i am a rhino

Tonight, we took our Chi Kung class outside. They are paving the road outside the dojo and the smell was wafting in through the windows and was almost choking us. We exited the building for a park upwind across the street. While we were doing our thing outside, I had two primary thoughts.

First, as we were doing our shaking exercise, I thought we must look like freaks. The shaking exercise consists of us standing in one spot and shaking our whole body like we are puppets suspended by a string with our feet secured to the ground and being bounced up and down. My friend Arturo has expressed concern about looking ridiculous doing this in particular exercise in public. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t at class today. On the other hand, I reveled in making people stop and stare. I love to let my freak flag fly.

My second thought was: “I am a rhino.” While doing the shaking exercise, I tend to go with whatever image pops into my head with my eyes closed. Usually the perceived shape of myself and those around me are distorted in my mind like they would be in a funhouse mirror. This time, with the tall grass tickling my bare calves, standing underneath a half moon, I thought of myself as sturdy and alive in the present and for some reason, I associated those ideas with a rhinoceros. The point of the exercise is to shake off any diseases or illnesses. I also let any bad mojo go. My thought drifted to my financial tightness right now and the fact that I may not have money when I get back from Europe. But I let those thoughts shake right off of me. The rhino doesn’t worry about money or the future. The rhino is the present, only concerned with what is here and what is now. Here and now, I was in a park, bouncing and loving every minute of it. That’s all I had to worry about. I will deal with the future when it is the present.