We had a good rehearsal today, turning the corner on several pieces. I love the organic way that things can come together: songs, computer programs, rowing crews (thinking of my Outward Bound course). Everything is chaos, people don't know their parts, everyone worries about the song being ready for performance...it's as if forty people are trying to weave the same piece of cloth, working on different patches in different patterns and colors and it's almost inconceivable that this could ever come to be of a piece that even connects together at all, let alone with good aesthetics. And suddenly, the group sings, and it's no longer people singing parts, it's a group, and a song, and everyone's patches have come together. There are wrong notes and wrong dynamics and unlikely diction, but it's a coherent whole, and you move from learning to polishing.

Sometimes this happens when you start the performance.

I return, yet again, to the Triangle Talk, and the perils of living for something--hoping for something--other than my practice. I could lose everything I have, my loved ones, my livelihood, even aikido. But reality, the sheer glimmering Is-ness of the phenomenal world, the richness of the passing instant

oops, there it goes!

the fact that, as H.L. Mencken said, "We are here and it is now; all other human knowledge is moonshine." Aikido is one way to realize that, but the Is-ness (and aikido, for that matter) extend far beyond the physical.