Another Ally
July 19. The summer sun is still shining as I begin practicing Tai Chi this evening on the front deck. I love practicing outside this time of year, surrounded by soft songs of mountain birds and a nearby stream.
Calm has settled over the valley, the constant stream of four-wheeled vehicles and motor homes gone until next weekend. There’s more traffic on our dirt road this summer by far.
The legendary Professor Chen Man Ching said the reason he was without peer in the martial push hands discipline of Tai Chi was that he could completely relax. Old films show him pushing opponents at least twice his size up into the air and away, while his students step in to prevent the air-bound from crashing into the wall.
In addition to instructing in the necessity for relaxation, he reminded his students that the only place to assemble one’s attention and energy was in one’s tanden, the center of a human being’s body, located about one and a half inches below the navel. Not only when practicing Tai Chi, he advised, but at all times. Doing so prevents fear and anxiety from finding a place in which to put their hooks. One’s tanden—paradise.
It takes me at least thirty minutes of Tai Chi practice to even begin to relax. It should be easy enough, given that relaxing is most intimately connected to surrendering to gravity—allowing one’s shoulders, elbows, hands, and chest to sink. In reality, we are fighting gravity all the time, constantly contracting our tendons and joints and pouring countless energy into keeping our bodies raised up, unconsciously trying to protect ourselves from the next, inevitable hit that life will deliver.
Today, around the thirty-minute mark I begin to relax and hear a sound starting up, not unlike a saw steadily cutting. I maintain my upright posture and with relaxed, open eyes inherent to Tai Chi, let my gaze land on the source of the sound—a little squirrel perhaps eight feet away, chewing on a moose antler I’d placed on the ground months ago.
I found the antler one morning last winter while skiing through a maze of large, ancient willows near our house, and brought it home, intending it to be a gift for my brother-in-law in the Midwest. The moose, in recent years, have created avenues that twist and turn through the thick willows, which have become fun trails to ski. I placed the antler under a bench outside our house, and there it remained, given the pandemic halt to all unnecessary activity, including visits from afar.
Mary first heard the sawing as she was writing one morning at the dining room table. She heard it again the next morning and went to the window to investigate.
“There’s a squirrel,” she told me later when I joined her at the table, “chewing on the moose antler. I bet he’s going for the minerals.”
The squirrel has taken to coming every morning, and sometimes for lunch and dinner supplements as well.
His sound this evening does not bother me, nor do I seem to bother him. I suspect he may have been waiting until I had calmed down enough, sunk to my center, so as to feel at ease in beginning his ritual. My relaxation only increases.
But, what the hell’s wrong with me? Haven’t I heard of cases of the plague having recently been reported? Yes, I am aware of that, and I’m sure there are countless other “what if’s” this little squirrel’s presence might conjure up.
But I am currently blissing on having my energy, my attention, down in my belly, where fear is off limits, tending to my well-being while squirrel tends to his. I feel no danger alert coming from my shinpo (see the 7/17/20 CurrentSee). To the contrary—I feel balanced; life is good.
Yet, at the end of my practice, when squirrel has gone home for the night, I’m left with a burning question:
Where I live the World Wide Web can only be accessed with a satellite dish, so how did squirrel learn which essential minerals he needed and where to procure them?