Protective Arts

Covid-19 and Time

Usually, Outlook regulates my time through calendar invites and other obligation reminders. But the Covid-19 pandemic and its forced isolation means many are spending more time alone, without the external impositions of scheduled activities. And I am sure the rupturing of routine is a psychic unbalancing.

Personally, I am enjoying the shift. It has allowed me to divorce my schedule from the “needs” of others, and I get to focus more time on my family (stuck at home with me). A comfortable house-arrest.[1]

I recently reread a post from Master James Keating, a mentor and friend, whose reflections remind me of the difference between Nature’s time and Man’s time. His essay, The Magical Art of Losing Track, reads like an invocation of Taoist wu-wei: a rediscovery of the natural rhythm beneath the mechanical pulse of clocks. It also recalled Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher (1972), where isolation becomes ordeal and self-reconciliation, atonement through dislocation.

Herbert’s protagonist, a disillusioned Native activist, takes a hostage and leads him into the wilderness in a forced rite of passage. What begins as vengeance becomes transfiguration. The journey strips away ego until only the archetype remains: man alone before nature, compelled to reconcile spirit and violence. Herbert’s wilderness is both physical and psychic.

Keating writes:

“Long ago when I spent six months out of each year alone in the mountains, I discovered a way to free my mind. The first rule: no watches, no clocks, no calendars. If you keep them, they will haunt you… Time will automatically see to the details for you.”

He describes the gradual detox from artificial order: the three weeks it takes to reach “the breakaway point,” when imposed schedules fade and self-regulation returns. Seasons become the new calendar; dawn and hunger replace alarms. For Keating, losing track is not confusion but clarity. It is the restoration of temporal integrity. Only the seasons will guide thee now.

This is a profound reversal. In ordinary life, we measure progress by efficiency, not harmony; by the tasks accomplished, not the rhythm sustained. In losing track, Keating regains what the ancients called kairos, the right time, not the clock time. His mountain hermitage becomes a sacrament of natural alignment, a quiet refutation of the industrial self.

I think of Thoreau’s warning in Walden: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” During our collective imprisonment, most of us have tried precisely that, killing time. Critics are right that Thoreau was not as isolated as legend suggests, but the precision of his diagnosis endures. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he wrote, adding with surgical cruelty, “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

Thoreau saw that industriousness, our ceaseless production and scheduling, was a pathology masquerading as virtue. Keating’s “losing track” is the antidote: an intentional unbinding from the tyranny of the clock, a return to lived time.

Modern psychology corroborates what these seekers intuited. Circadian rhythms govern not just sleep but cognition, mood, and immune function; when disrupted, anxiety and disassociation follow. The psychic unbalancing of lockdown was a collective initiation, a reminder that too much structure and too little rhythm are equally dehumanizing.

To lose track, in this sense, is not to drift but to recover flow: to synchronize with the natural oscillations of attention, hunger, sleep, and renewal. It is to remember that eternity is not duration but presence.

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THE MAGICAL ART OF LOSING TRACK

Most of the time we cannot really afford to lose track of time. The loss of tracking time means we are irresponsible and “out of it”. Many people are currently losing track due to the Virus lock down. No job equals no schedule, no school also equals no schedule. Not being able to really go about “normal” daily routines adds to the effect of losing track of things. For many people these accumulated effects can be disorienting and even frightening. Losing track of the flow of time is something most people never strive to attain. And if it does happen it is usually thought of as being a negative event. Yet, when this concept of “losing track” is viewed from a positive angle it can offer up some truly delightful discoveries that many of us need right now. Let’s explore the good side of “losing track” of things and find out some new & exciting things.

FREEDOM and THE LOST TRACK

Long ago when I spent six months out of each year alone in the mountains / real solitude (hermitage) I discovered a way to free my mind. It’s as easy as falling off a log. The circumstances must be right. Otherwise you will merely waste time and court failure. Let me explain more – I’d leave my digs in April and not return until early October. My goal was to forget time and all that goes with it. So the first rule is no watches, no clocks (or calendars). Stash all that shit away for when you return to the rat race. The very day I’d leave for the high country these items were immediately put away for six months. If you don’t ditch these things they will haunt you and destroy the purpose of your quest. From there just go on about your way. Time will automatically see to the details for you. Lead your life as it calls you to do, move from the heart, flow with the days – whether they be hard days or easy days makes no matter. Just flow and try to unwind from the scourge of the daily grind. No phones, no radios either. Modern life and all of its time manipulation has controlled you’re every action from childhood to this very moment. It takes the wu-wei sort of TIME to disconnect from the dominating OUTSIDE influences and to connect to your own inner workings.

The first few weeks of isolation are full of reminders of why you undertook this quest. Your mind will be constantly relating back to schedules of all kinds. It will dawn upon you just how much you are controlled each day through your job, through television, sleep habits and daily routines. Talk about being in a rut! This internal habit of time management will soon go away on its own. But on an average it takes about 3 weeks (21 days) for most people to reach the breakaway point. Then the schedules and habits you left behind begin to disappear and are replaced with your own more valuable personal rhythms and new directions in which you must go. Terra incognito! These new directions will seemingly come out of the blue. And they can guide you to the shores of even deeper self-realizations than you ever thought possible! Take heed – mindfulness is a plus in this quest. At some point, everything becomes rather “sacred”.

Finally you will reach a point (if you do this quest well) to where you will absolutely “lose track”. When you don’t know what day it is, you have quested well. When you lose track of what month you are in, you have quested wisely. Only the seasons will guide thee now, the elements too will speak to you. These things will become your new means of discerning time and also how you will use it. New necessities will crop up. New forms of happiness & pleasure will replace the old ones you once loved so much.

I can still remember the feeling: Upon achieving my goal of losing track (becoming lost) I could feel a distinct change within myself. A new calm, a truly refreshing-empowering feeling of leading life in a manner very few ever get to experience in today’s fast paced world. It gave me the edge I needed in order to be Myself. I’d think “This must be like it was long, long ago” – (and how did we ever lose such a valuable thing as this). It was a rush! Reminds me of the old saying: “Now that I have lost everything, I can do anything”.

CONCLUSION:

So from these valuable past experiences I am not uncomfortable being alone. And when I now lose track of time or of the days while enduring this Corona inspired lock down – I am not distraught. Because a hint of that old “lost” feeling comes rippling through my senses and I KNOW what to do, how I must deal w/ this non-linear time period and I smile brother, smile. I love being lost, I revel in losing track of time.

It’s an acquired taste for sure!

Thanx for reading / God bless each and every one of ye! Much love // jak

Easter 2020

Easter Sunday. The hope of rebirth. The ancient myths remind me that we are all deeply connected.

The Golden Bough (1890) by Sir James Frazer sits on my bookshelf beside Robert Graves and my high school yearbook. Mildred Beecher, my English teacher introduced me to Frazer’s work because I had asked the difference between a daimon and a demon. She was an extraordinary woman. She read Beowulf in the original and learned patience because she had been strapped to a board, immobilized for months, after breaking her back in a motorcycle accident in England.

Frazer’s full work is encyclopedic in scope, covering twelve volumes. I have only read the abridged version.

The book opens with a description of the rite practiced in a grove of Diana near Nemi, well into historical times. There grew a certain tree, guarded night and day by a man who was both priest and murderer. The Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, held his office only by having killed his predecessor. Each king, in turn, would be slain whenever a stronger or craftier rival arrived. But his assailant had to be a runaway slave who first tore a branch from the sacred tree, the Golden Bough sought by Aeneas as the price of admission to the underworld: the hero’s journey.

Sir James Frazer finds cognates through time and across the globe. By cataloging, reviewing and comparing the myths, he illuminates the secret of the sacred grove. The slave who stalks about the tree is human mortality whose very life and fecundity, the fertility of his flocks, and the fruitfulness of grain, fruit-trees, and vines, depends upon. He is the god that must die that his vigor be renewed. The ritual killing of a king to fructify the land: King Arthur, John Barleycorn, Adonis, Osiris, Balder, Tammuz. Sacrifice is necessary to ensure that the cycle of life, death, and rebirth continues.

The durability and continuity of the ritual form a pattern identified by Gilbert Murray who also tied it to the solar cycle:

Agon: a contest of the year-daemon against his enemy, light against darkness, or summer against winter

Pathos: a ritual or sacrificial death of year-daemon, followed by an announcement of the same by a messenger

Threnos: a lamentation of the death of the year-daemon

Theophany or Peripeteia: a resurrection and epiphany of the year-daemon, which is accompanied by a change from grief to joy

The rare Easter services I attended concluded with the joyous Paschal greeting, “Christ has Risen!” A wonderful sentiment to remember.

Frazer’s work encourages a review of Christ’s lineage beyond the pattern of his death and resurrection. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the House of Bread, which was also a seat of Adonis worship. His virgin birth, the sudden shining star, the gift of myrrh, even the straw on which he was laid, are a continuation of more remote and divine precedents. It is a recognition of patterns greater than man, coeval with the conception of time. The gods cannot come to birth until there is knowledge of the revolving year and memory of the seasons’ return. It is to these gods that myth rightly assign the gifts of civilization; wheat/corn and beer/wine.

As civilization advances we collectively forget the deep chthonic connection to the earthly cycle. But the ritual is before us with the sacrament: To eat the body of the God, to drink His blood (relic of a savage rite), is still to celebrate life. The palliative against the raw fear that life might cease.

