Editor's note: Notebook is an occasional series on slices of life found by The Bee's police reporters.
From Stan Oklobdzija:
For the past 10 years, Theresa Fluty and her husband Matt have taught the way of the harmonious spirit through martial arts from a small storefront in Sacramento.
As Aikido sensei's, the couple show students to how to redirect an attacker's blow away from them, using an assailant's own strength to take them down. Meeting force with force, they teach, will lead to your defeat. Rather, as Theresa Fluty said, receive an attack and "respond with love."
On Christmas Day, the Fluty's dojo, The Aikido Center at 2417 21st Street in Sacramento, was vandalized. Around noon, someone threw a large rock through the dojo's glass door, smashing it to pieces and spraying glass all over the mats.
"I was pissed," Fluty said of her first reaction when she and Matt came back from lunch to find their school vandalized. "I thought, 'Damn it, it's Christmas Day, and I have to spend it cleaning glass.'"
But anger soon dissolved into more constructive thought, she said.
She called some students who live nearby, who arrived quickly with boards to repair the hole and tools to help clean the glass, she said.
"It was a lot of work," she said. "The mats are tatami (traditional Japanese woven straw) and the way they lay together...we had to sweep and pick up all the glass and get all around the edges."
The work was hard, Fluty said, but gratifying.
"A dojo is a place of the way," she said. "It's a sacred place to practice Aikido... When you work for the dojo, it's fulfilling."
When the last shard of glass was picked up, Fluty sat down at the computer and wrote an email to the dojo's 75 students.
"The dojo has been attacked, it's space violated with deliberate force and intention to do harm. Let's respond to this attack with active, heartfelt Love," she wrote. "Send the dojo love, blessing and light. Send the attacker love, blessing and light."
"The attacker attacked, we felt it, we received it, we went into action and took care of it," Fluty said. "I feel like we handled it in the best Aikido way."
As Morihei Ueshiba, who founded the martial art almost 100 years ago, said, "If your heart is large enough to envelop your adversaries, you can see right through them."
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