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It may not be summer officially yet, but when these pink and red clarkias called "Farewell to Spring" suddenly pop up all over the front yard, sticking out above the yellow tidy tips (the baby blue eyes are but a memory now) and the thermometer hovers near or above 90, who am I to get all technical?
Seeing the clarkias rise up, full of buds, I couldn't for the life of me remember what they were supposed to be. Fortunately right there on Larner Seeds website there it was: the beginner's wildflower sale, featuring baby blue eyes (yep), tidy tips (yep), farewell to spring (aha!), and globe gilia (ah.....hmmm......not yet....).
Out back, everything is growing whether from seeds or starts. Between the tomatoes and peppers we planted from both seeds AND starts (as insurance) if things continue to grow well there should be lots of salads, spaghetti sauce and salsa this harvest. Right now we are watching the peas get ready for picking.
Western fence lizard with fleabane
The very weird thing is that the petit pois peas, which are supposed to be 20 days earlier than the sugar snaps, harvesting last week, are in full flower and just starting to make little pods. The sugar snaps aren't due until sometime in June.
Of course being a beginner has advantages: you don't know what isn't "supposed" to happen. When I told the local farmer at the farmers' market that I'd pass on the broccoli rabe because our's is growing, he snootily announced that he hoped I was not growing it in Ukiah where it is already way too hot. I told him I'd had a great crop of it all last summer...and I don't think he believed me. On the other hand, what he was selling looked like rapini to me, not broccoli rabe. About half the websites and seed catalogues say it is the same plant. His "rabe" was all leaf, none of the nice stalks with teeny floret things on the end. So maybe he thinks he's growing broccoli rabe, but anybody who grew up eating Brooklyn Italian food knows the difference.
Meanwhile our winter dormant xeric perennials in the front yard have all woken up and leafed out. The rockroses, yarrows and lambs ears are blooming. The bee plant and a couple of others are starting to form buds. But deer have eaten the buds off our new rosebushes, so Stu is getting sent out tomorrow to buy some "Not Tonight, Deer" repellent.
There was a dojo in San Francisco, now gone, where I trained for a couple of months some years ago. It was not a good fit; among other things, they insisted on training in utter silence. While during keiko I actually CAN refrain from comments if the culture demands it, I cannot refrain from laughing in joy when somebody unexpectedly nails me to the mat. But the thing that really got me was that they had fossilized the art exactly where the black belt who had started the dojo left it. They were going to emulate forever exactly what he had laid down. So it didn't feel like a dojo to me, it felt like one of those houses where the kid moved away or died and the room was going to be left JUST SO forever. Their aikido was a museum piece.
When I was briefly able to train in Suio Ryu Iai Kenpo, one thing that impressed me was finding out that the current Soke (15th in the lineage) continues to puzzle over and explore the kata and periodically makes some revisions to them. This art is over 400 years old and continues to be a living art, thanks to the integrity of its headmaster.
This has been on my mind since last night's aikido class. Our instructor demonstrated some changes in how Fillman Sensei wished to see us do a basic shihonage. In some ways it is closer to the version I was first taught in 1996 in a very different dojo, and in some ways it hearkens more closely to aiki taiso. Regardless, of course it is still a stretch to have the mind/body break its most current habitual movement. It was fun to play with and I left class appreciating a couple of things:
One was that there was a solid reason behind the change; that is, (as I understand it) an application of energy and of weighting that Sensei felt better exemplified the art and made it work more effectively. Another is that underlying the change is a continuing exploration on her part, and that in the process we the students were part of the feedback loop, that how we embody her teaching is closely observed and is part of the process.
This is aikido as a living art.
