There are linen sheets on my bed, it is Summer! more photos from trafal

It is Summer. This blog is taking a break.

What does that mean?

I love to write. I also love to write this very personal blog. It is that I just do not find myself in the personal-blogging space very often these days. It could also be that I am bored with writing about myself in the first person singular here. The exercise has however been good and thoroughly enjoyable. Between writing a novel, theoretical man, a few odd short stories, academic work, and the occasional policy bit here and there… to mention a few of the ongoing projects… I will be dropping a few balls. Catch one if you can!

Occasionally I need a break from weightier matters and go for more visual and fewer words on trafal.

I am looking forward to reboot, a community event for practical visionaries and a chance to talk with some very cool people, breathe a bit of the Scandinavian air… this I needed!

So a Wiffle is nothing that we use in this corner of the woods! Around here nobody plays Wiffle ball, but we European are fond of other games. The Irish are a lot all of their own and some of my good friends originated in Ireland, but what puzzles me is that none of them live in the place of origin. So, the Irish voted on the Lisbon treaty and a NIET came out. After reading this article in The Economist I wonder what it is that the result of this referendum reflects. Was it just a vote on how good the campaign on either side was? Is this to be interpreted that politics has reduced to marketing?

Now, if that is so, and marketing being a close relative of propaganda, I do wonder what has gone wrong and if people unhappy with the present state of affairs in our governments have much to complain about. After all, if marketing of ideas is the fine art of selling anything with superficial and inane arguments appealing to the brain dead, then if you are unhappy by the fact that you get a lame government serving all purposes but that of the community and society, then think again.

Right here in good old federal Switzerland - not even a member of the EU - there is one very popular political party that overspends any other political party to impose their ill advised programs and ideology on a population that has not quite yet abandoned the exercise of thinking critically. There is hope, nonetheless the Swiss voters are often seduced by the oversimplification and appeal of the sugar coated polemics coloured with racism and discrimination in all their ugly variations including the nationalism one. We all know that a diet with too much sugar is not healthy.

My apologies go to fine art, there is no fine art in what is propaganda or marketing. Propaganda is nothing fine, nor is there art in deceiving and misleading the masses with inane argumentation. We used to call this lies, or in the case of political activity, it is called propaganda.

I hope I am wrong about something here.

Yes there is a site named “upcoming” and it belong to yahoo, but other than true geeks and sandbox players nobody really uses it in real life. Go figure. What is real life, you ask. Still trying to figure out that one, but having a ball!

Now, this Sunday is Aikido Sunday with Barbara Imboden Shidoin, Birankai, in Bern. It starts at 9:30.

And the Summer Camp in Uzès is July 19-25.

Will I be there? Inshallah!

I do not even know at this point if I will make it to reboot 10 this year.

more photos from tensoriana

We did end up at the desperado not the milchbar due to a wonderfully wet summer storm. And guess what? Somebody had a birthday at another table and they played that gawful song again… (we love torture).

DSC01297, originally uploaded by Dannie Jost.

]]> http://dannie.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/reflections-monday-evening-walk/feed/ dannie http://dannie.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/writing-politics-death-and-boredom/ http://dannie.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/writing-politics-death-and-boredom/#comments Sat, 31 May 2008 17:03:47 +0000 Dannie http://dannie.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/writing-politics-death-and-boredom/

I am well, and if I was bored to death, I would not be writing, I would be wallowing in the boredom and slowly asphyxiating to death. So all is well. The past two weeks have been good weeks, and that means that I showered three times at the dojo each week. Remember my condition of satisfaction for a good week is that I shower three times at the dojo. In actuality it is two different dojos, but the three showers mean that I trained three times and if I am training that much, then I am healthy and I have otherwise organized my life to afford the luxury of training. Luxury? Not really a luxury, but I like to think of it this way. At today’s morning training one colleague gave me a good piece of advice after I voiced my hesitation in testing on June 20th, he told me to decide on the 21st. Thanks Andreas, I signed up. Really, sometimes I think too much!

