A Body Brave and Shy

I noticed something after sesshin, when I did not want to practice Aikido with Deston; and I noticed it again yesterday, when my new acquaintance Heather called me to come hear live music in the neighborhood, and she danced while I did not: my body has become shy.

Deston told the story of a great teacher—an Aikido master—who grew old and frail and fell into a coma. Even in that insensible state, he still breathed from the hara. For so many years, he had cultivated that practice that, even when he was no longer fully in this world, his body still held the ingrained habit.

Alison/Yuko works with demented bodies whose minds have flown but who nevertheless walk and fight and cry out among us. She tells a similar kind of story: those whose lives were marked by trauma and drama; those whose bodies are wracked by addictions, are now in the worst shape. When happy, balanced people fall victim to Alzheimer’s, they teeter off the edge of now; their mind rolls back until they are left floating in a haze of childhood reality. They are sweet, befuddled, earnest. But the others, who may have once been able to keep it together, to function in the midst of alcoholism or a terrible marriage, now cannot contain their pain. The barriers against the truth have fallen, and what comes forth is their fear and rage, their inability to peacefully be with what is. It boils forth in an outburst, or oozes slowly in bizarre repetitive behaviors that stretch into eternity. Unmoored from time, you become what you have been cultivating, minus all pretense, minus all hope of dignity.

There will come a time when all that remains is habit and instinct, and a body that continues to live because it is already alive. Long before we grow old and the mind rots away, we will be called to act without thought: accident, calamity, attack and emergency all bring forth responses from a deep, unreasoning place.

You wake up. A man looms over your bed.
You come home. The front door is open.
On the freeway, skidding.
An earthquake that becomes stronger.
A knock at the door.

You don’t decide, in those moments, where your mind goes. If you are wise, and lucky, you may have an instant to choose how to act. But you may not be one who responds in a satisfyingly cool, enlightened manner. You won’t actually know what you do until the situation arises, and you act. To judge what you do then is useless as denouncing or praising the weather, your weight, or the passage of time: it’s all karma, and nothing else.

Fruit. If the plums are small and hard this year, if they fall before they ripen, that’s just how it is; there’s no one to scold.

The only sure choice is not when you face the man with the knife; or the building belching smoke; or the child vomiting blood. It is now: how do I use my mind now? How do I train my body now?

So, last night, this body would not dance. Because Cuban music in a parking lot filled with neighbors was not enough to move me. Because I have ideas about authenticity, and refuse to dance unless I’m truly moved. I have that luxury now that I am no longer engaged in “Zen training” under a qualified master.

With no one to tell me to dance, to play the marimba, to laugh on cue for a minute—I don’t do such things. Perhaps my timidity now is in reaction to those days where I didn’t have such luxuries. I can’t say that turning on a dime, acting on cue, under stress, actually did lay down habits of joy and expansive action. Maybe it only bred a closed and quiescent reaction.

Or maybe this is no reaction at all, just the fruit of sitting so quietly, for so long. For expressing Self in ever-more-subtle ways. Regardless, five years ago, I would have danced. Today, although I can’t say why, my body prefers to hide. To mince, to stand silently.

Five years ago, I would already have an Aikido date with Deston, and be throwing myself into attack, not knowing how he might fly me and guide me to the mat, but trusting his love and great power.

And maybe five years ago, I would have emerged from a walking reverie to enquire after the health of the well-dressed man who lay curled in a pool of light outside an apartment building a few warm evenings ago. At that time, the world was quiet and perfect, and he looked so peaceful. I walked on: that action a cause and a result; simultaneous seed and fruit.

I know about sitting now. So perhaps it is time to fly through the air, to slap the mat, to collide and be thrown without fear; to be guided on the dance floor, spun and lost to myself for a moment. Entrusting that my body will be there in the end, that the body lost in an instant will be found to exist in the next, and the next. Until one day, when the mind is a pitted fruit, lacking in structure, and only the body remains.