It was not going to work, they said. Don’t you think that you have to choose? they asked again and again.
They said and asked with certainty, making their questions rhetorical ones, as if the answers were a given. But they weren’t. Nobody really have the answer to those questions.
Brother Otter did not choose. Or perhaps he did, since he didn’t know himself for sure. When the wind and the water called, you did see him, at shore or between the waves, sliding up and down, head popping here and there, rolling as sail boats do in windy days. And you also saw him, more often than not, explaining to the last newcomers one or another aspect of handling a katana. A time came when he needed to stay at land and advance his Iai, and stay he did. The water keep calling, though. And no matter how many hours at the landlocked dojo went by, his Iai retained a quality of the water dweller, a fluidity, a popping here and there. Perhaps it is not only impossible to choose, but it is also a mistake.
Sister Goose didn’t choose either. Like so many other migratory birds she kept traveling back and forth between her birth-land and other places, heeding voices unheard to others. One wonders if it is possible to name this or that piece of land hers. Could you, who read my lines, be able to call this land your land? Or would it be that by practicing Iai you have relinquished the right to inhabit just one country, and you are already living between cultures, flying back and forth between traditions apart and contradictory, yet complementary to each other. What is to choose? How can we choose? When the time came, sister Goose made straight lines in the sky. Us land-dwellers envied her slender figure at cutting the air, just like her arm and her sword described unmistakable clean lines in the dojo. It is not for nothing that geese are fearless birds, willing to take on any threat. Look at sister Goose straight in the eye and know that you do not want to face her.
If you would have ask me few years ago if an otter, or a goose could do Iai, I know what I would have answered. Yet the sleekness of brother Otter and sister Goose’s clarity shows us all how pretentious is to believe that you can choose, that you have to stick to your old ideas, to your one culture. Just look at them right one, going together home. Home is what they, and you, do… now.
