- – – – by Kimbal Anderson Sensei
What I wanted to talk about was, because of the season… if you go outside it’s glòm which is an Old English word, and I think it was sometimes in the idea of something that’s obscured but not dangerous: it’s just something you’re not seeing – like you just see the light of the moon, but you can’t see the moon itself.
It also is a metaphor…
We don’t use metaphor much in this society, but the idea of something being hidden in this sense is not negative secrecy. It’s like when your spiritual eye is ready… That kind of stuff… That it’s probably not good to force on other people who are not there. It’s not kind. And you have to drop the thing ‘they’re not ready and I’m much better’. It’s more like: ‘oh… it’s not their time for it’, okay?But you still have to live. You still have to have a good life.
One of the beauties of training is that, in here, you began to get experiences of interacting with people quite intimately that isn’t sexual it isn’t political it isn’t any of that ‘-isms’ or ‘-iddles’.
It’s simple.
And may be you never had these experiences before. So your whole vision of the world is kind of ‘over there’. And your ma-ai – the distance at which you keep things – can lead you to being very separate from things. And it doesn’t help you have empathy.
I prefer the ancient words but they don’t mean anything to anyone now, but they were much more subtle. And they were kind of holographic, and metaphoric, you know what I mean?
And then you get literalists who take the most beautiful thing, and turn it into a bludgeon.
I don’t think that way in our training.
Early on I found I used to have fifty-fifty in our dojo. We’re pretty much there now: fifty percent wonderful women… wonderful men… And to interact with each other in a non-sexual, non-transactional, non-social way – the whole stories, allow the stuff… allow them to just be in each other’s presence without that. There was not all that stuff.
And I so much enjoyed the women teachers I encountered. Their approach varied drastically… it was like this range of wildness…
The women brought so many things to it that I had never seen, that were like absolutely awakening to me.
I noticed with the Iwama-trained ones – there are a few very well-known teachers – at first when I trained with them in 1980, it was very much them trying to demonstrate that they weren’t going to be pushed around: they had very big guys in the Iwama lineage… and so they were very physical. But now they’re back to… what a variety… what a wonderful variety of things…
There are still some that are very physical, but it keeps the mental/heart part about musubi about just joining of energy… And it helps people understand that can exist without politics, without social stuff, without all those rôles that people think are real…
But I got to see what I call the spiritual lineage, the stories, the beauty of it all…