Tai chi

“Breathe from the diaphragm,” says Beverly, my tai chi instructor. “Clear your mind; try to go  slowly,” she reminds us before we begin. We never go slowly enough.  

We stand in two rows in a large room, the dining hall in a senior center. Some wear the thin-soled martial arts slippers that help in tai chi’s turns and kicks, glides and slides.

Through its floor-to-ceiling windows a hummingbird jabs at the orange and purple blooms on stalks of bird of paradise that edge the building. Across the grass between the fig and palm trees I can glimpse the gray blue Pacific in the distance; when the doors are open we can hear the muffled clang of the bell buoy.

This is January on the south bay coast west of Los Angeles, not Michigan. I get distracted.

We bow and then raise our outstretched arms to clasp our left hand over our right fist, the tai chi salute.  At some point in the next half hour---if I can corral my wandering thoughts---my mind will float away from my body.

Part of tai chi’s allure for me has been the promise of settling the mind, but I’ve come to love the exercise, how it feels in my body.  

I first learned about tai chi through a class taught one semester at the UM-Flint Rec Center. I learned about “the empty leg” and how to “sink the chest.” Different concepts and techniques after years of yoga. I found Youtube videos and began to follow articles online.

My first winter in southern California, I saw a group of twenty or so people in a nearby park moving in slow motion like the video I’d watched. I looked up the park activities online, but the tai chi group had disbanded. Another group met in a different park, but it was too far to drive. I checked Meetup---more than a dozen tai chi groups were listed but all were nearly an hour away. This is Los Angeles.

Then by chance I stopped in at a nearby senior center and saw a flyer for a tai chi class taught there, a weekly session in something called “the Yang style long form.”

I joined a group of eight learners---the oldest one turns 90 this year and another, aged 83, walks with a cane. For an hour on Thursday mornings we move silently through a routine that requires ten kicks standing on one leg, several with turns on one foot.

No one has ever fallen. We don’t kick very high.

The Yang style long form turned out to be a series of 103 moves (or more, depending on how they are counted), many with flowery names: grasp the bird’s tail, play the lute, repulse the monkey, fighting tiger, fair lady works the shuttles, the snake creeps down, the golden cock stands on one leg.

I see the brushstrokes of a Chinese painting.

Don’t be fooled. Tai chi is an internal martial art practiced for health and relaxation, but its full name, tai chi ch’uan, can be translated as “Supreme Ultimate Fist.” Basic moves like “ward off” and “parry and punch” come from combat and self-defense, but those with the flowery names do also. Beverly reminds us: you are blocking, you are striking, you are kicking an opponent. Keep space between your feet so you won’t be knocked off balance.    

Tai chi’s modern history is traced to Chen village in Wenxian County, Henan Province, in central China. A 17^th century warrior and master of martial arts named Chen Wangting is credited with creating tai chi. 

The art remained in Chen family and their village for centuries.  People came to the village to learn the art (and still do today). An outsider named Yang Lu-chan (1799-1872) learned the Chen practice and developed the style that is named after him. More styles developed from the Chen form. You can find a bewildering tree of lineages of tai chi styles in Wikipedia.

During China’s Civil War many traditional tai chi teachers emigrated or ceased activity, but in 1949 the People’s Republic government established the Chinese Sports Committee. The Committee developed hybrid forms of tai chi that were easier to learn and practice and promoted group tournament; the government encouraged public practice.[i]

Tai chi spread in America in the wake of the martial arts interest that exploded in the 1970s. Boomers have embraced tai chi for health; the Mayo Clinic recommends it to reduce stress and some hope its practice will prove beneficial against Alzheimer’s.

Each class tests me---how much of the entire form will my body remember?  I’ve got the short opening section down pat, melded into my muscle memory. I’m doing better with the middle section; sequences of moves repeat and sometimes if I can remember the one arm or leg go, the next moves will come to me. At some point in the third and longest section I will sneak a glance at Beverly; where are we? Did I miss “snake creeps down”?

