Back to where I once belonged

I'm getting back to myself in a number of ways. The sun is setting later and that is filling me with all kinds of cheeriness. My back is back in shape and I have been back to both Tai Chi and the clay studio. I started my triumphant return last week and I could already feel the strain on my back from just the first set. I skipped the don-yo's and went lightly on the rest of the exercise. To my great relief, I did not have any setbacks after this and I have been slowly getting back into the 'ol routine. This Wednesday, I was able to get to Tai Chi in time to do the first quiet set as well as the official first set, the various exercises and the final set without pain.

This meant a lot to me, in particular because the 'quiet set' is my favorite. The beginning Tai Chi class is an hour and begins and ends with as much of the set as the class knows at that time. By contrast, the continuing class always knows (for many different values of 'knows')  the full set which takes about 15 minutes. That takes up a half hour, and then there are donyo's and specific lessons in each class. There really isn't any room to fit in another set, so some of the class decided to take it upon themselves to arrive early and do an extra set without commentary or instruction.

It is not that the instruction is irritating. What I have learned in the continuing class has stripped a veil from the practice itself so that I can see where I need to improve. Nothing could be better as there is a definite pleasure that comes from doing the moves correctly. Each time, I 'get' a move, it is like my body is on rails and moving itself. It is like dancing, but instead of a move in response to music, it is the making of music itself.

So why do I love this extra set? Because doing the set is why I wanted to learn Tai Chi in the first place. It takes up a lot of time in my day, but I am determined to get these moves in my bones so that I can do them any time I want. Right now, I still need the rest of the class around me to remind me of the moves.

This is getting long, so the next post will be on pottery, and possibly poetry.

The Pain of Continuing

After Beginning Tai Chi there is, of course, Continuing Tai Chi. The main difference is that there are a series of exercises - donyos, toy-yos (sp?), etc, which are done in between sets. At first, they seemed unrelated to the Tai Chi set, but it did not take long to understand how they literally deepen the movements. It seems however, that the donyos may be at least partially to blame for taking me out of the action for a few weeks. I call the donyos "glorified squats" which is a bit harsh, but a good way of describing the essential movement. Our continuing class does 4 sets of 27 (for a total of 108 - the number of Tai Chi movements). That is a lot of effort in the legs and I am afraid that I may have forgotten the "lift with the legs, not with the back" mantra somewhere along the line. Then again, I have also been going to a chiropractor for a while to deal with some underlying back issues.

In any case, my spine got out of whack and I pulled a muscle the morning before I was due for a chiropractor session. The muscle stayed pulled and was in a state of constant spasm. I got some drugs from my mainstream doc (who is not really that mainstream, but that is another story), and then a second prescription when the first prescription proved to be ineffective.

I am on the road to recovery now and it is a boring road with a long list of things I shouldn't be doing and a near endless (i.e. over two weeks long) cycle of advances and setbacks. In the meantime, it snowed and I spent a day gazing helplessly at the snow while my husband and daughter played and then a second day in a medication free, pain free state of ecstasy at the sight of the blazing white snow and the deep blue sky.

There is no predicting how life will end out, but I try to remember the deep blue days.

Completion

For several months, I have been studying Tai Chi. Or perhaps, I should say for several years. I started taking Tai chi just before I left for college. This turned out to be fairly pointless because it takes quite a while to learn the whole form and there are many different styles. I developed a real gift for getting in a few months of one style before moving or radically changing my schedule so that I had to quit.

Finally, this past year I enrolled at the Taoist Tai Chi Society . This was actually the first form that I studied way back in my teen years so there seemed to be a certain symmetry. For three months, I went and learned a few moves each day. The instructor was patient, my fellow classmates were friendly, but I always felt a bit off when I left. I could not figure it out, but I knew this was good exercise so I persisted.

