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Washing Leeks by Benjamin Pincus Sensei Chief Instructor, Aikido of Champlain Valley "Budo and farming are one." —Attributed to Morihei Ueshiba O Sensei loved farming. As a young man, he founded an agricultural settlement in snowy Hokkaido. There he met the fierce Sokaku Takeda, heir to the Daito Ryu aikijutsu lineage and the most important technical influence on the development of aikido. Years later, during his isolation from the fervor of World War II, he had a blacksmith forge him heavy farming tools in order to increase his strength. In one of my favorite photographs, he is an old man, earnestly watering plants, evoking the spirit of a gentle gardener rather than that of a Shinto adept and temperamental warrior. I have puzzled over his statement "budo and farming are one" while laboring in various gardens and fields from Vermont to California. After observing weeds regenerate easily on the fields I had so carefully groomed, I realized that gardening, like aikido training, never ends. Cycles of birth, growth, harvest and decay continuously reflect our own journey of self-cultivation and transformation. The relationship between budo (martial arts) and farming is revealed in the expression takemusu aiki. Take is the same kanji (character) as bu, which can mean warrior, but also implies a sense of bravery and the cessation of conflict (literally meaning to stop a sword). The term musu is more complex, meaning creative power, percolate, fecundate, ferment ripeness. It is an abbreviation for Musubi (bi means wondrous light - vital source of energy). Musubi is sometimes translated as linkage, evoking interconnection, unity and marriage. Takemusu aiki is sometimes translated as Aiki of protection: our duty to bravely protect and nurture all living things, because we are interconnected to this world of decay, creation and rebirth. Similarly, the farmer creates life from fermentation, nourishing germination and growth through the decay of compost and manure. I kneel in mulch hay on a rainy August day. Thrusting my hand below hay and composted manure, I discover potatoes amidst the pungent blackness of rich soil. The garden glows with verdant beauty, rainfall accentuating the intensity of colors. Orange and purple stems of rainbow chard grow besides the paper lantern-like husks of ripe tomatillos. The green vitality of it all embodies perfection. I felt no separation between doer and doing, life and death. I had been sad about recent deaths in my family, but this grief dissipates in the wash of rain on grass. The way is within my veins and the veins themselves resemble roots in the soft soil. In aikido, there is no enemy, no attacker, only beings out of balance with this world. Harmony is only part of the picture. Aikido has its blending moments but there is always the potential for injury and destruction. Gardening too is an act of war, a destructive invasion of sod and soil. The thrust of a shovel unavoidably cuts earthworms in half, tearing the earth, eliminating weeds. I grimace while drowning Colorado potato beetles in soapy water, but this is war: I want my potatoes. In gardening and aikido we also create something. Shugyo is the Japanese word for self-cultivation, a process that implies our capacity for continual growth and transformation. A warrior polished his skills through the tradition of musha shugyo (literally warrior cultivation), a combination of knight errantry, sexual abstinence, combat, and rigorous ascetic and spiritual practices. Similarly, the farmer labors over a garden, removing endless stems of so-called weeds in order to create new growth and life. The ferment - the musu - the rot of manure, vegetable and grass - contributes nutritional elements to the soil, and the eventual growth of new plants and life. The rain drowns earthworms, yet it also is the catalyst for rot, which in turn fuels new life and growth. In Shinto tradition, water cleans our moral and spiritual impurities. The Shinto mendicant plunges into water, preserving inner heat through intense chanting and the flow of ki. Similarly, martial arts dojo conduct intensive winter training in the water and on the beach with minimal clothing in the Shinto tradition of misogi-ritual purification. Have you ever washed a leek? Washing vegetables, if done with full attention and presence, becomes in itself a spiritual practice. When you clean a leek, you can peel away the layers one by one, like its spherical, more pedestrian cousin the onion. Admire the base of the stalk, which looks pristine and white. When you separate the layers of flesh, observe the dirt that tenaciously clings to the interstices of leaf and stalk. No matter how much you clean, there is always a deeper layer covered with soil. Similarly, you think you've just done a beautiful kotegaeshi technique, and you are ecstatic that Sensei noticed your impeccable timing and power. But then she says "getting fat", slaps you on the stomach and cheerfully walks away. Aikido training - the art of self-cultivation - involves continual polishing, reevaluation, and of course letting go. Gardening and aikido reveal the synergy between the forces of harmony and destruction. Sometimes they are simply about hard work, and the ability to lose oneself in the path, shoveling for the sake of shoveling, growing for the revelation of seeing the magical birth of something so small as a seed, or throwing and being thrown, round as a new potato. In the gardens and on the mat we access a part of ourselves alienated from our natural surrounding and our physical self by urbanization, and its associated worries and rears, realizing that we are an intrinsic part of this decay and rot and yes, fecundity and rebirth. As in Issa's poem: The field worker wipes his snotty finger on the plum blossom Bodily excretions and ephemeral beauty exist concurrently, decay producing flowers, sweaty training strengthening our bodies that are likewise subject to decay and death. This very transience - the messiness of snot on blossom - is in itself harmony: the world as it is. The contrasts on the mat, in the streets and in the garden allow us to see the inherently tragic and comedic nature of experience. Wash a leek and maybe you will see. Wash a leek as if your life depended on it.