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And today pretty much couldn't have been a more perfect day. Breakfast at Tubby's in Cotati is something my son and I do once or twice a month so it was fitting that we started there. We drove out to the coast and rented Kayaks from John at Lotus Kayaks (707 865-9604). John is a really friendly guy and has ridiculously reasonable prices for his kayak rentals. $20 bucks for the half day for singles.
The mouth of the river was actually closed at this time of the year, unusual for the Russian River. We kayaked toward the beach area and pulled our boats up onto the beach. Did some T'ai Chi in the sand and wind, and practiced for Steven's 5th Kyu test in Aikido. We had a chance to play a little hide and seek, take in more of the beach, and then kayaked back. We paddled around the island in the river and made our way back to dock. John met us there and helped us pull up our kayaks. The people in Jenner are very friendly. I stopped briefly to talk to a couple selling tie dyed shirts and they were pleased as punch to talk.
On our way back we stopped by the touristy area in Duncan's Mills. There are some nice stores and artist's galleries there. In particular, the nice gentleman at Jim and Willie's Antiques was friendly and cheerful. Willie didn't say much. He preferred to sit on Jim's lap and have his belly rubbed. (Willie is a bichon frise that is almost as cute as a certain Shi tzu I know named Lilikoi.) Worldy Goods is a nice store with fun fair trade oddities. We spent a bit of time there looking at the art and antiques and talked for a few minute with one of the woman at Worldly Goods. She was very sweet and helpful last year taking a special order for me and calling me when it was ready. The item was a flying pig that I bought for my mom on her birthday. Goofy? yep!
Cafe des Jemelle in Monte Rio is a great little place for lunch. Once or twice a year I throw my diabetes to the wind and have lunch there and finish it off with a deep fried banana split. They had just about the best rueban I've ever had and after we got to play pool in the bar while enjoying our dessert. Coming home we cranked up Third Eye Blind, Oasis, The Replacements and The Police.
Steven is a great companion to go on trips with. He is always helpful, always seems to have fun when we go places and, well just makes it so perfect to be a dad. I'm totally glad to have had this time to share with him today!
The eve before her daughter's birthday, my friend Alicia commented online about how she remembered that night. How she remembers the music, the labor and the beautiful anticipation of welcoming her daughter into the world. As a man, I can't possibly know what it's like to go through the throes of labor. I can absolutely remember the anticipation I felt welcoming my son into this world. On the eve of his birthdays, I can the hospital, the joy and anticipation both he and his mom had. We wondered if he was going to have a huge head of hair or if he was going to be bald. (He was bald). He didn't cry a lot. Only when he needed to be fed.
I've have been honored with the opportunity of being a father, offering my son love and guidance. I've had the supreme pleasure of watching our infant son grow to the young, respectable, funny, thoughtful boy that he is today. I remember telling his mother, that i didn't care if he had a face only we could love, I didn't care if he was slow to learn in school, if he couldn't catch a ball, if he wasn't coordinated. My only wish was that he be nice and kind. He has grown to be a nice and kind boy. He's also very smart and handsome. I saw him excel past the other children when he took up baseball or soccer. I saw him bloom and grow when he took up Tae Kwon Do. I saw his determination when he decided that Tae Kwon Do was his main passion and he put his heart and soul into his art, dropping baseball and soccer, achieving his first degree blackbelt when he was 10 and his second degree when he was 12. I see him always helpful to his mother and respectful to me.
Father's Day is a day when us men who have had the opportunity to be blessed with the title "father" be honored. I am honored as a dad. I am honored because of my beautiful son. The life he lives daily honors both of his parents. I in turn, honor the memory of my father by striving to be a dedicated father to my son. i am forever grateful that I had a hand in bringing my son into this world, and try everyday to be the best dad I can.
Every six months or so our Aikido dojo holds a beginners day. We open up the dojo for our sensei's energy class, Yang style Tai Chi and Aikido to the public. This gives opportunity for our Sensei to talk about not just the fundamentals of Aikido, but one of the fundamental essences of the art; dealing with conflict.
We normally deal with conflict by either fight or flight. We fight back directly with the thought that if we meet force with enough force, we can overcome. We sometimes take flight thinking that if we can avoid conflict or close our eyes real tight, the conflict will eventually go away. Sometimes these techniques work. Sometimes we can meet conflict with conflict and overcome. Sometimes we can in fact avoid conflict by closing our eyes or stepping around it.
Our sensei talks about the third option. This option trains us to still maintain our integrity, be present in the face of conflict, but rather than meet conflict with force, we move off the line and allow it to go by us. We keep focus of what's behind the conflct and try to resolve the bigger picture, not the initial strike or blow. We deal with conflict in an honest and loving manner.
