Personal Icons of Inspiration

We all have them - people whose lives or words provide us with the spiritual sustenance we need to reach our goals, or help in our efforts to make some meaning of our lives. These people practiced budo in the very best sense of the word: to protect people, animals, places and principles from becoming victims of the ruthless, the self-centered, the uncaring. They were truly warriors. And the amazing thing about them is that they managed to accomplish their aims precisely because they recognized that love is the greatest force in the universe.
John Muir

Living as I do less than 100 miles away from Yosemite National Park, I feel a special debt of gratitude to the efforts of John Muir to protect our wilderness areas. This guy did more than just talk about the wonders of nature. He lived, breathed and imbibed it through every pore in his body! His passion for the natural beauty he saw about him was abundant, and his intellectual curiosity knew no obstacles. Muir persevered through withering snow storms, scaled towering granite walls, found ways through supposedly impassable canyons, and learned peaceful co-existence with the fiercest of predators to gratify a lifelong yearning to understand the harmony of the universe. He spent 10 years exploring Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. Like Ueshiba, Gandhi and King, Muir understood the oneness of the universe, and he gloried at being a part of it every single day of his life.

"O, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God." -John Muir
Muir was an incredible risk taker, sometimes hanging from sheer granite walls by one arm in his quest to know every crevice of his beloved Yosemite. On one occasion as he was scaling 13,156-foot Mt. Ritter, Muir had a decidedly aiki-nage experience during which he looked death squarely in the face.
"Nowhere on this rock face could he see sufficient hand and foot holds. He tried the walls on either side of the cliff and found them unclimbable. Returning to the cliff, he scanned its face again and again, then began to climb it, face tilted upward to choose the safest-looking fissures and projections. About half way up he came without warning to a place where there seemed no way to go farther.
He was suddenly brought to a dead stop with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the cliff, unable to move hand or foot, either up or down. His doom appeared to him to be certain. He must fall. There would be a moment of bewilderment and then a lifeless rumble down the one general precipice to the glacier below."
-James Mitchell Clarke, The Life and Adventures of John Muir.
Realizing his dangerous predicament, Muir almost lost it. His mind "seemed to fill with a stifling smoke," and he became afraid for his life for perhaps the very first time since setting foot in the Sierra.
"But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment. Life seemed to blaze forth again with preternatural clearness. He seemed to become possessed of a new sense, his trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope and his limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which he seemed to have nothing to do. He felt as if his deliverance could not have been more complete if he had been borne on wings."
Of course, Muir did survive and went on to fight tirelessly for the inclusion of Yosemite and other wilderness areas into the national park system. For more Muir stuff, click here. For more inspiration from a modern-day adventurer whose exploits on the sheer granite walls of Yosemite exceeded even Muir's, see my profile of Royal Robbins.

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Like Muir, the founder of aikido (translation: "the way of harmony with nature") was a deeply religious man who through his life experiences came to recognize the unity of all living things as derived from a single source of universal energy. At various stages in his life, Ueshiba tried his hand at being a tax assessor, merchant and farmer. But it became clear that his true calling was in the long tradition of Japanese martial arts and teaching the true meaning of budo: an end to all fighting and contention. A watershed in his life came in the form of a frequently repeated account of his encounter with a naval officer skilled in kendo. By this time, Ueshiba, now in his 40s, had mastered the hard martial arts styles of aikijutsu, ninjutsu, sword and staff. The officer, wishing to test Ueshiba's skill and reputation, attacked him with his sword. Ueshiba, relying on a intuitive sixth sense, later recounted that he had seen a flash of light indicating the direction of the swordsman's attack and was easily able to avoid the deadly thrusts. The officer departed in exhaustion and frustration, unable to land a single blow on his target. Ueshiba went into his garden to rest, and suddenly felt as if he were being bathed in a heavenly pillar of light. From that mystical revelation, he came to realize that the true purpose of budo is love, a love that cherishes and nurtures all beings.

Ueshiba's martial arts style also was transformed. Conquest was no longer the goal. Rather, Ueshiba refined the physical techniques of Aikijutsu in a way that made it clear that ending conflict was the ultimate mission of any confrontation. It's easy for someone skilled in a martial art to destroy an assailant, sometimes with one well-placed blow. But Ueshiba took the entire concept of self-defense to another level, one that holds the safety of the attacker almost on an equal footing with that of the personal safety of the one who is being attacked. When you think about it, that is quite an achievement. In aikido, Ueshiba, who aikidoka refer to as O Sensei, gave the world a remarkable set of techniques and principles that somehow resolve the moral dilemma of our primal urge for self-preservation with our loftier ideals of humanitarianism and compassion. All this within the context of a set of physical techniques and movement. Truly remarkable.

"Aikido is the study of the spirit."
-Morihei Ueshiba
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Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) 
& Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

This pair stood by, and ultimately died for, their commitment to their personal truth and vision. Their dream of brotherhood, equality and fellowship were remarkably similar. Just as amazing is how they came to use the same weapon of non-violent resistance (satyagraha) so effectively.

Hard to imagine the guts and courage, the faith in your convictions it must take to meet physical violence and threats of physical violence with an attitude of peace and non-retaliation. These men went in and out of jail for their beliefs, but their spirits were never broken. I ask you, were Gandhi and King not practicing aikido when they elevated themselves above hatred and violence? Like Ueshiba, they understood that the most powerful force in the universe is love. And they were centered and clear enough in their personal relation to the universe to embody that understanding into social movements that transformed their societies and took their nations on a different path. Wow!

"Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know."
-Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian political and spiritual leader. Non-Violence in Peace and War.
"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
-Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68), U.S. clergyman, civil rights leader. Speech, 23 June 1963, Detroit, Mich.
Click here for more about Gandhi and King.

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