Forty years later

Morihei Ueshiba, O'Sensei, the founder of Aikido, was a remarkable individual. A man who preceded his era, and softly crossed the square boundaries of the structured culture he was born into. He inspired others by his charismatic and enlightened way of being. He passed on April 26th, 1969, forty years ago.

Here is a small story that demonstrates his uniqueness:
A few years ago a couple of my students visited Japan, and their hometown of Iwama. The wife's family lived very close by to the Iwama Dojo, in Ibaraki perfecture. O'Sensei lived in Iwama from 1942 to the year of his passing. He built a shrine dedicated to the deities of Aikido, called Aiki Jinja (合気神社), where he was holding the daily ceremonies and prayers of his spiritual practice of the Ōmoto-kyō (大本教) religion.
My student was attending the daily classes for a while, and she volunteered to clean around the Dojo. One day she was asked to help tiding O'Sensei's office. To her surprise, she saw a calligraphy, one of many inscribed by O'Sensei, in which the Kanji were written in a shape of a circle. While in other languages this may be considered common practice (like the Arabic calligraphy), in Japanese calligraphy this is a rarety, and quite "out of the box".

O'Sensei was an eccentric man, who saw the world in a unusual light. After participating in WWII he said:
"The Way of the Warrior has been misunderstood. It is not a means to kill and destroy others. Those who seek to compete and better one another are making a terrible mistake. To smash, injure, or destroy is the worst thing a human being can do. The real Way of a Warrior is to prevent such slaughter - it is the Art of Peace, the power of love."

The legacy he left us will be celebrated in the next few days worldwide.