Having just finished shovelling the snow

Having just finished shovelling the snow, one's thoughts turn naturally to ... Flower Arranging!

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the Aikido Journal, specifically to a blog entry by Dave Lowry. Mr. Lowry is a senior practictioner of Classical Japanese Martial Arts, and was taught ikebana (flower arranging) by the wife of his kenjutsu sensei. There is an excerpt below. Also, if you click here, you will be directed to the Wikipedia article on ikebana. Enjoy.

Of all the requisites faced by the budoka (“martial artist”) contemplating the construction of a new dojo or training facility, the tokonoma (“alcove”), with its space for the display of arranged flowers, could rank in importance somewhere between solar-powered showers and cashmere mats. Pragmatism must sometimes take precedence over aesthetics. Safe, durable training floor surfaces, adequate dressing facilities, and so on, are more apt to concern dojo builders than will a shelf devoted to flower arrangements. Later on, the tasks of training, teaching, and maintaining the dojo are more likely to occupy its inhabitants than are such matters perceived solely as decorative like the arranging and display of flowers. This is reasonable. But it also risks the development of dojo—and we need not look far to find examples of these—that are physically healthy but seriously lacking in their collective soul. They are filled with budoka who are learning well the outer, physical aspects of their art. Yet something seems missing, something internal, unidentifiable in words by the students perhaps, although palpable if by no other sense than by its absence. A good many trends that today surface in budo (“martial Ways”) training, the recent interest in some of the spiritual aspects of the martial Ways, for example, appear fundamentally to be efforts at nurturing or reestablishing this spirit, this attitude, this matter of what we might call the budo’s “soul.”