Which practice

Aikido practice. Alma explains to Zach that she's leaving her tradition.

Date: 08/30/2018 Time: 12:00 EST	Osborn Near the forge that Alma helped build.
Cast: Alma Zach
Alma texts Zach to ask if he has time to help her learn the things? He texted back that he was at the forge, but basically exists in a state of always ready to run/spar. Neither Aikido nor Parkour have any of their intended utility if you need to prepare extensively before engaging in them. (That said, neophytes to the arts are well advised to prepare extensively for training.) With the confirmation that she was on her way, he began setting aside what he was working on: finished that heat, set the project to naturally cool, and then spread the coalbed out so that it too could cool down. By the time she's arriving, the coals are merely warm to the touch and he's scrubbing out the tuyere with a wire brush, taking advantage of the slack time to get some cleaning and maintenance in. His hands are covered in soot, but he seems pretty okay with it. Alma speeds up when she sees Zach and then slams on the breaks so that she can skid her bike in the gravel. She jumps off and then pickes it up on her shoulder to carry over to lean against a shed post. Soot! Instead of a hug she shakes his hand to see if she can make racoon eyes. "Spar?" The smile doesn't thread her entire body. The enterity of her being is thrumming with more things than a smile. Zach's a little bowled over by the exuberence of her greeting, but doesn't mind it at all. He grins instead. "If you'd like," he says, clapping loose soot from his hands, wiping the rest on the solidly soiled cargo slacks he wears for this sort of work. He gestures for her to lead the way to something other than sharp gravel for such training. No one wants to get dropped onto rocks, after all. Alma follows him to the smoother ground. She talks to Zach while she settles in, "I haven't had time to go to Ann Arbor, so I sent None a text asking them not to explain anything until I talk to them in person. I don't think it would be honorable to learn from them until they know I'm leaving. I feel so much better now." She looks around and then stares at her feeet. Oh wait, she looks at Zach, "I should be able to stand without needing to look at my feet?" Zach's steps falter for a second, and he looks over at her at that first. "You're leaving?" His voice is carefully measured here. Whatever his reactions are to the news, he's keeping it to himself. She gave him a question that he can use to refocus, too: "Yes," he confirms, "that's what drills are for, teach your body to do the right thing even when you're not looking." The drills consist of seemingly endless repetitions of the act of taking a step forward, backward, and turning on one's feet. It's not the exciting contested sparring that most people assume martial arts to be. 'A good foundation is everything' is the justification he gives if questioned on the necessity of those drills. Every time. "Yeah, I'm leaving." She notices his slowing. "I need to stop and think about things for a while." She looks up from his feet to his face, "This is helping me focus." She doesn't look down at her feet but points to them, or at least where she hopes they are. "We talked about it a lot, you know." and then she tries to go in to a stance with her eyes closed. Zach draws in a breath, lets it out and nods. "I know that feeling pretty well," he says. "I'll miss you, but... wherever you go I hope it's good for ya." By this point Alma's probably realized that Zach is -perpetually- in Aikido's 'ready' stance, known as han-mi. It's much more obvious when he deliberately draws that stance in demonstrations with her, but it's always there. "Where's your center of mass?" He asks her, since her eyes are closed. "Oh, no, I don't mean leaving Detroit. I mean, one day maybe." she pauses in thought for a while. Zach tilts his head, holding that posture of confusion/curiosity until she's had a chance to feel out her center and answer his question. At which point, he's really curious, "So when you say you're leaving....?" Alma's mind seeks for a while, maybe not long enough, or maybe too long, until she moves her hand to just around her naval, and then she moves it to some point below. It might be called her dantien. Maybe not the right place and time for it. "I'm leaving my mentor, unless they still want to teach me after I make it clear that I don't accept their beliefs or the beliefs of their tradition. They don't meet my code. Do you know how irritated I get at everyone?" She adds "/Especially/ lately," more as an observation to herself than to Zach. "When I'm irritated it means I have to really dig down to see what's going on. What it all means." She opens her eyes and looks at him again. "Is this the spot?" "That's your Hara," Zach says, amused. "Center of your breath and of your torso," he steps in and gently pushes at Alma's shoulders - the push is angled and structured so as to move all of her if she's trying even a little bit to preserve her orientation to the ground. "Back foot vs. front foot," he calls back to the first