Some
personal memories of Tai Chi
Anthony Stadlen
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2014, 2020
[Wu’s Tai Chi Chuan Academy Bethnal Green 25th Anniversary (2014: 58)]
Tai Chi doesn’t make sense to me as a set of gestures of an isolated,
encapsulated person. It is always in a place, in the world, with others, present
or implied. At first I was preoccupied with my own body, discovering that I had
hips, very stiff. But my recurring memories are of people, living beings, places.
Early on in my lessons with Sifu Gary, I asked him why we ‘Carry Tiger to the Mountain’.
‘Do you want a taste of honey?” he asked. Instantly, impossibly, I was upside
down over his back. Soon after that, I discovered how Tai Chi can be part of
the bustle of life. Flustered, carrying a pile of unmarked essays, I stopped
still in a college refectory – Sung! – and was restored, calm, even
though students rushed past me as before. My first weekend at Grimstone, doing
the Chuan on the lawn, as we reached Grasp Bird’s Tail for the fifth or sixth
time, the Form seemed like a symphony, a great work of art, and the eighth Grasp
Bird’s Tail, at the end, a final statement of one of its fundamental themes,
but the trees and flowers and sky and waterfall were part of it. A red fox and
rabbits were part of our Chi Kung under the trees at dawn at Grimstone, as
are the owls calling as we do it in the dark before dawn at Gaunt’s. In the
woods above Grimstone I watched for hours as badgers came out of their setts at
dusk, and they seemed to accompany my Tai Chi for weeks afterwards back in
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