A Study in personal Isshinryu time travel

 

 

I have written before on the advisability of keeping notebooks of what you experience in many different ways. Today I have a large box of them, too many in fact, and no convenient way to store the, So I have begun a project to review them one by one, and transcribe notes from them to be able to recall what I once experienced.

 

Not that I referred to them much but the task of keeping those notes the first time helped me retain them in my thoughts. They have so much material, material I have never had the time to share, but having undertaken those studies helped me shape my thoughts and my program a great deal.

 

This is what was in that first notebook, I picked it at random and it was most likely from the year 2000, which makes that about 20 years ago.

 

At a high level this is what it contained.

 

1.      Some notes on how Oyata Seryu viewed the use of kata technique.

2.      Notes Joe Swift and I made on the net about an analysis Chris Thomas made of a Seisan Kata bunkai. It got tech-y into which meridian points were struck in what order. I elected not to go the Meridian route, similar to the way Sherman Harrill didn’t do it either. But back then I spent some time looking at that.

3.      Demura Fumio application notes I made as what I saw interested me.

4.      My own analysis of how to improve Isshinryu power.

5.      A private memory Dr. Paul Harper made to me about an area to consider striking. He was both my dan student, and my physician and a surgeon.

6.      A section of 37 Wansu kata applications that Sherman Harrill shared at a clinic there 2 years before. Though later included in the Sherm-pedia I compiledit is interesting seeing them again.

7.      That was the year I first met Jim Keenan, he came up to watch my tai chi program one Sunday morning. He was originally an Isshinryu student back in Pittsburgh in the 1960's, Later he studied many Chinese arts and in his work for the Department of Defense traveled the world as a Chinese and Japanese translator. He made interesting points after that class, and as he described them he would draw on the driveway in chalk. He even went into the Chinese meaning of Seisan.   I have photos of those notes which included drawings of what he described.

8.      There was a pretty extensive section of French translations I was making on French martial texts at that time, I did not include them in my notes.

9.      Finally I had notes of Sherman sharing his sai kata he designed.

 

And that was just one of my notebooks.

This exercise allows me to travel in time and see what I was looking at back then.