The Grace Of Disarmament

As most of my regular readers already know, I am not religious but I love religious art and music when it's pretty and inspiring.  I also love churches and cathedrals, the older the better.  This picture was taken by me inside a small cathedral in Glasgow Scotland.  I love this lady.  And her roses.  And her robes.


It is such a strange thing to find something inside yourself that seems to be antithetical to everything you previously thought you were. 

My stomach remembers what it felt like to have a fist thrust through its soft tissues.  The shock of it is an imprint, a flash, a never-ending nightmare of memory.  That fist must have left bruises because it hit more than once but I don't remember bruises and I don't think anyone else ever looked for them.  It's the moment of blinding impact that haunts me like strobe lights randomly lighting the disused hallways of my mind and then shutting off for irregular periods of time.  I don't ever consciously think about it or dwell on it.  It comes and it goes, seemingly at its own will.  If a memory can be allowed to have a will of its own. 

I have watched a drunken fist crashing towards me in slow motion as I turned my head to see if I had left the cursing human behind me who was threatening violence- I had not.  That fist was all I saw for a few seconds which in reality was probably a half a second traveling against the night to meet with my nose and my mouth.  It hit me with a cartoon "Pow!" and warm blood gushed down my nose and mouth to my chin, just like in the movies.  My lip was swollen and split.  The feeling of knuckles crunching against the cartilage of my nose and grazing the teeth in my mouth feels like someone else's soul howling at me through time.  Someone else's ragged rage having nowhere else to go but in my face.

I have seen violence done to others and been helpless to do anything: frozen with the natural terror of a powerless child.  I have watched and felt rage but had no way to express it without risking violence to myself and I was so full of fear.  All the time.  Without an outlet to express the rage I turned it onto myself.  I couldn't punish the object of my anger so I punished myself instead.

My ears soaked up so much screaming in my young life that when I hear anyone express themselves in edgy decibels verging on a yell I freeze up inside instantly.  I will not tolerate it around myself.  Not even when it's completely natural.  It scrapes me raw inside and threatens to tear down every piece of wire I have strung up and woven across my person to keep me safe.  To keep the little I have left cloistered where violence can't find it.

War is evil.  I don't believe there is any reason good enough to start a war.  Defending yourself on your home turf is honorable and sometimes necessary.  Crossing an ocean to invade another country is wrong.  Killing other people for their resources is wrong when there are other ways to survive.  Killing other people for retribution is wrong.  Particularly when punishing an entire nation for the crimes of a few individuals.  I will not change my views on this.  It is a truth so unalterable for me that you can't remove it from my spirit without removing my heart too.

So how can it be possible that I have the spirit of a warrior?

All of Max's life I have been defending his love of toy weapons and play fighting because I believe it's natural, particularly in boys, to have an instinctual interest in fighting.  I have laughed about the irony of giving birth to a golden dragon warrior son since I am fiercely anti-war and anti-violence.  One of my heroes is Gandhi.  I have spoken of the irony of having a kid who is so unlike me.  Still, irony or not, I have never been afraid of his interest in violence and weapons.  It's completely human.  Mothers all around me try to keep their sons from making weapons of sticks and stones while I have handed them to Max trusting completely that playing at war wouldn't make him into an evil being.  Mothers around me don't encourage their sons' instinct to emerge.  We are all so civilized now*, boys are the same as girls and girls are the same as boys...give the boys some dolls and encourage the girls to play football...

I saw a little sliver of what was to come right before I got pregnant.  The year before getting pregnant I was taking fencing at the Santa Rosa Junior college.  I couldn't explain why it attracted me when I am absolutely not interested in any kind of sport.  I took the class and it made my body feel like a weak-ass pile of putty for months until I started to get stronger and getting stronger gave me something I'd never had before- a pleasure in the potential of my body.  I was surprised that a sport in which every action you take is to either kill another human being or avoid being killed by one.  I couldn't explain why it felt right.  I tried.  I tried to put it into words but that was during a rare period of writer's block and they wouldn't come to me.  Why I loved holding a sword and practicing my lunges in my carport.

I got pregnant and had to stop fencing.  I didn't return to it.

The sliver of sight that that experience afforded me has widened considerably in the three short months during which I've been taking Kung Fu.  Opening up now is a whole new vocabulary of violence and peace.  This is the way to express rage safely.  This is the way to shut out the ringing in my ears from the screaming in the past.  There is so much more in Kung Fu than there is in fencing.  It is more personal.  I'm not asking a sword to do all my work; I am always using my body; with the weapons or without them.  I am so new to it that I have no grace but watching the black belts and my teacher demonstrate moves and do their forms is like watching physical poetry.  It fills me with the desire to be capable of the same things because sometimes, like with music, you need to feel it for yourself.  It isn't enough to simply watch.  You need to feel it in your bones; the way I had to learn to play the accordion so that I could feel the sound through my skin.

I want that.  I want my body to have that impossible blend of fierce strength and fluid grace.

Every time I am doing my exercises in class I am taking something back into myself that violence against me and those around me took away.  When we get the plastic practice knives out I don't think "I am so against fighting with knives!" Instead I become more present in myself, in my body because the only way I can learn to deflect and disarm someone with a knife is if I am centered in the present.  When the knives come out or when we all arm ourselves with rattan sticks and learn to choke each other- it isn't frightening or weird or wrong- it feels like my education as a human being has, until now, been incomplete. 

The way a fierce spirit would feel if made to live in cotton wool.  The way a boxer would feel if he was taught only to weave.

I have no taste for violence, yet without learning self defense I am powerless to protect myself against it.  Violence is everywhere.  Human beings, on the whole, are a violent species of animal.  As territorial as Lions.  Violence is the other side of the Peace coin.  To balance both in yourself is perhaps the greatest service one can do for one's self.    Balanced people are more stable.

My own child, who has brought more chaos and stress to my life than I imagined possible, has also proved to be an inspiration to me in ways I didn't think children could be to their parents.  He has shown me to myself and though sometimes what he's forced me to see in myself is unbearably ugly, in trying to take care of his fierce but delicate soul he has taken me down the only road that can lead me back to myself.  There are ironies within ironies here that I am not a skilled enough writer to point out.

I won't ever purposely do violence to another human being.  Some people like to suggest that there are some things none of us can know until we're put in specific situations that tests us.  I don't believe this is true.  Regardless, I have been tested in this instance.  Given the encouragement to do violence to other people I have always turned that violence on myself** instead of others.  But as I learn to deflect knives, fists, and kicks in my Kung Fu classes I replay those old memories and they are changing now.  Now I know what to do with that fist coming at me like a bad cartoon; I amend the memory by defending myself and the other people that drunken fist bloodied that night.  Now, without thinking, in that memory my body is water around that fist and turns it against itself.

I can't really change the past.  What I can do is take its power to continue hurting me away. 

I'd like to do that with the grace of a warrior.





*This is not a belief endorsed by the author.

**There was exactly one instance where I did take the opportunity but having no guidance in such matters I struck a person when they were down and the second I did it I felt sick to my stomach and knew that that made me the worst kind of person.