I have a long way to go in my training. I am better at dealing with conflict. I can always improve though. Sometimes I rise up still and meet conflict head on. Sometimes I close my eyes and hope that conflict will simply go away. But I find that I can take the principles of Aikido off the mat and into my daily life. We measure our lives through progress, not perfection. I am appreciative and grateful that Aikido can give me tools to find progress and growth in my life.
I've been tired lately. i'm attempting to buy a condo and it's.. well it's draining. Lots of things to think about, what do these reports mean? I have to pay what to which appraiser? All of this, along with a back that's been bugging me and work kicking my ass is taking a toll on the time I spend at the dojo. i'm averaging 2 days a week now on a good week.
I thought a bit today, not about the Aikido training I do at Aikido of Petaluma, but of the KodenKan school Jujitsu I did as a kid. Kodenkan (ancient tradition school) stresses that the senior students teach the junior students. This tradition is something that is informally practiced at our dojo, without affiliation to the Kodenkan school. Everyone at our school has a voice and is encouraged to speak their voice, from sensei to sempai to the person that just walked on the mat five minutes ago.
What I'm thinking is simply this: We are a community. It honors our teacher to show up to class. It gives us the opportunity to have another mind and body and allow those that we train with the opportunity to train and experience a different person, a different way of attacking, a different way of taking a fall and a different way of throwing through this person on the mat.
"But what could I possibly offer? Surely there must be others that are better equipped to teach someone?"
As a student senior to someone else, I can simply offer my experiences and my way of moving through a technique. Since I'm a bigger guy (Think Sumo lite) then I can offer inspiration to someone else that may be hesitant to get on the mat because of his size. As a student junior to others, i can offer my humility and willingness to learn something from someone else. These are the ways we can honor ourselves, our school and our Sensei. Although the Danzan Ryu system is much different than Aikido, the concept of the KodenKan school can transcend to how we view our participation in the dojo.
I think that this is a much different concept than just paying your tuition, showing up and learning techniques. I've learned compassion, patience, kindness, openness of body, mind and spirit. Aikido was created by a man who could not be defeated. He decided that there must be more to technique and winning, and thus, came to create our art for two main reasons: the loving protection of others and the polishing of spirit. Through our training we learn to live in teh world happy, fearless and joyful. These are well worth me coming back with more regularity.
A couple of coworkers and I went to the Web 2.0 Expo at the Mosconi Center in San Francisco, CA today. Although the turn out seemed to be rather sparce. There was still good information to be had. Here are the highlights of what we saw today.
Session - How to leverage Social Marketing for Search Engine Marketing
We started out with a session called "Optimizing Search Results with Social Media" sponsored by Verio Web Hosting and featuring Heather Lutze, Internet Marketing consultant. She had a wealth of great information. She started off with the important point about search engine ranking and using longer keyword strings to find users that are not casually browsing but in fact ready to perform some kind of action, whether buying a product or service. She contends that a search for "web hosting" while yielding millions of hits, is not as valuable as "web hosting for small business". There are much less hits for "web hosting for small business" but the people that are doing searches using a longer more focused string of keywords are much more likely to buy a service or product than someone using a less descript keyword search. Wehn writing for the web, phrases like that should be put in title tags, meta data and the body of your document whenever possible.
Links from the presentation:
http://www.verio.com/ - Sponsors of the presentation
http://www.lutzeconsulting.com/ - Heather's professional site
http://lutzeconsulting.com/Verio - Slides from W2.0 presentation
Keyword search tools
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
Book Suggestions
Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug
The Long Tail - Chris Anderson
We then went to the main expo hall where we interacted with several vendors. There were some good and some not so good presentations. Here are the highlights:
Denodo Technologies - Mashup company that claim to organize structured and unstructured data for use by the enterprise.
http://www.denodo.com
Yola - Web building service that allows drag and drop web building that is done in the web browser. Yola's services are targetted towards small businesses and personal web pages. They offer an amazing amount of web tools in the stie construction process.
http://www.yola.com
Jive - Jive provides social media software packages to businesses. Out of the box, their packages include scalable and configurable tools for blogging, forums, and other collaboration.
http://www.jivesoftware.com
Financial Content - Providers of businesss news, stock quotes, company and profiles, executive profiles, currancy rates for display on internet and intranet sites as standalone widgets, xml or rss.
http://www.financialcontent.com
Blue Kiwi - Offers software and services for the creation of collaboritive/social sites and tools.
http://bluekiwi-software.com/
Twinsoft - provides enterprise mashup technologies. We were most impressed with them. Their edge over the other mashup technologies is that they can utilize both screen scraping technologies as well as web services to produce their mashups. They can even utilize the green screen from legacy mainframe technologies in their mashups.
http://www.twinsoft.com/
JackBe - Provides enterprise mashup technologies. They provide some interesting point/click drag/drop tools for visually creating mashups.
http://www.jackbe.com
HiveLive - Provides collaboration tools for the enterprise.
http://www.hivelive.com/
This was a good event for us to go to. Hopefully this will spawn some interesting discussion at work on the implementation of enterprise 2.0 technologies in the near future.
