Putting chin to knee

Serendipitous that I should get this invitation to start a word press blog, just as I thought of a line, while doing chi gung, that felt like it made a good title for a blog

 

So here we are. Putting chin to knee. Jaw to leg.

 

Thinking of the image I saw today in an old copy of the Digger Papers,  a 1965 or so hippie broadside newprint folio, which reproduces a woodcut with the caption carved in in all caps, ” THE END OF THE WAR,” and the image is of Ho Chi Minh looking of into a distant future with a wise and inscrutable look, while Johnson is resting his head on Ho’s shoulder, as if asking forgiveness, while Ho pats him on the back in comfort.

 

So the thought was, with Bush being the Apologizer, to whom could he be giving his grief and sorrow? Surely not Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden seems grotesque to put in that role. Kofi Annan was the only person who came to mind…capable of receiving such a testament. 

The practice

There is a chi gung move that I do daily as part of a routine, where one starts with heel to toe at a right angle away from the body, like getting ready for a ballet plié, and then one puts the heel of the foot that was reaching away from the body down where the toe hit when the foot was stretched out, and lay the body slowly down the leg, until the chin touches the knee.

 

Except it didn’t come close, my chin, most of the ten years I’ve been doing this practice. It felt like such a breakthrough moment, when I could finally, comfortably, touch chin to knee on each leg.