principles of Aikido's stances - relative share of body weight borne by each foot. The target is 80%/20% back/front for han-mi. "Is it forward, backward, or center?" Once the logistics of stance are out of the way. "Be prepared for them to not take that so well," he says - guardedly. "I basically had to be on the run for several years after I told the Order where they could shove their offer of membership... and I hadn't even joined up yet." "Oh, I keep thinking it's here." She bends a little when he pushes her because she doesn't have stance, and then she actually takes a step without thinking while she's thinking about how she's not in the right stance. She huffs at herself and starts over, trying to do it right this time. "I really hope they are honorable and that we can part on good terms if they don't want to have contact with me. I don't want to fight them. I even want them near. If I go down trying to figure out what's going on with the dead here? I want there to be someone else who comes to help. It's serious shit!" She tenses and loses her stance a moment due to the strength of her feeling. "They should know if anything happens to me. They are the only one I know around here who understands the gravity of the situation." "I'd offer to go with you," Zach says, giving her toe a tap from the side with his own, to non-verbally help her get the correct orientation of the feet, "but I suspect that'd only make it worse." Both of his hands come to her shoulders now and he guides her to proper hanmi. "Here." he says, "Feel this, remember this feeling. This is where you want to be." She concentrates on the adjustment then tries to relax her concentration in to /focus/. Focus is better than concentration. "I've never hidden from Kai that I spend time with you. Suddenly she is yelling at me. I don't know what's going on. Now she wants to talk to me again, but.. you're probably right. You really polarize people." She tests her adjustment by shifting weight subtly back and forth to see if she can feel it. She searches his face to see if she's got the stance. "Kai apparently lives with Victoria," he says - this is new information to him, as well. He gives a nod at where her weight is and sets up opposite her for the step-drills. "We'll do the shuffle step first, so your weight's gonna come forward to the reverse 80/20, then your back foot comes in, then you shift back again, and the front foot moves." He demonstrates each aspect of the step as he describes it. "We'll start slow and then we'll speed it up." The reverse is also going to be a thing, always is. This part might feel more like ballroom dance than martial arts. He's back on the topic of Kai as he indicates for her to begin. "She was okay with me existing when I was helping her dig holes and existed at arm's length. Then all of a sudden I'm inside her house, and folks are asking me if I want to join her cabal... without asking her, I might add. She's pretty protective of Victoria, too. That's a lot of bad news in a short period of time." He shrugs. "She's also got a temper like most nature witches I've met so... there's that too." "That helps," She says. Acknowledging this causes her face to soften, and it's easier to see how bothered she was by Kai. "I don't think we all realized it." She sighs, "We were all hasty. She wants to talk to me again. She gave me a message though Note." She stops a moment and thinks outloud, "is this the weight shift" And shifts forward in the first part of that step, without committing yet, like she needs to feel it again in her muscles. "Ok" she whispers to herself. "Ok." She says to Zach, and shuffle steps. "Are you ok?" He studies her movement - which he's naturally mirroring anyway. "Yeah," He says, nodding. "That's about it. As you start to move you'll end up making tiny little corrections on your own anyway. There's a point where perfect form isn't as important as just getting there. Ask me about my second randori sometime." Whenever he uses words that originate from Japanese, his intonation and accent shift smoothly and probably without him noticing into that language. "I'm fine," he answers with a shrug. "A little antsy maybe? Not used to sticking around a place this long and I don't like how... pinned down I feel. But it's just life, day by day, you know?" Then he squints. "Why do you ask?" She works on being able to be interested while also being able to shuffle backwards. She hmms for a moment, "I felt pinned down in my head until I got this clarity. Now I feel better. I'm stuck in the place, but it doesn't feel so bad, the location? It's not the same type of being stuck as that was." After a few more steps, with an occasional mistake when redistributing the weight she asks, "What's a randori, a second randori? I want to hear about perfect not perfect. That's what went in to the design on my back. imperfect perfect. Is it the same?" She goes back and forth, not bad this time, "and I like, well, the everything weighs on me. So my mind goes to wondering if you are ok out there and did you figure everything out. And then there's the normal kind of ok--I like knowing how