Author's note: Agh, I've been woefully neglectful of my blog. I started this last post in late February. I've decided not to change anything in the original post, but simply finish it. Now I can self evaluate my process and get better at this.
I've been sick and haven't been able to practice aikido much in the last week and a half. it will be good to get back on the mat this evening, The last class I went to was taught by Sensei, who comes in to teach on Thursdays and Sundays. We've been working on O'Sensei's concepts of the manifest (physical), hidden (dream/imaginary state) and divine (the place where love, connection to the bigger picture, and spontaneous creativity "takemusu" come from), and expressing each of these levels in our techniques. This was a beautiful and intense class for me.
Throughout the class, Sensei would ask us to check in and describe how our technique was feeling in the context of these levels. At the manifest level, I felt very solid and broad based and I described the feeling I had as a mountain. As we worked through the next level, the hidden, my thoughts changed to "how would a mountain act if it was a living breathing soul?" My technique changed, it got more deliberate, as mountains take their time to do anything, my technique slowed down, I relied on the tenacity that a mountain would have that eventually something would change. And it did. I felt the same connection to the ground, felt the same connection to my center but felt that my techniques were slowed down, they became more effortless. Finally, at the divine level, things changed. I myself on top of the mountain. I felt alone, but not lonely. I was the mountain, but I was it's owner as well. I felt love, compassion, and embraced it. My technique felt lighter, there was less need for external movement. I felt a beautiful connection to my partner, the dojo and my Sensei.
Sensei does an interesting thing that I've not experienced in other Aikido classes. He goes around the room and solicits feedback from us. This is a practice I've had to get used to. Most other dojos will let the student come to their own conclusions off the mat about how they connect with Aikido, and what meaning it holds. However, in our dojo, it's an integral part of our process. It's not for everyone, and it wasn't for me for a long while. Since I opened up to this I feel that my Aikido has grown immensely though, as have I. As he went along and asked us for feedback, it came to be my turn. I started to speak but quickly found myself overcome with emotion. That's never happened to me before. It wasn't a bad thing. My love for the class at that moment was overwhelming though, and I didn't properly say what I wanted to say. So now I will say it.
The predominant school of thought in martial arts training is to train yourself to not think, but rather be instinctive in a conflict situation. There's nothing wrong with this, lest I be admonished by other martial artists that read this. I would hope that if I ever had to defend myself that I wouldn't be plagued by hesitation due to how I "think" or "feel" about the situation, but rather just do what I needed to. This mind set is needed everyday by police officers, doctors, firemen in truama situations. The thing that I'm most grateful for however, is the way Sensei asks us to use our uniquely human qualities of thought and evaluation to look at our technique and evaluate. This is something that is so much bigger than martial techniques but yet embodies the spirit of Aikido in all that we do. As a spiritual person, it is my duty to evaluate my actions in order to get to deepr levels within myself. @aikidoMAC, someone I follow on twitter, tweeted the following quote from O'Sensei recently: Begin the week with AGATSU - O Sensei says,"True victory is self-victory; let that day arrive quickly!” Self victory comes from the human process of self evaluation. Self evaluation is sometimes a double edged sword. Too much, and the inner critic raises it's ugly head. I need to keep in mind two simple things about self evaluation: It is a tool for getting better at something, and it does not change what has happened. Onegai Shimasu!
As a part of our New Years Eve celebration my son and I practiced T'ai Chi a little before 12:00 until a little after. I got the idea from hearing that many Aikido schools have a new years class that starts at 11:30pm on New Years Eve and ends at 12:30am. This signfies ending the year and starting the year with aikido. Since we both practice different martial arts, but also, both practice t'ai chi, I thought that we can take this thought and carve out our own ritual. As firecrackers went off, and neighbors hooted and hollared, we were doing "single whip", "waving hands at clouds", "white snake creeps down" and "golden pheasant stands on one leg". It was a great time of reflection and looking forward into the new year.
My friend, Ana Ammann recently asked me what my goals were for 2009. I liked her question a lot. It made me think about my goals I put forth for 2008. I decided in 2008 I would explore more of my creative side and I set forth upont those goals by getting back on the Aikido mat, keeping with my T'ai Chi practice, doing ball room dance, sharpening my photography skills, and keeping the mindset of creativity as much as I can. These actions allowed me to look at my work life, my family life, my friends, and my relationships with a creative and artistic eye.
For 2009, my goals have changed slightly but still on a creative path. The important thing that I'm adding is how I'm going to be creative. For me, 2009 offers a chance to do some internal creative work. This means looking at the light and dark corners of my mind, and doing some tried and true exercises like journaling, reading, and turning a little more inward. I'm not sure how this looks but I believe that I can find a path and a journey to begin by looking inward a bit more than I did in 2008. I am excited by the prospects.
To all, I wish you a wondrous new year.