It takes our group 30 minutes or more to do the entire Yang long form. If we go slowly enough. When we finish we repeat the salute and bow. We clap for our instructor and ourselves. For a few moments my arthritic body feels light and fluid again.

Even when my kicks on one leg wobbled or I forgot half of the last section, I feel satisfaction.  Even if my errant mind got distracted, I am peaceful.

Real devotees say you can practice tai chi anywhere.  Allen Ginsberg dedicated a poem to his tai chi master. It turned out to be a wry commentary about practicing in his in a tiny Manhattan apartment and it’s recorded on video.  

The first stanzas go like this: 

Bend knees, shift weight
Picasso’s blue deathhead self portrait
tacked on refrigerator door

This is the only space in the apartment
big enough to do t’ai chi

Straighten right foot & rise–I wonder
if I should have set aside that garbage
pail

Raise up my hands & bring them back to
shoulders–The towels and pyjama
laundry’s hanging on a rope in the hall

Push down & grasp the sparrow’s tail

Those paper boxes of grocery bags are
blocking the closed door

Turn north–I should hang up all
those pots on the stovetop

Am I holding the world right? That
Hopi picture on the wall shows
rain & lightning bolt

Turn right again–thru the door, God
my office space is a mess of
pictures & unanswered letters

I better concentrate on what I’m doing
weight in belly, move by hips

No, that was the single whip–that apron’s
hanging on the North wall a year
I haven’t used it once
Except to wipe my hands–the Crane
spreads its wings have I paid
the electric bill?[ii]

Yeah, Allen, not enough space and too many distractions at home for me too. But the poem consoles me. Each week I join my tai chi friends in warm expectation; I see the ocean and hear the muffled clang of the bell buoy.  We bow, raise hands and salute, we try again.

---

[i] Qi gong, Chinese medicine’s ancient system of physical exercises and breathing control (and used for tai chi training) also came under state regulation.

[ii] Manhattan Midnite, September 5, 1984. http://slantedflying.com/a-poem-by-allen-ginsberg-about-tai-chi/

Note: Last Saturday in April is World Tai Chi and Qi Gong Day.



This is essay also appeared in East Village Magazine, https://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/EVM-04.2019.pdf

Traditional Chinese Medicine

I’ve known my friend Geri for over 40 years.  Our friendship dates back to the mid-1960s when she came from Taiwan to the west coast to study biochemistry at the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco.  

My parents had signed up for a program to host international students. I’ve no idea which one. I was not involved.  Their charge was to befriend this young female doctoral student and provide a temporary home for her until she could get settled on campus.  Naturally, their first task was to meet Geri at the airport.  

But there was a back story.  It was awkward and confusing.  I still wince when I remember it, at least the parts I can recall.  

I had just left home.  Two college girlfriends and I had rented an apartment in an old Victorian house, the three of us resolved to share these digs for our upcoming senior year.  Like school girls holding hands, we embarked on our road to independence by setting up house.

Not a big deal, really.  I was twenty, after all.  Just part of the process of working out my timid---by ‘60s standards---rebellion from parents, the middle class, and a small Catholic college.  Still a school for women and as yet untouched by student activism.

An only child, loved and cossetted, I had exhibited moderate promise in high school. Adept, but alas, absent some overriding talent or single-minded passion.  Now I was adrift in the liberal arts and close to college graduation. 

This apartment announcement alarmed my Mother and Dad.  Three years of private school tuition payments suddenly jeopardized. My grades had already dipped. And they did not know, I think, about the chilly interview I’d recently had with the college president---called in privately after some protest statement I can no longer remember. 

Even more disturbing for them was the shadow of the young man whom I was dating.  He was five years older than me, involved in the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations.  They supposed (correctly) that my apartment idea was bolstered by romance.  The lofty moral tone of “the movement” already pervaded my language in family apartment discussions.

Still, along with parental confused disappointment, there was the vacant bedroom I’d left behind.

