God is anything you need right now (Charles Bukowski)
Recently, a conversation came to mind, one between myself and Terry Dobson. For anyone who doesn’t know, Terry was, for a year or so, a live-in student at the Aikikai Headquarters Dojo, sometime between 1960 and 1962. A little more than a decade later, I lived in his dojo in NYC for about a year. He was definitely my teacher, but at the same time, we were in a relationship vaguely between paternal, fraternal and friends. This conversation pretty well exemplifies Terry and my relationship, but I think it also highlights the truth about all the pronouncements by Ueshiba’s students about what he really meant and what he taught. The first part of the story was part of Terry’s schtick, a lead-in to his teaching where he claimed that the movements of aikido were physical metaphors that both explained how to achieve peace on earth, and through the practice of them, gave the procedure to achieve it. It was in a conversation between us one day that he tacked on the second portion, that of the 2nd aikido instructor.