the next

It is late and I just got off the phone and then exchanged a few pleasant words over Skype with another reboot participant and speaker, yet most on my mind is my favorite geek of all, that geek who has been my inspiration all along, my son….  He is in California right now, and if I want to do all the milliard things that I leave for the last minute before a trip, then I can not let my emotions get wrapped around on how much I miss him.

I arrived in Strasbourg on Friday already deliciously tired from having spend thursday in the company of a friend doing a whole lot of nothing….  These moments are the richness of my Aikido experience, they happen on the tatami and they happen off the tatami.

Good things are happening in my life right along all the crap that I have been complaining and whining about offline to my dearest and most patient friends….  Usually when I am tired and sick of the long tale of misery, I turn it around and look for the humour in the whole situation.

I am starting to suspect that Aikido is not a martial art, it is a living and breathing art of the martial people that practice the discipline.Every year the members of Birankai and other aikidoka get invited to the spring training retreat in the Alsace country side in the Vosges….  I returned home from one of these retreats this afternoon totally drunk, delightfully drunk with a world of possibility that may have nothing to do with Aikido.May 9, 2006Being in the Algarve again was both heaven and hell.