We’ve had a couple of wonderful training sessions here lately. We are gathering outside, keeping distance, and therefore working mostly on kata right now. I’m used to training outside. We do our Saturday morning kobudo sessions outside for as much of the year as possible. I am used to seeing the seasons change through the window of our morning training: the sun shifting, temperature, humidity, the color of the sky and the feeling of the ground varying as the months go by. But these evenings have been beautiful. A couple of weeks ago we started in the rain, expecting it to turn into a downpour or a thunderstorm, but instead ending with a rainbow and some amazing peach and purple clouds. And tonight we started with a clear blue late summer New England sky and ended with the moon up over the trees and the stars just starting to peek out. A lovely way to share some sweat with the dojo.

These days it feels like a lot is, for now anyway, taken away. I miss contact. I miss our dojo space. I miss the schedule we were keeping. But there has been a lot of good that has come out of the last few months for our dojo, and tonight, as the moon rose and we finished up I was reminded of a poem by Ryokan.

Left behind by the thief

The moon

In my window