April 18, 2018

I remember once reading a great story about Terry Dobson when he was living in Japan training Aikido in the 60s. As the story goes, he was riding a train when he encountered a belligerent drunk creating a scene and threatening some travelers. As Terry tells the story, he always wanted to test his martial art skills and as an imposing man of 6ft. 225lbs, young, and full of strength, this was as good a time as any to come to the rescue of the passengers. As Terry stood up to confront the drunk, a voice from an old man who was sitting nearby yelled out to the drunk, “Hey!” and as the drunk turned the old man said, “What have you been drinking?” The drunk responded “Sake!” At that, the old man said, “My wife and I love sake, and often drink a warm cup at sundown in our garden and look at how our persimmon tree is doing.” The drunk quietly responded, "I love persimmons, too," as his voice trailed off. “Yes,” said the old man, smiling, “and I’m sure you have a wonderful wife.” “No,” replied the drunk. “My wife died.” Very gently, swaying with the motion of the train, the drunken man began to sob. “I have no wife, I don’t have a home. I don't have a job. I am so ashamed of myself.” Tears rolled down his cheeks; a spasm of despair rippled through his body. Terry got off at the next stop and as the train pulled away, he sat down on a bench. What he had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with kind words. He had just seen Aikido tried in combat, and the essence of it was love. He said that he would have to practice the art with an entirely different spirit and that it would be a long time before he could speak about the resolution of conflict.

When I started karate at the age of ten, I loved the stories as much as I loved the technique. I'm sure some of you can relate, it was part of the time. What I liked was that it had to do with not just how to "do" something but also how to "be".

Stories and storytellers like Terry Dobson were gems and sadly less revered today as we live in a world of reality TV, utilitarianism and win at all cost mentality. Years ago, I joined Richard Kim's organization for the simple reason that he was a great story teller, and from his stories I acquired inspiration that gave deep meaning to my practice — it just felt different. I miss that quality today. It is in fact why I started drawing my humble cartoon Holy Molé — to find the spirit of things again. You see, mythology is not something that is untrue, in fact it is the deeper truth that resides in all our subconscious, like Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces". Things like empathy, compassion, and connection are fundamental to the growth of the spirit and add value and meaning to life — always has and always will. Because in the end, everything IS everything. Long live the inspirational story tellers. We need them now more than ever. They reach into our humanity and influence the story we quietly tell ourselves.