In Pursuit of Mysteries

Fellow Travelers

I just got back from having chicken and waffles with Sean (http://www.seanomlor.com). Sean works swing shift about two miles from my place so we agreed to meet a little bit after 11:00 PM, when he got off from work.

Sean is an artist and a fellow traveler of sorts. We met through Zaadz, the socail networking site. Zaadz is kind of “Tribe meets the Integral Institute” space. I copy much of my blog content there and it forms its own closed (or not so closed) community of generally spiritually interested folks.

Sean gave me a point earlier today to the Sixth Patriarch Zen Center, a Korean zen center in Berkeley. I’ve been looking for a group to sit with once a week though R and I still need to visit the New Dharma Center that I wrote about last week. Sean also mentioned the Yoga Mandala Studio as a good place to practice (though not for Buddhism specifically).

It was a good chat for about an hour and a half. We’ll have to get together again soon. Since it is late and I have to be at work within the next eight hours, I’m going to bed now.

First Aikido Class

R and I attended our first full Aikido class at Aiki Arts yesterday. I think that we can safely say that the class kicked our asses. Even though the pace was relatively slow and people were easy on me as the FNG, I was pretty much hitting the wall physically by the end. R probably was not doing much better but we actually did not work together during the class as we are both so new.

I took Aikido for about a year in high school and I took another, hard boxing, style for about two years from 1994 through 1996. I haven’t taken anything since then and have progressively moved more and more away from any sense of fitness. I’ve lost a lot of weight over the last six or seven months (about thirty pounds) but that doesn’t make me fit, just not as fat.

The hope with the Aikido is to do something involving my body since almost all of my other activities are pretty sendentary from computer work through my school work and then ritual practice. One would also hope that it will help with grace and general movement. We’ll see.

Democracy TV

I downloaded the Democracy Player last night from http://www.getdemocracy.com/. They have a version available for OS X as of this last week.

It is an open source project to create an avenue for the democratization of visual media in the form of TV. It uses the bittorrent protocol to transfer the video files around. All of their code is available and they have guides to getting your own content up into the channel guide.

There is some cool stuff up already and I subscribed to a few things. I finally started watching the video podcasts from Make, for example. We’ll see where this goes but it is some cool stuff.