This morning I had a short conversation with my neighbour. It was the kind of periodic conversations that I have with her that make me wonder what kind of privileged relationship we have. Mind you, she is a very special neighbour and we share a certain affinity for rust and angular objects. This morning however we ended up talking about the flying ants at my place that I consider my guests for the next few days. It is the third year in a row that I am graced with these visitors. This year I decided to not spray with some chemical agent and indulge my more Buddhist tendencies and let the couple of spiders already cohabitating with me have a feast all of their own. Spiders? Yes, I live with a couple of spiders, and for the most part all is harmony except when one of them errs into the shower and I then mercilessly proceed without any consideration for its plight in trying to escape the water. Nothing, not even my beloved spiders, can come between me and my shower! These flying ants will be gone in a couple of days, and then all returns to normal, or whatever it is that normal is around here that is never quite normal. We will have to check the alternatives of dealing with the ant colony as it seems to be located somewhere in some ceiling crack between this place and the adjacent rooms. Ants, spiders and all, I really like this place. Shortly after I had moved in, I sat at my desk and a few wild thoughts, dreams, desires and aspirations zipped through my mind that today I shared with my neighbour and commented on my own state of affairs with some vague plan as to what is immediate for me. She smiled, and commented something about that being a good sign. Inshallah!

I have been a bit silent in the last months. Actually this year started with me being not much in the mood for blogging or broadcasting and so it has been so far. Nothing wrong, nothing special, just a few moods and whims. I have been writing on the technical level and am by now really missing writing fiction. I also have been reading quite a bit. But what is this with death? Ah, it is about Tantra! It is about Tantra and my old place. I remember now something that was rather odd when I returned from Germany quite a few years back. I remember the thought that I had come back to Berne to die. I liked that thought, i like the idea of returning to die. There was something in me that needed to die. It has been a slow and painful death, and I think that it is finally dying. Thing is that I only discovered what it was that was dying recently. Remember dying is about giving up and surrendering to life. The art of dying is what life is about.

Politics? What does any of this have to do with politics you ask. Simple, life is politics. Now go figure. Tokyo is never far, Rome, Paris, Geneva, London and New York are on my mind.

These days my political activity has been in the background, or rather, I have been exercising the art of the invisible. Politics is an art. One of the more startling discoveries that I have made is that the most action does happen behind the scenes and within the political household that “the party” is.

Recently I have had a few eye opening experiences that make me feel totally wet behind the ears. Yesterday I held my first speech of any significance in the Rathaus, and put in a good word for the motion from Barbara Streit-Stettler and Daniela Lutz-Beck that asks that the city make drinking water available at no cost to the fans and visitors of the EURO 08. That our city mayor - Alex Tschäppät, a socialist - would be against such a measure was a real surprise, but then he is known to not be much of a fan of water. What do I really know about socialists? Anyhow the motion got through unanimously, and that is indeed a rare occasion in that parliament. Ah! Free drinking water, how very refreshing!

Now, if you are following the political gossip in this country, you are aware of the fact that the “right wing” parties all have a bit of a problem and not very good press at the time. The CVP has seen one of its own having a drug problem of which we do not yet know the details, however I am told that this happens in the best of families. The SVP - the populists - are throwing a temper tantrum over the election of Federal Councillor Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, and my own party - the FDP -does not know how to keep its internal household problems away from the pornographic greed of the press.

In view of all of this I decided to stick to what is important to me: bags and colours. One week ago I approached Reto Nause - the proud owner of an iPhone - and asked him what one had to do to get one of those orange bags that he carries around. Reto told me that he would give me one at the next session, and so it was that yesterday he gave not one, but two. See, I like that orange bag for the colour and the functionality. I also like the idea of doing political work across party lines and bringing in what is co-operation. There is absolutely nothing wrong - not in my book - with the fact that each party focus on a different aspect of what is important in our society. Oh rats! I am colour blind and on a good day totally politically uncorrected! Forgive me for having a mind of my own, if you can, and if you can’t…

It turns out that the last few weeks have gone over me while I seem to have been in an altered state of conscientiousness. Trouble is is that I am not quite sure on which side of that consciousness I have been, I have whined and moaned and pestered many around me about the details of it all, I have partied, and I have worked. I sat in the sessions of our city council, our party meetings and assemblies, and after all of this there is one strange taste left in my mouth. But these have been interesting times, as “times” at my address tend to be always very unpredictable.

Once more I am right there in the middle of my own inquiry in what consists the interface of the public and private. After all, it is another election year for this city council, and although the campaigning season has not yet really opened up, it is clear from the nature of the debates and the local newspaper nonsense that we are in that season already when all of a sudden politics is a lot about ego trips. Ego trips are not all that bad, but what is for sure is that one must be willing to take one’s ego for one hell of a ride when exposed to the public scrutiny and this may be the ultimate thrill of them all.

