Sword And Resonance

In a world that seems so filled with uncertainty and rage, I find Iaijutsu to be a refuge.

The kata - the forms, the prescribed techniques of using the sword, passed down through 430 years of being enhanced and refined - are beautiful and models of efficiency.  They can become a form of dance or meditation in motion almost accidentally - although in my art, we primarily train with the idea of combative application (as opposed to the term Iaido, which is Iai which is practiced and retained for its meditative purposes).

Iaijustsu - like any martial art I suppose - requires complete focus while you are performing it; thus the temptation to be thinking about other things is impossible.  It allows one to focus, to push things completely out of mind for the thirty to sixty minutes a day I spend with it.

Sometimes,  though, it becomes something more.

This happened to me this week while I was performing my practice at home.  I was outside - thanks to the rain we had received earlier in the day the weather was cool - on the back patio, practicing as I have a thousand times.  Sometimes I have very specific kata that I am working on. Sometimes  I practice a single part or a single action.

This day I started as I had before - but something was different.  There was a stillness in my soul that emanated out, resounding through my training outfit and the bokuto (wooden training sword) to the still somewhat humid and wet back yard, and then came back.  There was a resonance - I can think of no other word to use - between myself and the sword, between the sword and the world, between myself and the world.

The setting seemed completely wrong for such a moment:  a suburban backyard, a concrete patio, surrounded on three sides by houses and oak trees with a half dry brown, half green lawn.  These are not the settings that suggests any sort of deep moments.  But it happened none the less.

When I was finished, I bowed to the sword - to-rei, we name it - and then went inside and sat quietly for a moment, to see if I could find out anything else from what had happened. There was no resonance at that point, as the moment had passed - perhaps a dying echo, but nothing that could be turned into something else for greater thought.

It is said that the great masters of the sword all had a moment of satori, or enlightenment, that changed the way they approached martial arts.  One can only hope, even as spaced out as these moments seem to be, that perhaps I am finally on that path.