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we're like creatures of the wind
and wild is the wind
Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin, Wild is the Wind
I have forgot much, Cynara!
Gone with the wind
Ernest Dowson, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
the wind of change blows straight
into the face of time
Scorpions, Wind of Change
A stormy wind signals the arrival of spring in Japan. It's called haru ichiban 春一番 - spring number one - the first wind of spring. It's strong and it blows bicycles and plants and signboards over. And then the warm weather arrives.
It's easy to get stuck in old ways of doing and thinking. Sometimes it's good to have a strong wind. Unnecessary things are blown away. Everything becomes fresh and new.
In Japan Fujin is the Shinto god of the wind. He glares ferociously and carries a bag of winds. He is rather like Boreas, the god of the wind in Greek mythology.
I talked about the wind before in wind forest fire mountain 風林火山 furinkazan, the motto of Takeda Shingen. In martial arts we have to be like the wind. To move like the wind. And to be free like the wind.
The title to the movie Gone with the Wind was taken from a poem by Ernest Dowson. I used to think gone with the wind meant that something was lost in the wind - youth, or the old order, or the past, say. But it really meant that he let himself be blown and tossed by the wind - and circumstances, and fate - trying to forget his lost love.
That makes a nice parallel for ukemi - receiving the technique in aikido. You make a true attack, but once your balance is broken you keep the connection like the wind and flow like the wind. And if your movements are like the wind you can never be injured.
02-24-2011 09:21 PM 