Growing up in Protestant Connecticut, ceremony and ritual were secondary to scripture. Although I respect his intellectual and individualistic spirit, I have come to conclude that Luther was wrong. By giving primacy to the text over ritual, the Protestants rejected the essential mystery. In discarding the Mass, they were depriving god his powers to fructify and rejuvenate; breaking the visceral connection to the ancient cycle. Ritual is the vestigial substructure of modern civilization.

Especially now, with a potential disruption in the food chain created by Covid-quarantined migrant labor not picking crops, the importance of ritual is reasserted: to remind us all of our connection to the earth and our dependency on it for sustenance. It is a call to mindfulness.

ISOLATION AND HOW TO TRAIN

It is unfortunate that Covid-19 keeps us from training together. Aikido is a partnered art and “social distancing” has made training together impossible. Nevertheless, there are ways to keep your connection to the art.

Okay, I admit to having a soft spot for some not-so-high-brow books. Steve Perry’s (1986) The Man Who Never Missed is just a fun read. A memorable fiction from this book is Sumito, the art of the 97 Steps. Sumito is a martial art whose training method is essentially an Arthur Murray dance step diagram

Just walk the 97 steps and you have mastered the art. Of course it isn’t that simple; to get from step A to B is easy, but C is challenging, and getting to D and beyond is exponentially more difficult and there are no explicit instructions on how to do it.

A marvelous fiction leading to being a bad-ass martial artist. But notice the deeper lesson – it’s predicated entirely on self-mastery. There are no partners, training devices, gimmicks, DVDs or other explicit instructions.

And the simple truth is that all martial arts are foremost a means of self-mastery.

So, what better time to work deeply on self-mastery than when you are forced to be alone?

The question becomes, in the context of Aikido, how?

Develop your base.

Funekogi Undo, the ‘rowing exercise,’ is a great warm-up and when done mindfully should teach you much about your body.

Funekogi Undo is adopted from Misogi 禊 (ritual purification) and importantly incorporates breathing patterns. As you perform the action: in through the nose, out through the mouth. Be sure your feet remain rooted as you shift your body forward and back. The action from your arms needs to have relaxed shoulders to ensure freedom of movement. Watch carefully how O’Sensei demonstrates the double-punch and grab return. Like most warm ups in every martial art – they are not simple ‘stretches’ or ‘calisthenics’ but rather essential movements necessary to execute techniques effectively.

With this exercise, your connection through your feet to the earth should provide a good sense of rooted stability. The flexibility and range of motion on a line (forward and back) are increased. Your breathing is ‘harmonizing’ with your movement and regulated by the kiai. More explicitly, the lesson is to learn to breathe like a fighter. Take this lesson from boxing.

Then add changes in direction.

Shiho– and Happo Undo are patterns to follow that develop tai-sabaki (foot work). If you have done weapons, Shiho– and Happo-Undo are exactly the same as Shihogiri and Happogiri, just without a sword.

The essential lessons are (1) complete each motion fully, (2) sequentially, and (3) each of the directions is nothing more than an entry on a line. Diagram the footwork vectors and you have traced the cutting rose.

You need to unify the lower and upper body to benefit from this exercise. Add the weapon to build some strength and provide a feedback to your shoulders. As you advance your feet, your hands should proceed (hand, body, foot!) from your waist to your head – chudan to shodan – as if your feet are pushing your hands. Don’t lift your arms from the shoulders! The shoulders are relaxed, simple ball joints that allow your fundament (hara) to impel your hands (weapon) forward and up. Focus on completing each motion to its fullest range. Do what you are doing to completion, do not move to the next direction prematurely.

As simple as these solo exercises may seem, listen to your body. Done correctly, you are learning efficient linear motion. As a swordsman, the weapon should be an extension of your body. But because the sword has mass and only one live edge, its construction dictates the linear pattern you are tracing. Focus on relaxed shoulders to ensure the sword is free to move unhindered by muscular tension. A sword’s efficacy is its speed, not the force by which you push it through space. It is not a club and neither are your arms!

And this too is a critical body skill that leads to a technique – ikkyo omote. It is this self-guided practice that will challenge you to understand the material. The process of trying to recall and practice the material will force you to analyze it. You will not have anyone to follow, so you must use your memory and critical thinking skills.

To maximize the benefit from solo training, you need to develop your mental image of what the movements should be. With a clearer image, you will be able to replicate the movement more accurately. Add repetition, and you will get ahead. Rather than spending more precious class time on repetition for coordination, you can return to class, ready to move forward, with the skills you developed at home.

Virtūs et Honos

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Added bonus if you have a training ring is provided by Master Keating

Great solo training