Bad stuff… But I ignored it for a year, and then another year more. And in the meantime, I took up tai chi daily for a year.

Correlation is not causality. Not scientifically anyway. But there have been studies over the decades that tai chi can help older people mitigate the effects of osteoporosis, and that it can improve bone density. So keep that in mind.

Yesterday, the dentist noted the presence of the broken facial plate on one of my teeth, something installed on my tooth 20 years ago, and decided that needed replacing… But otherwise my teeth were fine. Bone density, great. No cavities, either incipient or formed. Nothing requiring significant work at all.

Part of me goes, huh.. Part of me thinks, tai chi. And truly, I’ll never know one way or another.

Tai Chi Y2D64: Slowing down

The last few days, I feel like I’ve written everything useful that there is to say about tai chi practice. Slow Down. Remember to breathe. Hold horse stance. And so on. I could just recycle those three or four pieces of advice, ad infinitum. And it’s getting boring for me, and apparently for my readers. The deep insights are rarer, and spaced farther apart.

And frankly, I want to give up. By chance, I was reading something about sobriety the other day, and the author said, “the thing about choosing to be sober is that it’s a constant choice. You make it once, but then you have to keep making it, again and again. You have to make it even when you don’t want to, or when the stakes are very high, in sickness and in health. You have to make the choice even when you don’t much feel like staying sober, and the choice to stay sober is more painful than the choice to break down.” that’s not the exact quotation, but it’s the sentiment: the need to keep choosing.

And so it is with tai chi, or any martial practice, or any practice at all. There was a quotation by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters floating around on Facebook a week or so ago, and here I’m not going to use quotation marks because I’m not going to get it right: All these kids show up for American Idol or the Voice, and they get judged and critiqued so hard, and the ones that get turned down think that’s it, they’ve blown their shot. But the best bands of the next decade aren’t going to come out of the American Idol auditions. They’re the ones that are practicing now, in their garages, making a mess, making music… And they suck, right now, they’re terrible. But they’ll get better, and they’ll get a few breaks, and tour a bit. But that’s where great musicians come from: practice, and sucking for a while. Again, not an exact quote, but approximate. And the right sentiment: go practice, don’t worry about the Idol and the Voice, go suck at music in a garage somewhere. I haven’t got time to look it up: find it for yourself on Facebook. It’s floating around somewhere, and if you missed it the first time, don’t worry. It’ll be back. Eventually.

And the challenge is that practice is hard. And lonely at times. And you suck. Ten years ago I was in Washington DC for ISTE’s big conference, and I saw an African-American man doing tai chi in a park on the walk between my hotel and the conference center, every morning. Slow, graceful, fully in control of himself. Amazing. As good as my teacher,I’d say, at least in presentation.

But you don’t become that overnight, nor even after a year or more of practice. Keep going. Slow down. This isn’t a marathon. It isn’t even a sprint. It’s life. It’s practice. Keep it up.

Tai Chi Y2D63: Filling Space

Today, I woke up late on a school day for the first time in over a year.  My sleep patterns have been wonky the past few days, and I’m tired, and I have energy at times that I want to be sleeping; and I’m tired at times I want to be working.  Part of it is too much caffeine abuse over the weekend.  It makes many things possible, but it also leaves me a little wiped out.

Anyway, because of this, I did tai chi and the qi gong forms in the Design Lab this morning.  And as a result of that, I had the recognition/realization that my office is such a comfortable space to do tai chi in, because my movements fill the whole space.  I have no furniture in the center of the room there, so that there’s space for tai chi to occur. But that means that my tai chi practice is office-shaped.

JC over at Rosicrucian Vault wrote a little bit about the shape of space in a recent blog post. Ancients and medievals associated the dodecahedron with the shape of space overall, and correspondingly divided space into a twelve-sided figure.  It’s a remarkably consistent thing, this twelve-fold division, partly because the motion of the sun across the sky over the course of a year divides nicely into roughly-equal twelve parts (which twelfths also happen to very roughly correspond with the motion of the Moon against the stars, sorta — I know I’m simplifying here, don’t judge me).

