“Yamaguchi Sensei’s movements were often so fast that even the high- ranking teachers sometimes had trouble taking his ukemi!”
Let me begin with the events that led up to my discovery of aikido and eventually to the meeting with my first teacher, Yamaguchi Seigo Sensei. By late 1960, after a competitive career as a champion gymnast, I had finished with high school or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that high school had finished with me. In any event, I left behind that entire minute society which claimed to be an accurate representation of the greater world outside. Fortunately I had friends from the university who were part of the greater bohemian society of “Dinkytown” in Minneapolis and I begin to spend time on the music scene of the university campus at a place called the Ten O’Clock Scholar. I would go in the evenings to listen to Bob Zimmerman (Dylan), Dave Ray, and Johnny Koerner and was so inspired by the music that I became a guitarist myself.
It was the time of the folk/blues revival, when black people like Big Joe Williams were first being allowed to play on campus. It was party time. The music, as well as the drinking, often went on until daylight. After the coffee houses and bars closed the musicians would gather at house parties, set up their instruments in different rooms, and provide free entertainment until the early hours of the morning. I identified with and even felt a spiritual connection to those wandering musicians who lived lives of freewheeling non-attachment and made enchanting music out of their difficulties and hardships.
One Sunday afternoon I was celebrating with friends at the Eloise Butler flower gardens in Minneapolis. We were relaxing, just hanging out in the grass when I suddenly felt a great sense of clarity. Somehow I knew that something in my consciousness had changed. I saw that there was a great perfection in everything and that everyone was a part of that perfection, even if we were unaware of it. I interpreted this great shift in my way of thinking as a genuine spiritual experience.









As a kid, did you ever tie two sticks together at the centre then pull them sideways to form a cross? Did you then notice that they would yield towards alignment one way more than the other?