are you, what you're up to. What kinda new thing you learned lately. you know?" She squints at him? To see if that made sense? Like, he doesn't need to be paranoid because someone is curious about how he's doing? The easy questions get answered first. "Randori is the exception to Aikido's 'cooperative training' rule. It's a fully resistive sparring, usually against multiple opponents, with no specific rules or constraints as to what you can do. It gets used for Dan testing, mostly, but advanced techniques pretty much require multiple-opponent randori to teach since they're about confronting multiple opponents in the first place." Then perfection. "Perfect form is inflexible. It only works in the specific instance where it becomes perfect. An actual fight is total chaos and adhering to perfect form will leave you vulnerable to anything an opponent does that doesn't match up against that form's assumptions. The more perfect the form, the less perfect the result." And then on to himself as he starts drilling her in the backwards shuffle, "Haven't been learning much - nothing meaningful anyway. Kind of hit a slump, but then my focus is on other people right now. It's a temporary thing, and I'm still working out what my next steps will be when I'm no longer depended upon, you know?" She smiles when he describes the total chaos of imperfection in action towards something. "I like it. in the moment your body, being? maybe, suddenly knows the least perfect way to be. in that moment. in that time." It's obvious she needs more practice going backwards. She doesn't have an entire awareness of where she is or how she's moving. "Hmmm, you're applying what you've learned while random shit happens? Like the randori?" She repeats the word but doesn't get the phonemes or stresslessness right. Nodding, "I think I might know what you mean about dependency. I'm staying here until Maria doesn't need me. And maybe until the thing with the ghosts. It's not right. I don't want that happening to families. I don't know where my brother went? I can't let that happen to people. Even if I don't know what it all means. So, I've on duty right now." Zach nods. "I don't have a lot of options for where I go these days," he says, frankly, switching the drills to three-forward then three-back, giving the contrast to build awareness of how these interrelate. "But yeah randori is all about introducing chaos. You can only claim mastery of a thing when you can sustain it in the face of chaos. So on my second randori without really thinking about it, I ended up grabbing Uke," that's a term he uses a lot. Having trained with him at all she's been introduced to the idea that all Aikido techniques have two parties 'Uke' the person receiving the technique (and thus the person simulating an attack to be defeated), and 'Nage' the person delivering the technique (simulating the victim of the attack, which is to be defeated). "He'd come at me with a knife prop and my training hadn't done a lot of techniques against weapons so I freaked a little bit and just put him into a full Nelson. In any other martial art belt test that'd fail me. Wrestling moves aren't Aikido, but it defeated Uke and the next Uke had no idea what to do so he was stymied to boot. Shit like that happens. Aikido's about flow, and sometimes that means you exit Aikido." "I spent a lot of time thinking other people didn't know how to really introduce chaos." She goes through a triple forward and triple back with him and has to cut down on her talk while she focuses on that. After a couple rounds she talks again, "Stubborness? Like no one could tell me what or how to do things. Like I had to reinvent everything for myself. moss, rocks, humus, glass breaking and scattering. Then I saw your kid use a card." shuffle step shuffle step shuffle step. "And I wondered how that worked, so I got a deck and studied it." step shuffle, shuffle step, falter step. "and realized I hadn't been listening to the entire conversation of everyone all through out time. like a hypocrite! I only /thought/ I was open to asking everyone questions." "That's what happened. And then I trust people knew about that, the flow of the chaos. I'm still not relying on stories. But there are conversations that aren't tied down to plot, too. I'm still free." She steps through with him more. "I talk about myself a lot. Talk too much outloud maybe. I didn't realize until talking to that Aaron guy. It's hard to get across to him. He walked out complaining about garden paths. But everything is related! I don't know how to tell it. Just tell me to shut up if I'm" she doesn't finish the sentence but sighs. Some flow in her temporarily knots up and snarls. "This the guy with the Library?" Zach asks, making sure he's got the name right. "Hermetics like everything to be in its place - to follow a logical order and rhythm." He pauses and regards her, "You don't think that way - which is fine, even if they don't think so. I have trouble following all the branches your mind takes you down too, so I can empathize - but it's also a huge part of why I enjoy talking with you. I'm a pretty linear