Geri was about my age and, as things turned out, she helped fill the void my move created. 

 

Deeply absorbed in my modest rebellion, I have no memory of my parents’ preparation for their student guest. But I was on hand at their house that first day when Geri arrived after a twelve-hour flight from Taipei. 

In contrast to the recent months of family tension, this day my parents were upbeat with anticipation. Smiles all round.  A relief for me, but tinged with a creeping sense of my outsider position. 

Conversation was animated, arms gesticulating and eyebrows rising like commas to assist communication.  Moments of mutual comprehension eliciting bursts of elation. Getting accustomed to Geri’s accented English.

By late afternoon, Geri was exhausted; she had a headache.  My Mom’s offers of aspirin (in these pre-Tylenol days) were politely declined.  Geri retreated to her suitcases and boxes deposited in my old bedroom.  She delved into her pharmacopeia brought from home and produced a small hexagonal jar of a glistening, milky salve.  She rubbed it on her forehead and lay down to rest. 

Tiger Balm had entered our lives.  It never left my Mother’s medicine cabinet.  Decades later, when moving my Mom to an assisted living apartment, I found three jars in different strengths.  

Geri completed her PhD and then worked in research labs.  She too shared an apartment with her campus girlfriends.  She met her future husband, also from Taiwan, who had come to the US to study engineering. 

With longtime friends of my mother and dad as surrogate family, Geri was married in my parents’ garden.  My father gave her away.  I was a bridesmaid along with her Chinese girlfriends.

The Taiwan graft onto my family brought many joys to my parents in later years.  Photographs show visits with two little boys born in America bringing afternoons of boisterous family life to my parents.  

I was not there. I had married the unapproved young man.  The anti-war movement and the counter culture swallowed up the next three years of my life.   

But that was long ago.  

Geri and I are retired now.  When we meet our main topic is health.  

It is time for TCM, traditional Chinese medicine.  

At the computer, Geri rolls through screen after screen of Chinese text. After much searching she finds it:  a picture of ten hand exercises to stimulate the body’s meridians.  You know, she says, gets the chi going in the channels that govern our internal organs: the small intestine, large intestine, stomach, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lungs, bladder, and gall bladder.  Then there’s “the triple warmer” (cavities of thorax, abdomen, and pelvis) and the governing and conception vessels through which yin and yang flow.  Of course.

The simple, black and white thumbnail sketches on the left side of the page are easy to follow.  The Chinese characters on the right?   Not a clue.
  

It looks like this: 

Every morning you firmly tap parts of the hand, punch the palm of the hand, and tug the earlobes and press the palms to your face.  And whatever else you can figure out from the pictures.  

Geri advises:  “You can just do it when you first wake up, when still lying in bed.  Gets you ready for the day.”   Your chi will decline in late afternoon.  No exercise after 7 pm. 

Several times a day Geri lies down for twenty minutes on a contraption to stretch her spine and legs.  It looks like a padded ironing board attached to a second board at a right angle. Keeps the hip joint flexible and extends the lower back.  We compare notes; my yoga poses have a similar effect.  

My partner Dennis is hugely skeptical.  Geri---a scientist---smiles subversively.  “You have to believe,” she says.

I understand.  

My own inherited health traditions have returned to me in later life.  Advice remembered from my southern grandmother.  Use cold pressed castor oil for all skin irritations.  Wear a broad-brimmed hat in the sun.  Choose an “osteopathic” physician over a medical doctor.  Remedies from her Kentucky childhood and her experience of married life in frontier Idaho.  She had a midwife for childbirth---three times. 

Not much compared to over two thousand years of TCM.  But it brings me closer to my forebears.  My grandmother was just a few years older than I am when she repeated her remedies to me---who ignored them.  

So I do the hand exercises and use the castor oil.  And think about traditional medicine.  I’m in another phase of change now.  Just one year short of 70 and once again things are awkward and confusing.  Funny thing, though. I’m beginning to look back more gently at my youth.  I think it must be TCM. 

