This blog claimes to be updated evey monday, wednesday, and friday. Of course a few months back these had been my busiest days at school and by the evening I usually didn’t have any energy left to ready a post, pushing the update back to tuesdays, thursdays, and saturdays. And of course, being the endless procrastinator that I am, the actual post time usually got pushed even further back to the evenings of these days as well. Thus it happened that on a late tuesday afternoon I found myself drafting monday’s post about some nifty headphones I’d bought my sister. But I had to stop before I finished to get ready for my tuesday night Bujinkan training. The training itself was nothing memoriable. It was mostly reinforcement of theory and technique I had already seen before. The real revelation came during the bow-out ceremony, where it was announced that Nick Ermak, a senior student of our school and of our sister dojo, had died a few days prior in a mountain climbing accident.

Suddenly my sister’s spiff new headset didn’t seem so important.

I didn’t know Nick as well as I should have―I don’t think any of us did―but his death still hit me pretty hard. The kid was young―about my age―and had so much potential ahead of him. I don’t know the details, but it seems in the last few years he had just gotten his life together and found his calling. And a big part of what gave Nick’s life meaning and purpose was the martial arts.

So often teachers only answer the question they think you asked, which can be quite different from what you had actually wanted to know. But Nick was different; he had a real talent for empathizing with difficulties others were experianced, and a nack for explaining the art which still makes me envious. I knew that Nick would make a great teacher in the future, and looked forward to the day I could attend his seminars.

But Nick understood not just the technical aspects of the craft, he also had a deep connection with the art’s spiritual component. He understood how the martial arts is more about training the mind and the ego than the body. The martial arts were for him, like me, a path towards enlightenment and a source of direction and meaning in life. The hiden (secret teachings) of the martial arts are as much about the ways in which we live our lives as they are about physical form and fighting.

All of this and more I saw in Nick, and learned from the conversations we all had over Thai lunch following the saturday seminars. I miss him at those santa cruz training sessions. Even with the new faces that have arrived since, there is still an emptiness that hangs over the park grounds where we train; a wound which will not heal.

It’s been now about three months since Nick died. I think I’ve moved on but these words remain, mostly finished yet unpublished. Writing a conclusion to this post has been hard, but it also seemed disrespectful to work on anything else as long as this post was in the edit queue (thus my haitus from blogging). While I promised last week to explain the delay, what finally forced me to write today was the passing away of another great man who will also be missed. He’s wrestling crocodiles in a better place now, but in life he was an knowledgeable and enthusiastic naturalist who did so much for the conservation movement. Nick too was an exceptional artist and a caring friend, and I hope that wherever he is now he is at peace.

Take care, man.