thinker, myself. I listen to other people because it's the best way to gain new insights and new perspective on problems. Remind myself that there's more than one approach that works." He shrugs. "If you don't walk the garden paths you never see the whole garden, ya know?" "Yeah, that's him. I'll say this for him. We yelled at each other until he got so /something/ he walked out of his library, but he still lets me use it. So, eh? But his head was so up his ass this morning that he didn't take me up on my offer to help him and Al with some cards (previously). It's obvious he thinks I have nothing to offer. Maybe he'll see it. I'm suprised you haven't met. He's with Al. He took care of her when she was sick. I told him about her dark. anger. really really bottomless. Anger's not bad. I tell people that. Not everyone beleives me." She manages to get through another set of steps before continuing. "But that's it exactly. You have it. Perspective taking. That's a key thing. And now I know it more. Like, agree, disagree, it doesn't matter. It's teaching all the time. And doubt is part of it. Doubt is a solid thing and you can smash through windows with it." She comes down a bit harder on her foot than she should because she applied force instead of pouring weight from one leg to the other. It was the brick maybe. Oops. Then she giggles, "Or you can make a mirror with the brick." She giggles some more, "Like that dude said." "If you don't do things the way they want things done," Zach opines about the Hermetics, "then you don't have much to offer that they're prepared to accept. And I'm doing what I can to stay away from Hermetics right now. I made an agreement with someone. If he's with Al like... romantically? Then it's VERY not surprising I haven't met him." Al's anger? He's not commenting on that for now. He simply keeps the drilling going. She stays quiet for a time with the drill before starting again, because she still hasn't learned enough to do it without a large part of her attention on the work. But inevitably she starts talking again, "Yeah, they look romantically entangled to me, but maybe I only saw it because she was sick and didn't think about her body language." Alma shrugs. It doesn't bother her whatever way Al wants to present to the world. "At first I didn't like her. A lot, but then something just clicked over and now I just want to poke at her. In a good way, i hope. Uh... but not like I did the other day. I didn't mean to fly off the handle like that. I misunderstood something she said." She sighs in and out a long breath. Hey, this time she didn't stumble even though a lot of attention got sucked up in remembering that. Good job, kid. Oh, oops. Spoke to soon. There she goes. That was a step scuffle. Zach isn't much into correction, but where there's missteps like that, he just keeps the drill going - only commenting if she seems oblivious to a slip - the good news about footwork drills is that if you make such a misstep... you know it pretty much immediately. "You weren't wrong, is the thing. She's got a serious problem with team play," pot calls kettle black, film at eleven, "and has a funny notion about how to respond to any given crisis. She's not into discussion, either. So it's good for her to get checked now and again." Alma hmmms, pondering Zach's reply. "It's what got me so angry at Maya too. I thought she was going to work together to inspect that gate, but she didn't discuss things beforehand. When I showed up, she had already started it. And then she poked at it, instead of just looking. It wasn't like back when you meditated with me. You were," she searches for the right words, "deliberate. You asked questions. You made sure to understand my goals. I built up an expectation that people work that way. I mean, it just makes sense." She can tell when she stumbles, but she can't always figure out why she stumbled. "Huh, did you catch that? I don't know what I did." She steps again, worked okay that time. "Do you have time for our ritual after this? The terroir?" "Sadly, it's extremely rare that people will negotiate about those kinds of things," he says, of Maya's proclivities towards rushing in. "I've worked with a LOT of different kinds of people in all sorts of circumstances. It's a thing I've learned to do well. Not that I get many chances these days." He squints, "Which ritual are you thinking is 'ours'? I don't... do ritual much. Too formal." "It's the one I started with apricots? To perceive your being? Remember your entirity. over and over. So that I can tell when you change, whether it is natural or a manipulation. Or whether you are possessed. Or... really, to be honest, I enjoy remembering you." She searches his face. "I can explain it again? If you don't remember? I'm not even sure I explained it well back then. You did show up before you greeted the sun--wait, I thought that was a ritual. Maybe I'm using the wrong words? What do you call it?" "Ritual's a word I associate with religious beliefs. What you're describing is what I'd call a project. But whatever. I'd forgotten all about that one. Yeah, that's fine. We can do that."