Kathey

I met Kathey in 1987. She was walking through Pease Park, wearing a black hakama and white, quilted gi, the traditional attire of a Japanese martial artist. At the time, she was a Shodan, first degree black belt in aikido, and the dojo where she practiced, Austin Ki Aikido, had only been founded four years earlier.

In early 1988, the dojo's founder left Austin for Colorado. As the most senior student remaining, she assumed the role of Head Instructor, not because of ambitions to run a dojo, but because she wanted a place to practice and improve her art. She loved the movement of aikido and enjoyed the community of practice that surrounded it. For the next 25 years, she was the heartbeat and head of the dojo.

During that time, my best conversations with Kathey were in the dojo's parking lot after the evening's class. She believed she was a reincarnated Korean warrior who was cruel and vicious in a previous life. And that belief drove her in her study of aikido. The training taught her how to be a warrior while also being an instrument of peace and healing.

In the early 2000s, she was diagnosed with cancer. She put it into remission, but lost the use of her lower body due to a side effect of the radiation treatment. She retired from the practice and teaching of aikido in 2011.

Over the next decade, she pursued other practices and continued to engage in the life she was given. Then the cancer reemerged and killed her.

Her death was a shocking reminder of how fragile relationships are and how vulnerable life is. And nestled within that truth was an opening to what is important in my own living and that was to engage the beautiful, dangerous mystery of it.

Kathey believed that aikido, while effective in this world as a martial art, was meant to be used in what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as the bardo, a transitional place between lifes. The art was teaching her how to remain a calm center in the midst of one's peaceful and wrathful deities.

So I imagine her now, fully erect, throwing and pinning her petty demons and charming her hungry ghosts. I will reconnect with her there. And she will probably be waiting with her smile.

There is a place at the front of our dojo, like an altar where objects are placed that represent the legacy of the art or importance of certain elements to its practice. The practice of traditional martial arts has a lot of ritual. One of those is bowing. The instructor and students bow to that space at the beginning and end of every class, a gesture of gratitude to the founder of the art, the objects and symbols of practice, and to all who contribute to making the particular place and time happen.

In that space is a photograph of Kathey, taken when she was doing her test for Nidan in the early 90s. For over two decades, she bowed, breathed, and engaged people within this space. She is part of the legacy of the dojo. She is part of the reason we still exist. Her handprints are all over the dojo and the students who passed through it.

At the beginning and ending of every class, I bow to her photo and thank her for being one of the threads that is woven into the tapestry of my life and the dojo's.