TEMPORARY SETBACKS

It's been a hectic couple of weeks. I had to miss two aikido classes, one due to being on pain meds, one to celebrating a birthday. I'd hoped to at least keep up on practicing weapons at home, but with a three day trip to San Francisco, starting a twice-weekly Spanish class, and it being too cold to train outdoors in the few daylight hours that would be available, that fell by the wayside. And the art studio still doesn't have a carpet remnant down (nor shelves, bulletin boards and pegboards, but I can start painting without those).

So no painting, no weapons...at least I'm maintaining the little bit of stationery biking and Pilates I do in order to keep from falling apart, and have made it back to the dojo (although my hands gave out before the class did Monday night).

The good news is, we are going to buy AND put down the carpet remnant tomorrow before I go to the dojo for evening class. Other chores may have to wait, but this will be done. And I think this weekend will be the start of a planned prescheduled weapons practice, because if I don't treat it that way, it won't happen.

Having so many things one cannot just stop doing is difficult.

A TIME TO MAKE, A TIME TO SELL

The need to have a part time day job (plus making time for martial arts and marital arts and miscellaneous interests) has always meant that there have to be compromises made. Over the past twenty five years I've tended to alternate between periods of mostly sewing or mostly painting. For the past four years, between making custom aikido goods and playing with costumes and corsets, the balance was very much towards sewing. When I was in between custom orders and had some really cool new Japanese prints to play with, I'd make up fancy looking weapons bags. That led to presenting a line of premade bags under the line Nishoku.

The pull is now very much towards painting again. A year after setting up a new home, I'm finally organizing the painting section of the studio. So in order to make time to paint, sewing is going to be purely on a custom basis again, and I'm clearing out the premade bags at a good sale price. There are only six of them, and when they go, they are gone. So if you can use a good deal on a well made weapons bag and want something a little different, check out the Nishoku final sale.

LET'S TRY IT AGAIN, THIS WAY

I've worked with a variety of metaphors to help me better understand the aikido principle that in every tenkan there is an irimi (how one turns without a hint of "moving back." I've started with the New York u-turn into a parking space across the street and tried to translate that into hip movement. I've played with weighting and pointing and a bunch of things. My understanding improves but my doing it invariable lags behind (bodies are soooo uncooperative).

The other evening, a different approach was presented to this problem. The teacher clearly knew what she was aiming for us to try, and she was presenting it pretty clearly, but most of us were having trouble embodying it. I don't think it was a weakness in the teaching; rather, for those of us who did "get it" in our heads, we were having trouble getting it from our heads to our bodies.

I finally had the "aha' mental moment in which I could reduce it to a simple mantra for how to move. I still couldn't do it well, certainly couldn't do it with a person attached to me who I should throw, because it felt so different that it took all my concentration to just get my center, hips, and feet working together the way the teacher was suggesting.

Coincidentally, I was planning all day to write on this subject tonight, and just before sitting down to write I went over to check my friend, the budo bum's, blog and found his posting on the question of kata. I commented: "Personally, the kata that have the most meaning for me are those that comprise the movements that constitute the most basic building blocks of the art. It lets all from newbie to master to have a base to which to return for reality testing, muscle memory, polishing, refinement."

Having written that, I realized as I clicked over here to write, that what would serve best with this new teaching is for me to treat it as a solo kata, working on it alone at home, so I can internalize the movement. Then I can try incorporating it into technique at the dojo.

REHEARSALS

Fives years into my aikido training, I had an enforced two year hiatus due to knee injury, surgery, and rehab. During that time, I often experienced what I called "waking dreams" about aikido. Driving the car, taking a shower, walking down the street, the "back burner" of my mind would begin doing techniques to the degree that I was aware of feeling nerve-muscle connections firing even though there was no gross motor response (in other words, I wasn't making a public spectacle of myself). Sometimes when walking past an inviting lawn or traversing a large open space like inside San Francisco City Hall, I'd get an overwhelming urge to do a forward roll, and could almost visualize and somaticize doing so.

When I returned to training, it seemed to me that experiencing these phenomenon, as well as continuing to watch class from time to time, had been invaluable in keeping aikido "in my body." I was out of shape, but had not lost any technical competence in the art. Articles I've read about sports training in the years since then seems to validate this.

It has now been over a year since I've set up my palette and done any painting. But the half of my studio allocated for painting is coming together, and as I walk around town or drive through the hills of the Coast Range, my eyes and brain have begun to see differently again, in the simultaneously open and analyzing way of a painter. I'm not painting. But I'm certainly getting ready to.