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Old 09-21-2000, 10:20 PM   #28
Mike Collins
Location: San Jose
Join Date: Jun 2000
Posts: 189
United_States
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Still, it's a lovely ideal, and Jun, you should know there are a good many of us who not only agree, but to some degree, try to do just what you've said.

Aikido is like this beautiful jewel, and most, if not all of us are looking at a given light splinter from one prismed refraction and declaring that Aikido. We owe it to our teachers to gradually and naturally unite Aikido, if not in it's physical manifestation, then in the spirit of our own training atmosphere.

In the one dojo where I train, there are differing splinters who spend a great deal of time and energy bitching about this and that. It has recently come to me that I have a responsibility both for my own happiness, and for the passing on of this beautiful and life-changing art, to make my training atmosphere joyful rather than a clouded bitchy mess. It's hard to take responsibility for this stuff, but we all (at least those of us who have benefited from this art)have incurred a debt, to our teachers, their teachers, and to Osensei, to make the art alive and well.
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