Morning Tai Chi practice gets back to the tower and has breakfast [2/3]

[continued from previous post]

I sat up slowly and luxuriously. My warmth filled me and felt relaxed and warm and wonderful. I enjoyed that sensation as I watched the scene turn slowly back from blue to it's normal hues. I realized that was a reaction to the red from sunlight through my eyelids, like in water polo when you'd been wearing red goggles all day, and when you took them off everything was blue. It was like that.

I felt like I'd just gotten out of a warm bath and had a thick white terrycloth robe on, and I moved slow as to not lose that feeling, and I picked up the portable radio, heavy in its yellow padded case, and I walked slowly and enjoyfully back to the lookout stairs. As I did, I allowed myself to feel relaxed and wander "off-course" and watch rocks and feel different textures under my feet, and it felt kind of like a dream, so much did I not recognize my felt body.

Eventually I wandered past the crisp image of my old red bus, and it looked higher on its tires than usual and real healthy.

I made it to the narrow, worn wood staircase of the tower. When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard the radio inside the tower with voices, but not my packset radio, and I remembered hearing that on the way back to the tower on that long walk over the red-packed mud-gravel drive, and I wondered if my packset radio was set to the wrong channel and I was missing something. Eventually I realized it was just that the borrowed radio inside the tower had decided to switch itself to scan mode like it had lately in the middle of the night, keeping me up with midnight noise until I got up and turned it off and turned on my packset in it's yellow case -- worrying that I'd use up all the batteries in it by leaving it on all night. [The "borrowed" desk radio was run off a big marine deep cell battery charged off a small solar panel, and was designed to easily run all night long on that power source, the packset was for short trips only.]

I did it anyway, remembering the boxes and boxes of D-cells left over from last year to which the ranger that was helping you move into the tower remarked "What -- was Russ hoarding these?" and chuckled.

I got inside and worked to remember the relaxation, to encourage it, even though it had not lost its grip yet. I turned the packset off in its yellow case and put it in its spot in between the desk and the steel refrigerator that somehow runs on propane and freezes everything you put in it.

*** [there is a mark here in the journal meaning I took a quick break from writing.]

You tried not to get exasperated at the radio as you readjusted it off scan and to channel 3 which is the Forest Service channel for this district.

You were hungry for plain oats, but you remembered the pot full of rice you had overmade yesterday and thought about eating that, but when you put it inside your stomach in your imagination your body didn't feel good, so you boiled water and ate mushy plain oatmeal and it tasted great.

Somewhere in there, you realized what an open state you were in and picked out Louise Erdrich's book of poetry called Jacklight because you knew it was powerful and true and that's what you wanted to affect you right now.

[to be continued]

Morning Tai Chi practice went well [1/3]

[So far, almost every post I've made over the past 3-4 days has made me cringe in some way and want to explain myself or it. Explain it in some way that distances me from the content. I think I'll stop doing that -- it is what it is and I'll just put it down for historical reference, or entertainment, or whatever it is folks want to see it as.]

I went outside and did my Tai Chi set. I had the radio in its little yellow carrier over to the side in the rocks, next to some lupine. Parts of the set felt better than I've ever felt doing Tai Chi.

Afterwards, I slowly picked up the radio and habitually headed back up towards the tower. Two or three steps into the motion, I stopped. I went back to the gravel-flat space where I do my Tai Chi [a helicopter landing pad] and Sat.

I allowed my eyes to rest on a configuration of leaves in a small shrub. I relaxed, my vision relaxed, my breathing relaxed. I remembered my breath, and began to breath up through my center from the earth and let it spill back down over me from the top of my head back into the ground. Soon that seemed imbalanced, however.

I remembered the breath I learned in the dry lake bed in South East Oregon, where I bring the energy down through my crown and up through my root at the same time on the inhale, and let them disperse from my chest (heart) -- creating the world -- on the exhale. I breathed that way for many minutes.

Sometime after I Sat -- I don't know when -- a wind spirit, in the form of a dustless dust devil, traveled behind me through the Beargrass and gravel. Smiling I composed myself and spoke aloud to it, setting boundaries I had learned years ago from a Cherokee teacher. Boundaries for when you are approached by a spirit in the wild -- basically calling out that if it was there to be helpful, it is welcome, if not it must go. [I won't use the exact phrasing, as it was taught to me in confidence, and I was never instructed to pass it on]. Good way to start the morning.

[To Be Continued]