Woke this morning at 5:30 (no school today), did tai chi and my druidic work, and then took some time to prepare for today’s Mars in Exaltation.
And then I made the image for today’s movement, White Crane Spreads Wings, also called White Heron Spreads Wings.
The poem that I did on this movement went like this, back on day 135. When I learned this move, it was called White Crane Spreads Wings. I think somewhere along the way, I changed it in my own mind to be called “White Heron” because I have another poem of the same name, about watching a heron hunt in the river marshes near my parents’ house. Anyway, this poem, about this tai chi movement, goes like this:
Left hand sinks downward, but right hand rises,
the first past left hip, the second up high.
White Heron hunts with shadowed disguises —
“my legs are sticks” is its first tiny lie,
and the second is how it hides its head
behind a curtain of feathers and shade.
Circle your arms, so neither is led
by the other; and stand as though you wade
in the shallows. Right hand comes curving down,
while left hand goes curving to the top,
left palm pressing upward, above the crown;
right hand seeks earth as though to never stop.
Then sudden reverse: both hands turn and close,
to hold chi at navel, fragile as rose.
I’m thinking about my decision to put three movements of this posture on a single page, a page with an existing pair of postures. This is just yesterday’s chart, with the blank spaces filled in. Hmm. Already I have it in mind to go back and re-do a lot of these images, but I’m also aware of the possibility of printing a Book. They allow for fifteen pages, which isn’t enough for the sonnets (all sixty of them!) hand-written, but might be enough for the diagrams of my tai chi form… a nifty little grammar of movement, perhaps? But that means concentrating and consolidating the drawings — more postures to a page. I can’t decide if that will help people learn the form better, to see multiple movements in sequence; or be more confusing.
Time will tell.