Anyway, the result of doing his mental exercise in pencil (if not yet colored papers and foamcore, and large enough to work on) was this little paper model, in which the sides of the dodecahedron are marked with the signs of the Zodiac.  If it were colored to represent the four elements, and additional signs were drawn on the sides to represent the Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable signs, and perhaps a line of gold drawn on it to represent the course of the sun through each sign of the Zodiac, it would be a fair three-dimensional model of the universe as ancient and medieval students explained it — perhaps not as they understood it to be, but at least as they initiated the conversation about its structure and its nature.

Maybe.  I’m guessing, I admit. A lot.

Yet underlying this simple paper model (download your own paper blank dodecahedron here) is an understanding of the universe as being a thing with boundaries and edges.  And I realized today during my practice that the way that I practice, and the place where I practice, has become the place where I feel most comfortable practicing.  And that needs to change.  I’ve traveled along this path for more than year, learning all kinds of things about my practice in one place (or mostly one place — there’s been bathrooms and kitchens and hotel rooms in the last year, too)… but I need to extend my practice.  I need to widen my conception of space, so that I can work the forms in larger environments and within larger boundaries, than just my usual practice space.

Anyway, that’s my insight today.

Tai chi Y2D51: done

Done for today. Not much else to say. Morrow will be especially busy — expect no entry until much later in the day.

Tai Chi Y2D44: advising Lawrence

It’s becoming harder to decide what to write about each morning. There’s nothing that I can point to that’s going particularly well; but nothing that’s going particularly badly, either. I’m in a groove, I guess; but it’s hard to tell if it’s a rut, either. A lot of the basic challenges of doing the form are solved; the principle challenge is getting up and doing it. That is to say, the dweller on the threshold is still my most critical enemy.

Which is to say, procrastination is my biggest enemy. Procrastination comes from the Latin words “for tomorrow”. There’s this temptation to “for-tomorrowize” a good many of the challenges I face. And it would have been fine to lie in bed and get another half-hour or more of sleep. Or write a poem. Or something else.

T.S. Eliot once wrote “ambition comes when we find all things no longer possible.” I haven’t run up against physical limits at all. The mental obstacles are the real challenges — as they pretty much always have been.

I told a kid yesterday at school that most schools have a secret curriculum that consists of three things:

1. organization
2. presentation
3. participation

That is, how well your system works at getting things done; how well your system works at presenting and framing your ideas; and how well you get along with others and making the team work.

But it occurs to me this morning that there are two more:

1. initiation
2. transition

That is, how well you develop new ideas, and how easily you shift from one set of ideas to another set. I think tai chi cultivates these two in me. But it’s hard to tell at the moment.

Tai chi y2D42: on track

Well, I’m back on my normal schedule for now. I don’t know how long this current schedule will at, though. It seems like the major themes of year two are keeping up with the routine, and learning how to work around interruptions to the schedule.

Tai Chi Y2D39: Finding Normal

Four days in Quito, I think, really screwed with my practice.  I had to do things much more lightly and easily than I usually do, as a result of altitude.  And getting back into my normal rhythm has felt hard.  Today was the first day that I felt like I was back to my “normal” practice.  And it was tiring, rather than invigorating today.  I find that this is the case after any travel, though — it takes me a while to get back into my routine.

Tai Chi Y2D34: processions and paleness

This morning there was a religious or ceremonial
procession under our window at about 3am. Singing, accordions,
banners, candles, fireworks. Made for an interesting morning, but
hard to get up again at 5:30. I’m definitely finding that the
altitude gets in the way of tai chi and qi gong. I can perform the
outward actions but not move the internal energy. Breath work? It’s
a lot of work to breathe, much less do deep breathing. But I’m
getting along ok.

Tai chi Y2D33: altitude and attitude

I definitely feel better about the whole altitude thing today. It is still challenging to walk far, or bend over, or move too fast. Don’t Rush. That’s the principal rule to be obeyed.

Under these constraints, today’s taichi can’t be said to be an exemplar of the form. Done. That’s pretty much all that can be said of it. It got done.

There are peculiar aches and pains that manifest at this altitude. Lower back pain, weird mouth dryness, shoulder aches, restlessness, sleeplessness. We’re having a good time, my father and I, but the height and the dryness are both unusual travel experiences for us.