Today I was able to to 20 push-ups fairly easily in all directions but South. South is associated with fire, with passion, with energy, with noonday, with summer, and with heat and dryness in druidry. I tend to associate it with drive and focus as well. In that direction I was only able to do 16 push-ups: four-fifths of twenty. I had to stop, and then do the last four.
My tai chi practice was weird today. The two qi gong forms went fine, but the tai chi form itself was out of sorts. I am not entirely sure when or how it went off the rails, but it did go off the rails in a couple of places. One was after the Heel Kick that follows the Golden Pheasants and the Half Spin. I think I left out the whole Buddha’s Twist piece, and I wound up having to re-insert it after Fair Lady Works Shuttles 4. Except I’m not sure that I did that part right today, either.
Can I just say, it feels great to have those poems done, that I reference in the previous paragraph? Having a guide that I can refer back to, to give myself some sense of where I went wrong, is kind of like having a bunch of anchors, or save points, in my experience, that I can draw upon. It’s like building infrastructure; there’s a cost to maintaining it, but on the other hand it gives one a leg up. I think that we don’t spend enough time thinking about or creating infrastructure — and yet a lot of my life revolves around infrastructure these days — building up my own skills, building up the skill-set of my students, and generally creating a framework that results in quality work for and from my colleagues.
More on that soon.