Now for this next bit, you have to understand that the "chi" is not just a metaphor, but is absolutely real. I don't know whether it is a matter of the body's electrical system or a factor of the body warming up. I don't think that it really matters how or why it all works.

What I do know is that when I lowered my hands down for the final bow, I felt balanced.

I am out of my depth

My mom sent me a brush calligraphy set for Christmas. It has all sorts of new toys to play with like an ink stone and a seal, but my first experiments showed that I have a few challenges ahead of me. Among other things, I don't know any Chinese, so I need to find a way to use brushes with the roman alphabet. I did see a few mentions of using brushes for western calligraphy on youtube, but the brushes were just being used for flourishes.

My ultimate goal is to develop enough of a consistent style that I can write up some of my own English haiku with brushes. In any case, it is a fine meditative exercise so I am sure that I will enjoy playing with it. It might even improve my pottery. The main technique which I use with glazing my pottery is to dip it one glaze, apply a crude design with wax, and then dip it in a second glaze. This actually works out fairly well as getting fine details out of drippy glaze is futile.

Hello Again, Imaginary Readers!

Today's obsession is knitting! The weather is getting very cold and is expected to stay cold for the duration of the extended forecast. I am also coming to the close of my rather odd paravacation. I am a freelancer and in theory I would set my own schedule. In reality, it is the tail end of winter break, not a client is stirring, and I have finally quieted down that nagging voice that says I really should be working.

Thus, it is a perfect storm for some good quality knitting time. I am currently working on February Lady and have been for some time. My friends at the local knitting group were giving me some serious grief about how I had been knitting it since February, but decided that it could not have been quite that long. In fact, I think I can date it fairly precisely to sometime in June '09. I started it as a good travel project before a long vacation. I am a slow knitter. I knit slowly and I don't knit all the time (see previous post regarding excess of hobbies). For the most part, I have dealt with this by avoiding knitting anything on a deadline and keeping (as much as possible) to one project at a time.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the cool projects are starting to add up. I did a gauge swatch for Spoke today and it turned out quite well. The pattern calls for Classic Elite Yarns Waterlily with size 8 needles, but it looked like Paton Classic Wool with size 7 needles would also work. I did a quick test swatch and we are good to go.

Keeping it wild

I suppose starting a blog on New Years Day is only slightly less predictable than joining a gym. Nonetheless, here I am. The theme of this blog will be...look, you're going to have to go to some other blog to find a theme. In fact, that is the key reason why I delayed creating a blog for so long. In short, if you find yourself getting frustrated that I am wandering off the point, well, there isn't one.

This could have been a professional blog in which I focused on my various writing, translation, or poetry projects. Or a hobby blog about gardening, pottery, aquaria, tai chi, or knitting. Or a mommy blog, but while I am a mommy and I do love my daughter, I can't imagine centering a whole blog around any one part of my life. And that's the problem. All of my passions rotate in their importance. This is occasionally due to the seasons or some other external force, but often there is no reason at all.

Catch me on the right (or wrong) day and I could make a blog about finding the best possible notebook. Do not encourage me on this as I probably actually could write a year's worth of content about the best size, binding, cover materials, paper quality, line height or lack of lines, and the proper price[1] to encourage rather than inhibit the notebook's use.

I think that I would slowly go mad if I tried to narrow down my writings to one particular subject. Instead, I will do my best to tag posts so that you can read the Wanderjenn "pottery blog" or the "aquarium blog" or even the "calligraphy blog" (I got a Chinese calligraphy set for Christmas and I am dying to try it out). Maybe I am a fool for not properly establishing my "personal brand," but you can't build a tarot deck without a fool.

All that being said, Happy New Blog!

[1] It should be high enough to insure quality materials were used and to provide a certain feeling of luxury, but low enough so that it is not too hard to use it for fear of "spoiling it." In fact, I would say that notebooks should always have pages which can be detached seamlessly so that you can start over again with a different subject. Speaking of which, isn't it lovely the way that blog posts can be deleted...