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

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.

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).

INITIAL TROUBLESHOOTING STEPS

Step 1

Microsoft: “It’s probably user error.”
GOD: “And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden…”

Step 2

Microsoft: “Let’s go ahead and reboot, that sometimes fixes it.”
GOD: “The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’”

Many steps later…

Microsoft: “OK, we’re going to send you a patch.”
GOD: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

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.

Remember by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

REMEMBER me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

(listen)

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.  :-)

Dark, Undark

Night comes to land

Dark, undark

Moon sails through clouds
Shadow stealthy slips through trees

Dark, undark

Brothers plot in cobweb corner
Sister runs through streets of city
Runs on cobbles red as heart’s blood

Dark, undark

Father rules in tight-fast tower
King of madness, lord of shadows
Mother sits in ancient king-seat
Rules the land to land’s undoing

Dark, undark

Outside city, jackals gather
Scent of life-force spiked with iron
Sentries stand on walls of palace
Heads well set on stony shoulders
Staring wild-eyed into darkness

Dark, undark

Horsemen riding, up from southward
Armor strong and weapons gleaming
Come to claim the night-bound city
Free her from her dark enslavement

Dark, undark

Soldiers meet with beasts in battle
Steel and claw in mortal combat
Rend the night and tear the shadows

Dark, undark

Moon sails through clouds
Shadow stealthy slips through trees

Dark, undark

Dawn stains sky with red of morning

Dark

Undark

Oh, and here’s a couple of additions to the Halloween mix – “Haunting” and “Turkish Song of the Damned” by The Pogues.

* Glen Cook’s Black Company series and Paul Edwin Zimmer’s “Dark Border” books, if I remember correctly…

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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!