Holding Hands

Though it certainly wasn’t without physical challenge, the past week found me far more engaged in spiritual training. I’ve experienced three insights I’d like to share:

The first is more a reminder than a new revelation. When I went to the park to train one morning, a merlin swept in, attempting to catch one of the magpies I feed. Unfortunately for the hungry merlin, the smaller birds saw him coming and scattered into the brush. But I myself was caught completely unaware. I hadn’t noticed the sudden departure of the magpies, and I only learned of the merlin when he swooped past my head, close enough to reach up and touch. Seconds later, he was gone. If I had been a small bird, it would have been lights out. And for me, this was a strong reminder of how important it is to develop greater powers of awareness. I often talk about this need for awareness, as an aspect of my core [artistic] project, training to more fully realize my natural human potential. For the most part, in this respect, I concern myself with learning to recognize and pay attention to the other species we co-exist with. I feel compelled to learn to identify all of the plants and animals I regularly encounter, to understand the ecological relationships between them, and to engage with them in a variety of ways, particularly for food and medicine. This study alone keeps me very busy. But what the merlin and magpies made clear is that ‘being aware’ is about more than recognition, familiarity, and understanding. It’s also about looking out for, and being prepared to respond appropriately to, potential dangers. When I think about it, we really don’t have any exercises in the martial arts to train ourselves toward better awareness, in this respect. If we were highly aware of everything and everyone in our environment, chances are we’d be far more capable of avoiding dangerous physical attacks. Yet, just as with myself and the merlin, it’s more often the case that we’re completely oblivious until an attack is already underway. This needs to change. In my opinion, we should strive to be, in a sense, like the best detectives and diagnosticians of our fictions, like Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Gregory House, characters who are keenly aware of all the behavioral and physical minutia of their environments all the time, and who can read in these elements the behavioral histories that ‘normal’ people simply can’t perceive. Developing these kinds of skills would involve some of the same identification training that I’m already involved in. But to address the merlin factor, it should also include self-testing to demonstrate how much of the goings on in my environment I’m aware of. For instance, if sitting in a restaurant, I might ask myself, “What is the guy three tables behind me wearing?” Or if walking down the street, “Where could someone hide if they wanted to ambush me?” Moreover, if we are to help people, by developing ourselves as instructors of fitness and martial arts, shouldn’t we also learn to read, at a glance, as much as possible about a person’s health/ medical background? The magpies have again inspired me to develop greater awareness capacities. The merlin has reminded me that failure to do so could mean serious danger, maybe death

After the merlin encounter, I decided to head out into the river coulee, to see what else the animals might have to teach me. Among those I encountered were the Canada geese, goldeneye ducks, and mergansers. The geese, when they aren’t up above the coulee rim feeding on grain off the stubble fields, are down at the river, crowding around the open water crags. The goldeneyes and mergansers hang out in these crags as well, hunting. What I notice though is that whenever I see these diving ducks feeding, they’re almost always close to the geese. There will be open water crags with no other birds around, but the ducks will choose to use those already occupied by geese. I think the reason for this is because the geese offer protection. While diving, the goldeneyes and mergansers are vulnerable to predators like bald eagles. But if there’s danger approaching, the geese would certainly sound an alarm, and this might help the ducks to survive. Clearly, these ducks are somewhat (though not absolutely) dependent on the geese; they benefit from associating with them… not in a parasitic way, but just by relying on the natural defense system of the geese as an extension of their own. At surface consideration, it doesn’t seem that the geese gain anything from this relationship. But considering the matter more deeply, I would argue that they actually do. From my perspective, ‘fitness’ (in the evolutionary sense) is a measure of how well you fit-into the eco-social matrix. In this respect, the more benefit you bring to others through your relationships with them, the more integral you are to the system, and therefore the more likely you will be to survive long-term. This is an important lesson, both for the continuation of our species, but also for its utility in our everyday.  Want to ensure the persistence of ‘real martial arts’ in the future? Find ways to bring more people into relationships with true martial arts. I am seeing, for example, comments from people on the FMK YouTube Channel, where they say they’re using the recent videos of training sessions at the Chicago Kwoon. They’re following along with the workouts. It’s unfortunate that the Kwoon isn’t benefitting financially from them, that nobody’s giving donations. But at the same time, the more people who are utilizing these videos, the more likely FMK will benefit long-term, perhaps by getting a sizeable following of freeloader practitioners who up the ‘hits’ on the videos and ads. Certainly, the more who are engaging with the videos in this manner, the more expressions of interest we’ll start seeing in official online training. So this is just one example. Just because it doesn’t appear like you’re benefitting from a relationship doesn’t mean you won’t. Perhaps you’re just too focused on the immediate gains. In the long-term, the more you can give to others freely, the more secure your own persistence

So these were two of my insights this week. A third came just today, and is not so much my own, but something that came through dialog with a friend. It happens that my maternal grandmother is dying right now. Even as I write this, she could be taking her last breath. It’s clear that she’s going to pass sometime tonight or tomorrow. She lives in Oregon, which is two days drive for me, so I’m not going to be able to get there in time. I was, however, able to talk to her briefly on the phone today, and my brother has been keeping me updated with text messages and photos (the image at the top of this post is of my grandmother holding onto his hand). I got very choked up this morning, after talking to her and seeing some of the images. The tears were not of sadness, because I don’t see her passing as a loss or tragedy. It is simply what happens with all of us. We live, we die. It’s the natural cycle. And she’s had a very full life. What touched me though was the power of the death experience itself. It’s sooo powerful. Can you imagine what it must be like to be in that seat, knowing that you are soon to be no more? I can’t imagine it. But what I see in my grandma is something I’ve seen in critically injured animals many times, and that’s a kind of noble act of facing death courageously. She’s looking it in the face, but she doesn’t feel sorry for herself. In fact, when I was making small talk with her, telling her about my day, asking how she’s been feeling, she apologized to me. She said, “I’m sorry, Rye,” as though she was guilty of ruining my otherwise good day by dying. It was very powerful. One of the things I considered telling her, but didn’t, was that I really cherish a few things she’s given me over the years, items she’d owned for a long time herself. There’s a little wooden statue of a crane, and then a larger wooden statue from Mexico that had once belonged to my grandpa’s friend John Wayne, and then a scalping knife that had been passed down several generations (it still has human scalp and hair attached to the knife handle). These are the things I will have to remember my grandma by when she goes. I was telling one of my friends this afternoon about it, and he pointed out how interesting it is that we use these kinds of inherited objects as representations for the relationships, once the people aren’t there. Sometimes, however, we use objects in similar ways, even when there are real people to relate to instead, and that’s part of the illness of our society. But it’s important to note that the mechanism that this illness derives from is our capacity to use objects in this way, out of love. I think we should pay more attention to the ways we rely on objects in our lives to represent relationships. We should not be too attached to these representations. Rather, we should always be mindful of the importance of the relationships themselves, and how we are (or are not) honoring those relationships in the manner we actually live