May 10, 2018

I feel uncomfortable. It is a type of generalized discomfort that has been going on for most of my life. You know the feeling, when you look at things around you and they just don't seem right. It is what caused me to pick up a pencil and start drawing a comic strip in 2008 because, well…I can't play guitar and sing this discomfort out. If I were to try and articulate the "uneasy" I would be hard pressed to label it, other than in some vaguely general way as a lack of "connection" or "spirit". It is a quality that is drowned out by self-interest, profits, tribalism, the "machine" — things that separate or try to control. As a young boy, I specifically began karate in an attempt to find this quality of "connected spirit" because I thought that was the essence of "self-defense" — to be "fully alive". I now know that there are some things that lead me closer to this existence, things like appreciation, humility, compassion and a certain type of deliberateness — things that break down barriers, heighten awareness, and challenge the absurdity of my ego, leading to the heart-felt experience of "now" and my connection to life. It is an interesting dichotomy, where you don't belong to anything in particular because you belong to everything simultaneously, or as Bob Dylan said, "It's not he or she or it that you belong to." So I endeavor not to surrender loyalty to ideology, to institution, to party, but rather to have direct experience and connection, or as one of my greatest teachers once said to me, "Earth, Man, Heaven."

Spirit running through all things is one of the oldest anthropological beliefs, just another way of saying everything is connected, "everything is everything." It is an epiphany of sorts.

This is the spirit that I envisioned when I created Sunday Morning Keiko as a community not an "organization". Perhaps it was the latest iteration of what I was looking for as a young boy entering a dojo over 50 years ago. I know for sure that it is not a truth confined to four walls, but a way of being that embraces the heavens.