Yesterday hurt. @tieandJeans (Andrew Carle) and I wandered all over MakerFaire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens yesterday, and it was a mighty good time. I think I was in a state of crowdshock, if I may coin a new word — definitely I don’t think I made a very good impression on a lot of people, owing partly to the difficult events of the last week, and partly to the challenges of navigating such a large and complex event for the first time. Practice this morning, then, began much later than usual, and was… Not clean. In the middle of each of the three forms, I stopped doing tai chi and just sort of… wandered away from what I was doing. I’d stop in the middle of a set of repetitions, and go on to the next set. I’d pause between actions and then get lost and start doing a set of positions from much later in the set. It was like, my brain had no control over what I was doing. There was a deep disconnect between “me”, my mind, and “my meat”, my body, as though they were not in fact connected. I have this feeling that I’m going to be writing about MakerFaire quite a lot over the next few days. I’m experiencing the disquiet and unsettled-ness that suggests a major revolution in my thinking is about to occur. I’m looking forward to it, but at the same time trying to stay in and enjoy the unsettled space and time. This is hard. I like settled things, though I rarely get them. On the train home from New York City to my parents’ house last night, I was reading Josephine McCarthy on how power channels through magicians, and one of the things she wrote about, was how often magicians who had the capability to do something but were not using their power correctly had a tendency to burn out, or shut down and be left in the dark. I felt very much in the dark yesterday about the way forward, and the tai chi routine today suggests that I’m still in the dark. Now, I’m trying to decide how to get the lights back on.
