Category: Uncategorized

Balance

Today, barefoot man taught me about running.

He taught me through a series of steps. Basically, imagine that you are stomping on grapes. Or running in place atop a tub of sudsy laundry.

Your feet keep moving up and down even through you are standing still. To move about, just imagine yourself as a human segway transporter:

Tilt forward, feet carry you forward to prevent you from falling on your face. Too fast? Tilt forward less, let your feet catch up. How to brake hard? Tilt backwards a bit until you come to a stop.

After meeting with barefoot man, I ran into a gritty t’ai chi teacher underneath the library. We started talking and then tried “push hands.” I pushed him as hard as I could but no matter where or how I pushed, he could always let the force slide off, like water off a jewelweed leaf. It was amazing.

He left me with a few messages that I want to remember.

Strength vs. strength and eventually you come across someone who is stronger. Maybe you don’t encounter anyone stronger in your prime, but eventually everyone who survives including you gets old and weaker. Learning “not doing” response may be the only way to deal effectively with an antagonist who is stronger than you.

One is from Lao Tzu:

“People do not want to be like water, because water goes down to the low places. I want to be like water.”

Another:

Learning how to respond to weak forces is more difficult than responding to strong forces. Strong forces direct your body how to “not do” easily — it’s almost done for you. Weak forces are much more subtle and more difficult to read. Reading weak forces through practice will help you deal with real life strong forces.

In writing, what are the weak forces and the strong forces?

Gibberish

Have you ever read “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll? If you haven’t, I highly recommend reading it. Chances are, if you’re here now, you’ve already read it.

Now, imagine that you are deaf. Okay, so you are deaf. You are watching a reading of “The Jabberwocky.” In sign language.
Thank you, Zor, for telling me about this.
Watching this is fascinating to me because I’d never conceived of the concept of gibberish being translated into gesture.
I find it empowering to write in gibberish sometimes. I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it’s because gibberish connects us subconsciously to the roots of our language which we already understand, gabbé?

Correction to the Shank Post

At last, I looked closely at the opaque cone sticking down inside the ink bottle, and realized there was a tiny pit at the very tip (“tip” is pit backwards!), almost like a hole. Then I discovered that you can squeeze the little bulb projecting on the cap, and ink jets out. It was a hole at the tip! So the stick was filled with ink all along. I felt daft. And even worse, for a half a second, the very slightest bit… proud.
Realizing that the bottle has a built in ink-dropper means I can reload my pen significantly faster, while spilling about 75% less ink on my hands and all over my desk.
When I tried to teach my grandmother how to write with the quill and ink, she said, “What do you mean?” and looked at me blankly. Then, she grabbed up the paper and quill, flipped the nib upside down from the way I’d been holding it, so in her hand the metal nib curved concave side down, and wrote beautiful cursive letters. I tried it her way, and it works better than what I was doing before.