Human Flower Project

Friday, June 05, 2009

Mine that Miracle: Spring Chi 2009

Planted in Louisville, Kentucky, Allen Bush pushes, channels, rides and rejoices-in the fundamental force.

Yang Cheng-fu
in ‘Single whip’
Tai Chi pose
Photo: Yang Cheng-fu

By Allen Bush

The Kentucky Derby was a week away and the welcome mat was out for spring blessings – revelations just waiting on a miracle.  The last Saturday in April was World Tai Chi Day. And as April 25 dawned in the Pacific and made its way across time zones, practioners of Tai Chi gathered at ten in the morning to move some chi – a mysterious force - around the world.

My Big Rock Tai Chi Club (we meet at Big Rock in Louisville’s Cherokee Park) was invited to join the University of Louisville Tai Chi Club to do our part on their turf. As luck, or maybe even chi, would have it, we set-up next to a grotto and garden built in 1927 to resemble the naturally occurring hillside French grotto where a teenager, Bernadette Soubirous, in 1858 saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The local Grotto and Garden of Our Lady of Lourdes, built for “prayer and meditation,” commemorates Bernadette’s “private revelations.”

We gathered under an ash tree on university property that had once belonged to the St. Joseph’s infirmary, part of the Louisville landscape along Eastern Parkway until most of it was torn down around 1980. (When a friend of mine got suspended from 8th grade for a prank in 1966, she had to go tell her father who was recuperating there. As it turns-out, he was sharing a room with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer. Merton got to hear her confession, too. Forgiveness is integral to a good life.)

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