I started this blog as a kind of travel diary when visiting Japan a few weeks after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Later it became my major place to publish thoughts and experiences from teaching Zazen, Hitsuzendo (Zen-Calligraphy) and Aikiken (Aikido exercise with a wooden sword).
Now this blog exists for almost three years, and for various reasons I decided to move it away from it’s original blogspot location to a self-hosted wordpress platform. That transfer, which just completed today, was more work than it might sound (and much more than I originally expected!). I had to read through and fix links and formatting for each of the 164 articles (including images), which gave me lots of opportunity and time to think about impermanence.
Does it make sense at all to publicly preserve words and ideas from past years? Several things I wouldn’t say the same way today as I wrote them down a year or two ago. Much of the content is already out of date, and some topics are repeated several times in a slightly different fashion. Like everyone and everything, I am changing over time and my teaching is changing with me … why then save past words on-line? I kind of fancy the idea of keeping only a few most recent posts and delete all the older stuff, or at least I want to attach a “best before” warning to every post …