Commonplace book #24

Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain at the gate;
“To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his Gods…”

- Thomas Macaulay, from Lays of Ancient Rome

My brain, my body and me

So, we had a great Aikido seminar this past weekend, with our now-annual visit from one of the most traveled instructors in the world, Donovan Waite shihan. As always, I was exposed to a lot of new concepts, and – again as always – it will be weeks before any of it actually shows up in my practice.

It’s somewhat amusing, then, that I actually had a bit of a breakthrough tonight in one of the areas that has been causing me the most trouble since I began practicing over 2 ½ years ago, and one that was definitely NOT a focus of the seminar – mai kaiten ukemi. (Also known as the basic front roll – one of the very first things you learn when you step on the mat. Sigh.)

Fundamentally, my problem is that somewhere in the back of my subconscious, my brain doesn’t believe that I’m going to fall correctly if I do it right – with the inevitable result that I DON’T fall correctly, because I’m always trying to catch myself. Ushiro ukemi, or back rolls, I don’t have much of a problem with, except an occasional tendency for my left arm to stick out when I roll on the right side. I’ve been wondering why, completely ignoring the obvious answer that it’s because I can’t see where I’m going, so I just go.

It’s worth noting that my sensei has been pointing this out to me for, oh, about 2 ½ years. However, being aware of the problem and being able to translate that awareness into my actual movement are very different things… remembering that healing the mind-body disconnect is one of the reasons that I started this training in the first place. I’m not surprised, and really shouldn’t be frustrated, that it’s taking a long time to undo a lifetime of living in my head.

I figured all this out tonight in a burst of inspiration (a.k.a., “d’oh!”). I arrived at the dojo a half hour early, and walked out in the dark. I bowed in, and before turning on the lights I just stood for a couple of minutes watching the moonlight and listening to the wind in the trees (I may have mentioned that our dojo is built outdoors, backed up on the woods)… and decided to try some rolls, just for the heck of it.

What happened next should be pretty obvious – I rolled. Correctly. For 10 minutes straight. Better on my dominant side than on the other, but still basically correctly. (When I told my wife about this she just said, “Use the Force, Luke”… thereby pointing out that I lose at least three geek points because I didn’t immediately think of the Jedi Trainer scene myself. :)

I then turned the lights on, and worked on remembering what it felt like when I did it right so that I could avoid slipping back into my now-ingrained bad habits. It worked, mostly, although by the end of the class some of the bad falling started to come back as I got tired.

It’s going to take time and a lot of extra practice to burn the new, good rolls into my muscle memory, but I think I am actually going to accomplish the goal that I set for myself of fixing this particular problem before my next kyu test.

God vs. Microsoft

NOTE: for “God” in the following, read “God as commonly understood by Christians”. Also note that I  am not comparing the relative merits of their respective products (Windows vs. all of creation), but their customer service models.

Is there a significant difference? Let’s take a look at how each responds to a reported bug (in the case of God, the “bug” is Original Sin; for M$, just pick your favorite).

A very quiet Samhain

Spent time with my family, soloed Stephen Chatman’s “Remember” (from his “Two Rossetti Songs”) at our UU church’s Service of Remembrance… it’s a gorgeous setting of a poem by Christina Rossetti, poem and a link to a choral performance below.

A poem for the season

This is another very old piece, circa 1992. Can you tell what I was reading then? *

I suggest listening to ELO’s Fire on High while reading.  :-)

too true

The other day Chas Clifton linked to an old strip of one of my favorite webcomics, PartiallyClips. Today’s strip is also link-worthy, so here it is! I encourage you to go and read the archives (and buy the book!) – they’re *well* worth the time.

Serendipity

If you follow the link at right to the Indian Temples blog, you will find a very interesting post on the elements of ritual. If you then click the link to the Jewish Magic blog, you will find… a post on ritual themed on various elements. I just thought it was kinda cool.

Stunning nature photography

Britian’s Natural History Museum and Veolia Environmental Services Corp.  sponsor an annual wildlife photo competition; the winners for this year have just been announced. Go check out their gallery of current and past winners – there are some amazingly beautiful pictures there.

A bit of theology, Pratchett-style

I’m most of the way through the new Discworld book, Unseen Academicals, and wanted to share this passage:

Quoth Lord Vetinari: “… one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on this delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

Resident Aliens

This is the title of a recent sermon at a Presbyterian church that I pass every day on the way to work, as advertised on their signboard. Having been raised a “preacher’s kid” in a fairly conservative Christian environment, and seeing so many familiar topics in the sermon titles at this particular church, I suspect that I could write that minister’s sermon myself almost word for word. Dollars to doughnuts he talked about how we humans (or at least Christians) are “in the world but not of it”, and how we don’t really belong here, how our “real” home is with God in Heaven (but only if we believe in Jesus).

I don’t normally pay a lot of attention to the sermon topics there – like I said, it’s all so familiar – but for some reason, at this time and in this season this particular topic has stuck in my head… both the familiarity of it, and the realization that there is no longer even a tiny residual corner of my psyche that’s wondering “what if they’re right?”; the whole theology behind it seems so – well, alien – to me now. It’s so obvious to me that we are a part of whatever is, and that our true home is right here… and if we don’t start acting like it, the whole house will eventually collapse around us.

And on that note, I’m going offline for a few days – see you next weekend!