last week on thursday a dear friend and his very pregnant wife came over for dinner. while i planned the meal it was raining outside and i had just returned from two weeks at the beach. i planned a rather winterly dish. it was however a gloriously summer promising day and we sat in the garden for dinner and conversation until well past ten in the evening. glorious!
sometimes wonder why i chose the friends around me and how in my utter naivety and ignorance i end up being a very lucky person indeed. if anything, my life is defined by my friends and the relationships that i maintain with them. these friends come from all walks of life and all the places that my wandering nature and serendipity have taken me to. one of these friends is my sensei's sensei. i tend to define the quality of friend rather loosely, if not generously, while friendship is a relationship that ripens and grows with time through thick and thin, through good times and bad times. i also have a friend from india now living in the middle east who is fond of calling me his goddess and with whom i claim to share insanity. however it is the sensei's sensei that is most on my mind right now. a few weeks ago while walking out of the dojo, bump into him and we get into a long conversation right there while i hold the door open. imagine there i was for an hour holding the door open for him while we were having this involved conversation. this conversation has stuck. the subject matter was one that has me puzzled and the whole picture of me holding a door open for an hour may or may not have any significance. then later on sensei had to share something with me about what it is that makes irish men special, or something along those lines, but somehow i found it funny. between the banalities and the shared insights we cover a ground that is called a connected understanding of reality.
on that week of intense aikido training i learned from all there, but a few episodes have engraved themselves in my mind memory. sensei and i were discussing at one point the Celt culture, and he went on to mention some of their so claimed more horrifying rites or customs involving human sacrifice. i looked at him in astonishment at his own concern over such matters and asked him if anything had changed. do we not continue to make human sacrifice a part of our modern day twenty first century lives?
it was sensei's turn to look at me. yes, nothing has changed. the ancient celts and semites did practice human sacrifice, but then so do we. human superstition has not ceased to be, it just happens that sometimes we call it science, other times we call the victims fatalities of war or accident. whichever way you look at it, human sacrifice at the hands of other humans. humans are humans, brutal, aggressive and on occasions, rational. seldomly rational we are.
still, it was not our exchange on human sacrifice that remains seared in my memory. it was something he shared about himself, something about his own life, something that made me feel connected in experience to him. it made me feel not unique, but a part of a common shared experience. that connection point is what is most on my mind now. it gives me strength to navigate through what is again another period of total uncertainty and utter chaos.
then, i returned home from the aikido week and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom in the garden. i left again and when i returned last week, all was green, not a trace of a single cherry blossom. i am either the sorcerer's apprentice or a lost samurai... i dream of cherry blossoms.
so, how the fuck am i?
do not ask. i do not know.
last night i had a late night phone conversation which felt like holding somebody's hand. tenderness and kindness are rare in this mad life on the planet. still this is the only planet we know that supports our organisms. this is the planet earth that we cohabit with rabbits, foxes, bees, earthworms and cherry blossoms. this is the place of tsunamis, volcanos, wars, human sacrifices, blood, sweat, tears, and ecstasy. we are all here together. did we choose it? chances are that it was all serendipity anyhow.
so, how am i doing?
frankly my dear, i do not give a damn. in the ever continuing saga of this life of mine, i continue to fall in love each day with every stone in my garden. i have more trouble with the slugs eating away at my basil, i poison those.
