Acapulco

Taiji has always felt like something like a past life memory for me, even from the beginning. As I began to learn I watched Tony as he went from facing the mirror to facing me. Our apartment was too small for me to do the entire form, but I could do individual moves. My space limitations were the determinant, and not my desire to do things the old way. It all seemed quite strange to Ronnie, and my parents. e six sections of the form should take thirty minutes to perform, with the proper focus on breathing, inhaling and exhaling in coordination with the unfolding of the techniques that grow progressively more di cult until the third section, where there are turns that should be done on one leg. When you learn Taiji as a younger person, there are successes you can only have with youth, and when you grow older there are successes you can have only with wisdom and a deepening knowledge of Qi, the internal power, or so I believed when I was the 27-year-old poet who mentally drafted lines of poetry while riding my sweeper through a warehouse with enough space for a million boxes of inventory. Whatever perceptions lay ahead of me, I had put my faith in Taiji as a way of life. It helped me hold onto the dreams the way many of us dreamed, of buying farms in the counties around Baltimore or across the state line in Pennsylvania, or helping our children who wanted to build theaters. e dreams let us live with the machines.

When I practiced with the breath coordination, I felt myself settling back into my body, fastening my soul more securely inside me. I learned to direct my breath with mind concentration, lling my lungs from the bottom until my stomach swelled, and then compressing my abdomen and exhaling, the breathing we know instinctively when we are born. Even when I was not practicing the techniques, I practiced the breathing, and as I learned the techniques, I put the basics to work while working. Moving and stacking boxes, I paid attention to the shifting tension in my legs and focused on the breathing. I began to feel a naturalness that let me feel free. In the space where I was weighed down with shame, I began to feel I could have a serenity that was a shield against what other people thought of me, as I acquired a power that would let me live more deeply and securely. It was not so much a defense against a real attacker, as I had learned that while growing up, but rather a defense against a diagnosis that led me to

think my mind would always betray me, whenever it decided I needed a comeuppance. e joy of these revelations came with an increasing speed, as spring began to anticipate summer. My grief over my maternal grandmother, whose death was only a few months behind me now, was stu ed into some canister in my heart, where it began to fester, and I felt the old anxieties that lled me eight years earlier. In the spring of 1971, I came home from basic training to learn my rst child was terminally ill. is time I fought the anxieties by making real plans. I bought a new 35mm slr camera to replace my old one. Along with being a poet, I also dreamed of being a photographer. ree years earlier, a professional photographer in Washington, DC, who had a show up at the Corcoran gallery, took the time to teach me how to use black and white to focus on geometric composition and compensate for my color blindness. is new camera was rather fancy and expensive, and along with my strange way of moving, Ronnie and my mother began to worry that I might be going o the deep end again. Now that my grandmother was no longer a focus for my mother’s caretaking, she and Ronnie formed an alliance where my mother turned her caretaking energies and strategies onto me. I was still taking the medicine, but in the mixture of hope and anxiety, I began to believe I could function without it.

However, the old nightmare scenarios emerged when my father joined forces with Ronnie and my mother in enrolling all of us in a family therapy program at University hospital, the place where I was born 28 years earlier. When they decided I was too close to the precipice, they took me to the emergency room at the hospital. In that state of extreme anxiety where fear takes over, I went with them, but intent on negotiating my own terms. I was not going to be hospitalized again, put away on a ward where I would be at the mercy of people who knew very little about what they were being paid to do. Some years later, a psychiatrist friend would explain that this period in American psychiatry was barbaric, but as someone subjected to the system, I knew at the time that people were fumbling in the dark to understand what drives people over the edge. Very few mental health workers understood or believed the problems were often rooted in childhood, where the unspeakable enters the lives of those of us unfortunate enough to be chosen by whatever forces drive evil in our lives.