Just earlier this week - or was it last week? - while heading up town I bumped into Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf walking in the opposite direction fully engaged in a very animated discussion. This was just days after I had finally claimed my fame in the diplomatic parquet by having spilled a hot expresso over the nice white shirt of one of the local ambassadors all the while not having had a clue to the nature of the position of the “lucky” gentleman who had thus had a much too intimate and private encounter with “my” expresso. It is hard to take life too seriously these days when the nature of my experiences are of this calibre, and a look into either the headlines of the international or local press makes me wonder if this world has gone totally insane already and that I may be the last one to discover what must already be obvious to all. There is something sobering about the observation of all the insanity and irrationality that surrounds us all. We do live in a world where wisdom and rational are precious jewels cultivated by the very few who know that freedom resides only in the generosity of our spirit. The faculty of critical thought is one rare and necessary instrument within our democratic societies, however we often forget that life is indeed an ephemeral non-equilibrium phenomenon. Each time that violence erupts in the streets of Beirut, I wake up.

In the grand scale of things, the weather often has the last word. You may think what you may want, however there is no such thing as a non-political discussion when it comes to humanitarian relief: watch the UN Webcast of Noon Time Press Briefing of May 8 for an idea of what this dilemma is about. Somewhere along the line the whole reminds me of some fantastic scenes from the movie Babel.

I summarise the 2008 Birankai Spring Camp in Labaroche in one word: stress. It was my fourth year, and as every preceding year, it was different from all others. Three of us travelled for two hours from Berne to Labaroche on Saturday the 12th and returned on the 19th. In between I must confess that I delighted in stress and all its bodily sensations! I sat out the third class on Tuesday morning and took some pictures of Rikko Varjan Sensei’s class.

Every morning I got up at 6 and was in Zazen by 6:30 warmly wrapped in a few layers of cotton sitting on a Zafu, and every day at some point I got nauseated while sitting. Really, I literally felt like throwing up and vomiting while sitting. The great thing about Zazen is that it is a perfect opportunity to postpone. Everyday I postponed giving in to that urge to vomit by making a conscious effort to breathe from deep down that place that is often referred to as hara. Aikido and Zazen go together better than one can imagine, especially if one has never tried either. One is moving, the other is sitting, and both are active, very active. What one trains in either case has to do with hara, or what we call the centre or the lower chakra, or rather what I would call my gut. We all know the idiomatic expressions around gut from “having no guts” to “feeling it in my guts” or that all too familiar “gut feeling” however the expression lacks all the mystical and mysterious connotations that a word like hara or chakra can awaken in the seeking mind and searching spirit. There is nothing romantic about training one’s gut and getting it connected to the rest of one’s existence, yet that is exactly what it boils down to, and it starts with learning to breathe.

While I was offline all week in Labaroche, on Sunday one week ago I checked my email via the mobile and found one conversation in progress between two of my colleagues that got me reacting. Totally oblivious to the fact that it was Sunday, at lunch time and after three hours of intensive training I gave my colleague in the UK a call and was very surprised that I could only reach him on his mobile, not in his university office. It was not until Tuesday that I realised my blunder in having lost track of the days of the week. I also had signed up our Dojo for cleaning duties for Tuesday while thinking all along that I had done so for Wednesday. Stress!

I arrived in Labaroche after a night when I had slept less than three hours after having finished a piece of work that in my view was overdue although the client was not complaining. Still, in my view, in my reality, I had wanted to have that piece of work finished several weeks ago. My stress is home-made and self-generated, and as far as I can tell, I need it. Whatever it is that I call stress, it is what often drives me. If anything, then this week was about my relationship to stress. I also arrived with a rather stiff left leg after a most annoying case of some discomfort at the sacroiliac joint that had pestered me for over a week, then by Tuesday afternoon I discovered that I had pulled a muscle on my left shoulder while I had managed to recover my flexibility. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Failure is always a possibility. A pulled muscle in my days of being a gymnast was a piece of cake, but then I was also barely twenty years old and my body took to abuse with much more delight and less discomfort. After fifty, I have decided to make an effort to care better for this empty shell of bone, muscle and guts that is my body. For the rest of the week I avoided any additional strain on that shoulder. I like pain, but then not all pain gives me the same kind of pleasure, however that is not even the point here. If my body was a bit of a mess, my mind was chaos, and is chaos now. There is a piece of synthesis that I need to write down that deals with complexity, technology and self-organisation that I need to finish by today, and at this point I really do not know how I will get there. I worked on it every afternoon, except Wednesday when six of us followed Gabriel Valibouze’s invitation and went to Haut-Koenigsbourg. All the while this piece of work had me then, like it has me now, This is good. I need the stress, I need the challenge, and I love not knowing and creating out of that place called emptiness. But, how does one get to that point of being empty?

