20 June 2005: Funny You Should Ask

Today is the last day of my three-week break from school; Summer classes (Critical Thinking and Art History) begin at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

I had intended to write many entries in this journal during this break, but I didn't get to it. I found that instead of being inspired to write, what I needed was to spend time absorbing - reading, observing, watching movies and videos, resting, researching. being social. I needed to integrate the work I'd done during the Spring, particularly the paratheatrical work I did in preparing for and performing in Requiem for a Friend.

The rest-and-integration process for me often involves cravings for specific sorts of entertainment, interaction, and information. In the past three weeks I've consumed multiple novels, nonfiction books, comics, online journals and essays, movies, and the entire fifth season of Angel. It's not entirely clear to me exactly how this contributes to my process of integrating spiritual work, but it works for me. I can observe the results of the integration process as they happen, because whatever I successfully integrate manifests in my aikido. Many exciting breakthroughs and developments in my aikido recently.

Speaking of aikido, the dojo is thriving. And although I ended up doing very little writing during this break, I did do a major overhaul of the Aiki Arts website.

Rhiannon persuaded me some time ago that I must write a nonfiction book about aikido and the various related stuff that I know. I plan to do it, when the time is right – which, at the moment, it isn’t. Right now, I’m too busy learning and doing the things that I’ll eventually be writing about. I am, however, consciously researching and making notes; I’m actively engaged in preparing myself to be ready to write this book when the time comes.

To this end, one of the books I planned to read was Wendy Palmer’s The Practice of Freedom – one of the more recent aikido books, from someone whose aikido I like. I slogged through about 40 pages before I gave up in disgust. It’s not a bad book; I even added it to the list of recommended books on the Aiki Arts site, because it does do a good job of talking about how aikido functions as a spiritual path, and there are people to whom that idea is sufficiently new and non-obvious that they’d benefit greatly from such a book. But there’s nothing new in it. There’s nothing in it that I haven’t already seen in other books; there’s nothing in it that’s challenging, nothing in it that could do anything as rude and upsetting as actually waking someone up.

In a vain and selfish way, I was relieved – if Wendy’s not capable of writing aikido’s equivalent of Prometheus Rising, that probably means that I get to do it (Terry Dobson is dead, after all, and Richard Heckler is brilliant but doesn’t know how to make his writing as engaging and accessible as his personal presence). But it also served to raise an important question for me: what vital and original perspectives are mine to offer, and how do I cultivate and explore them to the point where I’m ready to write about them in a way that no one else could?

I concluded that the best way to explore this question (I’ve found that exploring questions is much more productive than answering them) would be to get busy doing the work that I’ve been called to do: bringing my brand of aikido to various marginalized populations, particularly marginalized youth, or “at-risk” youth, as the social services professions currently refer to them. (at risk of what? waking up?) I’d been planning to do that sort of work when I finished school, but I saw that if I need to have done that work in order to write my book properly, then I can’t wait that long to start doing the work, or I won’t be ready to write the book for another decade or so. So I decided to start doing my “aiki missionary” work with marginalized populations as soon as possible.

Six hours after I came to that decision, I got an email from my friend Rebis, from whom I hadn’t heard for months, saying that she was working at the St. James Infirmary, a San Francisco nonprofit health clinic for sex workers (the only such clinic that is also run and staffed exclusively by sex workers and former sex workers). Rebis wanted to start a series of classes on movement, self-defense, and body awareness for the St. James staff and clientele, and she wondered if I would be interested in teaching.

Why, yes. Funny you should ask.

A couple of days later, I went to a staff meeting at the YMCA, and one of my favorite yoga teachers there announced that he was starting a nonprofit organization to bring yoga instruction to populations that could benefit from it but ordinarily might not have access to it – “at-risk” youth, for instance. I emailed him after the meeting, asking whether his organization would be interested in offering some aikido along with the yoga.

Why, yes. Funny you should ask.

Walking down the street a couple of days ago, I ran into a former YMCA youth program organizer who has since gone on to make a career of organizing other youth programs in other places. He was in the middle of a cell phone call, but he interrupted it long enough to hand me his business card and tell me to call him about a project he had in mind. I’ll be calling him today.

I got a fortune cookie yesterday that said, "There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation."