Autumn Equinox and the language of leaves…

  • – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

Sensei said: “It’s still Equinox”… 

Did you see the picture of the Full Moon over the shrine up there in Granite Falls? Beautiful! It’s just… you know…

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So… last Saturday, there was this change in the sky and you know it was rainy and stuff that day, and it all started to cloud up…  but it hit this point where the sun looked golden color. It wasn’t red any more and it wasn’t white-ish like it usually is it was a gold color. And beams of light were shooting through the clouds, like, huge rays… It looked like some kind of religious calendar, almost, it was incredible. And then there were these curtain clouds that were coming… just dancing… It got me thinking of Kurosawa’s Dreams, right?  All these waving things…

And then it got really intense. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and I’ve seen lots of skies. My father taught me to predict weather and all kinds of things by the moon. As farm people we used the moon as our guide. So I’m used to examining the sky in detail, and I’ve seen phenomenal sun-dogs and Aurora Borealis and all those…  This was totally unique.  I took a picture, but it doesn’t look… you know… there’s no depth of field.. But the rays of light passing through extended across the sky. I’ve never seen anything do it like that and then these pulsing clouds behind it…

And what I thought was: ‘There’s probably 250 people at the market and 3 of us looked at it.’

No-one else looked up.

It’s like they were so disconnected from the phenomena around them… no-one looks at the sky any more,

And so I went around and there are some people that I know, and I said  “Come here…”  and I’d take them outside and they’d go “aaaah!”… and they’d just stare at it for a while… Then they’d always run back inside and try to get their children, and the children would go “I don’t care”… you know, looking at their cell-phones…

And I just thought what an extraordinary thing, that people no longer see, because, like I said, it was incredible… I’ve never seen anything like that. 

So I was considering that phenomenon of disconnection from Great Nature.  And to see it in that form, particularly when people are shopping for local, organic vegetables and local, organic food… You would think there would be some kind of…but no… I think Nature has been commoditized. It’s not part of us… …for those folks…

And I was just thinking…

Something I want to do in the dojo is take you out and show you some things about how to look at the sky.

And this event today, and in the last couple of days… we had the Autumnal Equinox…And you can tell. Everything feels so much different. And I was observing the trees out front, the leaves, and they were signaling ‘Autumn’ and ‘rain’: Autumn rain And I was thinking: probably no-one knows even how to talk to the trees any more.

They can’t understand the language of leaves.

So I want to show you that, so it doesn’t get lost.

And it’ll also let you understand maybe a little bit better.

Maybe like O’Sensei and those guys – they were very much creatures of Nature – they had to watch the sky, because of rain… or typhoons…or any of that stuff…

So we’re going to do that. 

There’s so much joy that’s not being enjoyed.

We’re going to do such a thing – as Sensei says – “without fail”. 

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