The heart of a human being is no different from the soul of heaven and earth. In your practice always keep in your thoughts the interaction of heaven and earth, fire and water, yin and yang.
Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace
I think that if one were to order all mankind to bring together into a single pile all that each individual considered shameful, and then again to take from this mass what each thought seemly, nothing would be left, but they would all, severally, take away everything. For not everyone has the same views.
Anonymous. Dissoi Logoi: Two-Fold or Contrasting Arguments (ca. 425 AD), 18.
Both aikido and rhetoric require a partner to practice, and this isn’t just so one partner can practice all her moves on a straw man. The partner brings something crucial to the practice: opposition or difference. Each partner completes the other, fills in the gaps, harmonizes to create a dynamic whole called peace. You can’t have peace by yourself. Nor is peace the lack of conflict or total mind-meld with others. It’s a constantly shifting interplay of opposing thoughts, beings, attitudes, spirits. It’s the magnetic attraction between opposite ways of thinking and being—as long as we stay connected—that’s the stuff of peace, of community.
The Rookery 