As you may have gathered from yesterday’s blog posts, yesterday was a productive day: in the last thirty-six hours, I’ve built a pair of tables for the new design lab, guided a group of kids through the construction of some puppet bodies, worked on a Wizard of Oz head, and announced that I may be going to NAIS (some details of that are still up in the air, though). Oh, and did tai chi. Four entries in a day — you must be getting sick of me. Today will be a less exciting day, I think.
Tai chi practice went normally, but slowly, which is good. There’s a section in the middle, from about cloud hands to the end of Fair Lady Works Shuttles, where I have difficulty figuring out how to make that slow-down happen. A lot of it seems to be about the Great Divorce — separating the movement from the breathing pattern, or more specifically breathing normally, and just moving really slowly. I think that’s the piece of the form that I know least well, and it’s easy to rush through things that you don’t know well.
The other piece of good news today is that the elbow position of the left hand during the first Ward Off Left is always challenging. I tend to let the elbow droop, and then correct it after the fact. I do this on both the first, and second WOL, and it’s difficult to get right. Even when I’m thinking about it, and being careful about it, I do it wrong.
Today I did it right, and without thinking about it. The elbow started in the right place, it stayed in the right place, and it kept on staying in the right place, all the way through that particular movement. Perfect.
