I find refuge on bare concrete

After the busyness of the first three months, I find myself unused to the abundance of time to myself again. The weather hasn't been helping: it's been soggy and overcast for the past 2-3 weeks. Lessons and tai chi go on as per usual, more than ever, actually, now that I have launched a new series of workshops; but still – it always takes time to get used to have time with myself again.

I do tai chi every morning. Before I had weariness + stress as an excuse; now I have none, but it takes so much self-discipline. I've started going to a nearby park, ten minutes down an obscure side road. It's a park my brother and I used to play in as children, and is much smaller and shabbier than I remember. The paint is faded, and they have cleared out a small expanse of space to build a pagoda. This bare corner, underscored with concrete, is where I do my tai chi.

It helps to have a practice ground to come back to every morning. On mornings when my body refuses to function (e.g., muggy headache from a late night), just making the pilgrimage to the park to stretch or write is helpful to me. The space bears witness to my presence; it is a container for my practice.

I am reminded a lot of that winter in Poland, when the company had gone to the States, and I was left alone, with the studio at my disposal, to make a solo. Getting used to the solitude of the studio was like entering cold water; I enter gingerly into its discomfort. Over and over again, in Liannan, in Paris, in London… getting used to a new space; getting used to my own company, and the solitude of a practice…

Every single time, it cuts just as sharply. The only difference? The knowledge that this solitude will thaw, and eventually blossom.


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