The Shintaido bokutoh or sword is intentionally designed to be a heavy, clunky chunk of wood so that you don't take sword work lightly.

Unlike hands, or staff (boh), or walking stick (joh), the sword is by definition a weapon.

The sword is a material paradox.

A paradox on many scales:

Heal/hurt
Destruction/path clearing
Cripple/liberate
Intimacy/distance
Light/dark
Death/life
self/other
weighty/weightless
Finish/infinite

The more you know about sword, the more you know sword is unknowable.

When love guides timing and nature of the blow, I’d like to think you can cause no harm. But perhaps even then, that is not true; there’s an element of unpredictability in the sword, something precocious.

You aim at a target you see, yet strike what is unseen, with uncertain consequence.

So. Strike or sheathe?

***

My mom and I rode in an ambulance this morning, transportation to her new home at a nursing facility. I’d always imagined a quiet, well-insulated ride, but this was more like the back of a truck, noisy and drafty. In her blankets, she was strapped to a stretcher like a baby on a papoose board. She was very, very brave.

This evening I walked back and forth across the house, disassembling the hospital room we’d made out of the living room these last weeks. This house holds 47 years of her stuff: her chairs, her carpet choices and drapes, newspaper clippings and photos and dishes and laundry detergent. Stamps and paper clips. The egg ornaments she bought at one of our last shopping excursions back in March. Her enormous leather purse. All of her belongings. And today, we took her away from this, her own home. We used sound and sensitive reasoning; it's a good if not happy decision. But, oh...