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This poem and others are available in my books, Nothing Works: Meditations on Aikido, Buddhism, the Tao, Zen, and other inconsequential things....and, Nothing Special, and Nothing Matters..., available thru Amazon.com, in print and Kindle editions and Barnes & Noble websites.....Also available as an e-book via Smashwords.com. Try this link: www.nothing-works.com for the full array of options.
Transcendence does not
Require the hero's quest
It does not require climbing
Vast, distant mountains
It does not even require
Achieving godhood
It merely means the
Transcendence of self
Overcoming the person you are
To a level beyond
A quantum jump in personal evolution
You don't need a god for that
The bell rang out
Piercing and clear
We all bowed
Sensei turned and faced us
Sitting in a line facing him
We all bowed again
We bow a lot in the dojo
We warmed up, then
Picked a partner, and
You guessed it, bowed
Practice, practice, practice....
The dojo is a timeless place
Gi and hakama
Sweat and no-time
All become one
Conscious breathing itself stops
But the flow is always there
Deep inside, I bow to the flow
Sometimes, I think
It bows back...
In the dojo
We bow a lot
I saw a sign on a dumpster once
It said: Empty When Full
I must have seen this sign
A thousand times
But this time what I saw was: Full When Empty
It has turned into my koan
As the story goes:
Sitting under a Bohdi tree
The Buddha was approached
And asked who he was: I am he who woke up
Responded the Buddha
Today, would he be accused
Of being woke? That is:
Well informed, up-to-date
Alert to racial or social
Discrimination and injustice
To being aware…
Or, as William Melvin Kelly
So succinctly put it
Way back in 1962: If you're woke, you dig it
Do it now!
Now!
Don't delay
Oh, too late….
Now!
Now, damn it!
Again, now slips on by Now, a slippery concept
A slippery artifact Now is always moving
Moving….
As is consciousness, too
We are slow to keep up
Always lagging behind
The now of non-thought is
The only way to experience it
Now, now, now, now….
No past, no future
Now….
The monumental prospect
Of being merely human
To praise existence itself
Though our own death is preordained
To see the small beauties of ordinary life
The small evils of ordinary life
The Stoic would speak of
Right Perception, Right Action,
And Right Will
Buddhists, of the Eightfold Path
Me, I'm not so disciplined
I just sip my coffee
Writing checks for things
I can't afford
Approaching via a halo orbit
From Valhalla Station is relatively easy
Still, taking off and landing
Are always the worst times
Fortunately, it's mostly automated
Alba Station will be a fun change
The running joke is that their hakama
Should be tartan instead of black
But, no one underestimates their
Aikido and weapons work
Especially since they have added
A Claymore to their weapons practice
Interesting, but no worse as when the
New America Station added baseball bats
(Wooden, of course) to their weapons practice
Purists think aikido should not be changed
From the way of the Founder's practice
But what is that, anyway? Others think
That arbitrarily freezing a tradition at any
Particular stage stifles and smothers it
It can become a dead thing and have the
Insidious power to deaden its practitioners
What is more innovative than aikido in space!
The Mutuality of the L-5 and L-4
Republics are nothing if not innovative
06-27-2023 03:50 PM 
