Sat, 10 Sep 2005
White Heron Spreads Wings, Coffee at Sea Bottom.
So. More about the weekend in question. I'm writing this significantly later than I expected to. It actually was the 20th of August, and now it's three weeks later to the day.
The university needed to do maintenance on something or other that required them to shut off power to, I think, the whole school. In any event the Math building was completely without power, so we took it upon ourselves to move around a lot of the servers that required them to be powered off anyway.
The power was already off when I got there, a little earlier than everyone else. The hallways were dark save for the occasional emergency light and exit sign, and all through the hallway, the sounds of UPSes urgently requesting attention were chirping at randomly repeating intervals like some sort of chorus of digital crickets in the night. Appreciate that sentence's imagery. It was the principle inspiration for this blog entry.
So sitting in the hallway, waiting for everyone else to show up, I decided to do some tai chi in the glow of the emergency exit sign, digital crickets chirping away in the background. It had been a while. The tai chi sessions I regularly go to have five eight-week sessions a year, with a break in the summer, and I'd missed the last session of the previous year, so it had been almost four months since I had last done it in any real capacity.
Work itself was very zen as well. No real thinking involved. Lots of moving about basically. There was some lifting of heavy things, but none of it was work in the way that I typically think about it.
The Monday immediately after, walking through the park towards school, there was a heron wandering around the small lake there in amongst the gulls and the ducks. I put down my coffee to get my camera out to take some pictures. I got some pictures, put my camera away, and reached down to pick up my coffee. A perfect tai chi move, "Needle at Sea Bottom".
So apparently, I've missed my Tai Chi class.
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