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Entries for the Month of May 2012
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In Humor
Welcome to Mushin Ryu Aikido Dojo
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#272
 05-14-2012 11:25 AM |
There's something odd about the instructor's voice, but he can't quite put his finger on it. The guy sounded perfectly normal on the phone.
Joe tries not to fidget on the wooden bench and looks around. At the front of the room there's a picture of an old, bald, Asian man with a long beard. The man seems to be staring past the camera and into the distance with a look of serious contemplation.
"I hope I'll age as gracefully as that," the 21-year-old muses.
He leans against the wall behind him, trying to imagine himself looking even half as dignified in his older years. As his head tilts back, he feels it hit something sharp and instinctively jerks forward.
"Ow!" mutters Joe, turning around to frown at the source of the pain. He steps back and finds himself staring up at a large, wooden picture frame. Within it is a photo of the same Asian man, only looking much older, sporting a longer, white beard. This time, however, he's dressed in a flowing grey robe. On his head is a floppy, wide-brimmed, and pointy grey hat. In his hand is a carved, white wooden staff.
Someone has Photoshopped the man into a picture of Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings.
In fact, all along the wall, Joe can see similar, badly doctored photos of the same man: dressed as Dumbledore from Harry Potter, standing among the parapets of Hogwarts; clean-shaven and sitting in a wheelchair as Professor Charles Xavier from the X-men with a huge explosion behind him.
Just as his jaw goes slack
...More 
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Views: 972
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In General
A New Direction: The Anti-Blog
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#271
05-14-2012 09:46 AM |
I started this blog not too long after I began training in Aikikai-style Aikido in January of 2003. A lot has changed since then. Two jobs, many friends and one husband later, I am still practicing Aikido.
But I am not really blogging about it so much anymore.
When I first started, just like many beginners, I was overwhelmed with information. Much of it, as rightly concerns all beginners, was purely mechanical. Naturally, just as I progressed in my training, so too, did my writing progress from discussion of the basic form to more complex subject matter.
What I am learning these days, however, isn't something that is easy to explain. As the copious amount of posts on this forum tries desperately to refute by their very existence, and as one popular column here suggests, it's something that "has to be felt".
But I am only a humble shodan. I do not have decades of experience to commend me. I have never had the opportunity of feeling, first-hand, the uncanny strength of O Sensei, or any of his students, or any of his students' first cousins twice-removed. Nor am I at all interested in pretending that I have discovered the divine power of profound Zen enlightenment that others have (or at least would like to think they have).
So what could I possibly have to share with this community that would be worth writing about? What would be the point in even bothering?
From here on, I'm going to take a backseat to all of the debating and pontificating and just let the s
...More
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Views: 660
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