For the first time in this fourth pilgrimage to Labaroche, I actually got bored with it all. I got impatient and tired of watching all the human comings and goings, the dramas, the games, and the plays. The reality of others seems to bore me. I got bored and I also delighted in the wonder of it all. Little if anything made any sense, and that was as good as I cared to have it. For among all the comings and goings of my feelings of boredom and joy, I also delighted in conversations with Iona and Ivo around the kitchen table in the evening. On Friday night I could have danced the night away, and then retired early anyhow. I was spoiled by Mireille’s cooking once more, and I indulged in the preparation of a lentil salad overloaded with garlic for the party on Friday. The lentil salad was inspired by Tuesday evening’s dinner invitation by the Greek Dojo friends where we were served a wonderful fakés (greek lentil soup) and all sorts of other goodies. Come to think of it, during the whole week I ate tremendous amounts, slept a lot, and moaned quite a bit about this and that. Most of the time I felt like a total sissy, and then yesterday during the last training I felt alive and grounded, even playful. Remarkable in a way, normal in another. Just during the first weapons training earlier in the week I had caught myself not being able to tell right from left in one of the exercises. It was only when Gabriel Sensei corrected me that I realised that I had not seen that that particular exercise involved going once to the the right and then to the left. I was under the impression that it involved taking two steps both to the right and was quite convinced that I had observed correctly. Had this happened during my first camp at Labaroche I suspect that I would have freaked out and lost it since in those days I would lose it with far smaller challenges to my own perception. It in this case being the ability to be corrected and stay free of prejudice. My expression of losing it is usually associated with some very private thoughts of punching out the teacher for daring to correct me and then having the gall to ask me if I had understood. See, I just never did too well in the understanding department. What my mind understands does not necessarly translate to my body being able to execute it.

One evening we ended up on the subject of relationships, but then Aikido is about relationships at all levels. It starts with the relationship that you have with yourself, and then you work on the relationship with the others. Anyhow, is life about anything else? The minute that more than two individuals get into each other’s circle of awareness, relationship happens, and before that there is a relationship between you and the ground on which you stand. Earlier in the week I had defended the thesis that whatever private relationships one entertains, that is exactly what they are: private. Immediately I am reminded of the expression on Facebook “in a Relationship” and my inability to call that one in any way, as I can not possibly fathom - or fantom or even phantom- being in just one relationship, like I will never understand the logic of tea bags or coffee capsules. How is it supposed to work being in just one relationship? But then, my reality may be just as strange and foreign to others as theirs is to me. The wonder of it all is that somehow we do manage to live and create nourishing and sustaining communities.

I love logic, and although I may not understand logic with my guts, my mind has no trouble with it. Then it could be that after having spent one week in a house with seven other human beings and training on tatami populated with almost one hundred human bodies, my very reclusive and private self feels a stringent need to shut it all out and go back to the drawing board of my reality which in itself is very private in spite of the fact that it takes place in the public eye. If relationship is about feelings, then I for the most part try to stay out of relationship because feelings tend to be messy to deal with and I have little patience for dealing with the messy and uncomfortable. In a week during which I felt like a silly mess, bored, impotent and disorganised it is good to return to the quietness of my studio. One look at my calendar for next week does inform me that somehow life still feels like going to school. Ah… but what was it that I was supposed to have finished by this evening? Stress?

Yes, there is much more. There is always much more, but I will also be finishing up an essay about Aikido for Chris Mooney that was inspired by the recent Warwick University Aikido Club Anniversary.

Achilles: Is this what remains of you when you are done ploughing through the reality of men’s dreams?

Tortoise: For the first time in our life, I would rather punch the living daylights out of you than to reason with you! What gives you the right to make of me your dream that I never was?

Achilles: Was it I? Was it me? What is your nature?

Tortoise: I am insanity, truly am, and still your voice is so very loud. Why must you speak with me? Do you really imagine that I exist? Let me make it clear to you now and for ever and ever: I do not exist!

Achilles: You are a screaming dying fool! Those few malignant anorexic cells that are left with you, those anorexics are eating away your bandwidth, and you are doomed!

Tortoise: To listen to you is the only folly that is left in my sanity! Today I tasted that which is the very elixir of life: not caring, not giving a damn, not wanting, not committing, not owning, not existing!

Achilles: If I listen to you carefully now, I would think that you are… could it be? is it possible that you actually turned around, and you considered the existence of the possibility of love?

Tortoise: Must you once more return to your belief in love? There is no wisdom and no attainment! Why would I want to belief when my cosmos is already empty?

Achilles: Pathetic! You call the pressure anvil that you create day in and day out, peace? Your cosmos is chaotic, agonizing, suffocating, moronic, boring, and the next calamity follows the past calamity. You bleed to death!

Tortoise: There is no fear.

Achilles: Fear?

Tortoise: Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form; form is emptiness, emptiness is form.