Autumn Transition

It’s fall in New England, the milkweed dry out and their seeds hit the air and travel wherever the wind blows. I’m in the process of backing up dozens of hours of VHS tapes to DVD’s, ones taken by clinics given by my instructors and friends to my students. Watching them, however, is bittersweet, the presentations are incredible but there are too many students, friends and instructors no longer present.

Some have died, many moved away or moved on in life and stopped training. As my adult students average over 15 years training with me, each of those who’ve moved in is felt more poignant when I see them working so hard in those clinics. Now only echo’s in my life.

Those of us, the possessed who never cease our practice, have to learn to deal with those flying away.

Of course they never lose what they crafted. I’ve had students return after 16 year breaks and within a week or two they’re training as if they had never left and remembering most of what they had previously studied. The proof the practice of karate is something most special and ingrains itself into our being.

But most now are flying as the wind blows, just like those milkweed.

Definitely in my Autumn too, it’s surprising how past memories push to the front.

Way back in 1969 when I was a student at Temple University in Philadelphia I would dabble in poetry. Here is one I wrote back then still appropriate, just the template has changed.

Rittenhouse Square on an Autumn Afternoon

Flower Children have no flowers
Leaves have turned from green to brown
Cold and Darkness they are coming
The summer has been run aground

The first leaf decides to take the chance
Jumps into the great unknown
Floating, turning, always downward
Not to remain alone.

Flower Children have no flowers
Leaves have fallen, gone aground
Bare Trees
Brown Grass
Flower Children Gone

I remember that summer in Philadelphia, the heat and the gathering of the young in Rittenhouse Square, songs like ‘Hot Town Summer in the City’ on the radio and listening to Joni Mitchell at the Second Fret, live. I was young then too, but was unaware of it myself. Later in the fall this came to me passing through the square.