Read more essays like this one at like this one in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Million Dollars Red

My daughter-in-law Kristin posted a picture of her toes on Facebook after a recent pedicure.  Slender and delicate, her phalangial extremeties (toes) are pale and regular like those of the six cavorting ladies in Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring".  Bright red nail polish and a tiny fanciful daisy---slightly different on each great toe---add joy to her agile step.  And step she does.  Kristin is a nurse in a trauma ICU.  She works ten to twelve hour days, goes to school to earn her BSN, and loves my son Christopher. They have an energetic dog and a nervous cat and many, many friends. And two mortgages. Step, step, step.

I am fascinated with the bones in the foot, especially now when the metatarsus of my left foot seems to have developed a life of its own. For example, bones fracture.  Since November of last year I've had metatarsals 3 and 4 both break. I've spent months in various kinds of casts. Knobs of bone seem to be developing on the sides of the foot. What is this?

Of course, I am older than Kristin---by nearly four decades---but I still want my feet to work.  I don't stand, or walk, or run as much as a younger person would; I try to be kind to my skeletal system. I realize that bones age and get tired, but I take calcium and vitamins.  I've not quit; why should they?

I coddle my feet.  I wear Birkenstocks and just invested in a pair of New Balance 927s for walking.  Not only are these shoe prices high.  If you have any fashion radar, you see that you have to revise your entire wardrobe to accomodate this large boxy shape at the base of the silhouette.  Or, not look down; or cover the lower portion of a full length mirror. The "line" just doesn't work.

Then, there's therapy; I get a foot massage from Tom at a manicure/pedicure place in LA.  But the nail and polish business is less important to me than the "reflexology" therapy he does on my feet and legs.  Whatever the scientific value of  my "qi" or meridians, my step is light after an hour with Tom. This business is an Asian speciality, of course, and in Los Angeles, practically every block you drive has at least one nail salon.  It's one of the growth industries of the last decade and the particular province of Asian immigrants.

Tom and his sister Nancy are from Vietnam; they run a little shop in one of the countless strip malls lining the major arteries in Torrance. They are open 7 days a week, from 9 am to 9 pm. Decor is minimal and the tv has no cable.  A little shrine sits on the floor---an indecipherable Asian baroque design; sometimes with some kind of sweet roll offering in celophane. I restrain the impulse to genuflect. How they got here is sketchy: she'd escaped in a boat and watched people drown; then waited in an internment camp.This must have been several decades ago, maybe during the 1970s.  Now she sends letters back to family in Vietnam, but not too often. I overheard this history in the most chatty encounter I'd observed in the three or four years I've gone there.  Tom and Nancy do not talk much; their English suffices for business.  Once in surprisingly expansive moment Tom confided to me that his daughter was applying to medical school and needing to re-take entrance exam.

But the main thing is that Tom understands my feet and in particular what's going on as my left foot ages and stress fractures occur.  It touches me that he examines my foot with such understanding and compassion.  He slowly nods his head when he takes my left foot in his capable hands and carefully probes its strengths and weaknesses. Gently tests its flexibility. Presses points in the sole and behind the knee.  I am comforted.

Toward the end of an hour, after all therapy, he applies the polish: "Million Dollars Red."  It's a bright, true red; makes me think of Marilyn Monroe.  Who wants subtlety in southern California?  For several weeks now, my feet will feel young again.  That is, to say, I won't feel them at all. Some yoga classes and regular walking in those 927s will improve my attitude toward my phalangial extremities.  So much of my life has been done on foot---the long blocks of Vienna suburbs and the cobblestones of Cracow, traipsing from campus to the edge of town in grad school, childhood wandering northern California hillsides from bus stop to home.  Whatever the need, if I could walk it, I was OK.  If I got tired, I could sit and rest.  Legs and feet  recovered. Walking has been my measure of life. Maybe only street people gauge their lives that way now.  I wish them and their feet well.

Read more essays at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/