I write this while sitting in a café near a highly frequented road. The sheer noise is overwhelming, cars driving by with blaring subwoofers with drivers who might as well use the bass reflexes to propel them forward. Just over the square I could see junkies and drunks dozing their lives away murmuring to themselves. On my way to the café I had seen five mentally challenges persons screaming at no one in particular. Each and every person I have seen on my way wore a drastic frown that would have been an indication of a serious mental illness just five years ago. Three guys with ragged clothes had an argument and whacked the shit out of each other until the police came by.
Hell, one might say. Hell on earth, everywhere.
But as I passed by the railway station, I saw a girl with well-worn Salwar pants of green colour, with a shaggy mane of dreadlocks walking barefoot and happily eating an ice lolly. Her feet were ...
?muddy? She ?smiled? the whole time? She bid me a nice day? And meant it (I guess)?
Wait?
I did not ask her where she´d come from.
But I like to think that she came from a place that makes me happy, too. The still vibrant, living, lovely woods, where I can walk with dirty feet and feel the mud between my toes. Where I can smell the strong earth and the rich scent of soil and the bark of trees and the perfume of blossom and, yes, decay. A place where all still makes sense. A place not far in kilometres from the hell we have made, but that cannot be farther in actual. These days I tend to flee my fellow humans more and more. I cannot help them, for they want their life that way, and while I often crawl to the silence and go to hidden places, I do this as I always did. I know the magic sword from the lake is not offered just like a muffin at the baker´s, and while the grey rock will not open to grant me access to the realm of dwarves, where they will provide me with magical weapons to fight the world, I still have gained treasures beyond description there.
The art of stealth and stalking for the joy of it. Laughing deep and full of joy. Lust and dance and death. Moving in and out the branches of a tree, more nimble than I could before. Some people say there´s a light in my eyes they cannot explain and a star upon my brow. I don´t tell them. But it is the forest in my heart.
Now you have read about this on my blog, and chance is, you get this impression that I rant about the same thing over and over. If I do, I do this, because it is constantly filling me with awe. It is constantly growing, and I am becoming something very different to man. Nothing special, either.
There´s nothing mysterious about the things I do there, and some of you might find this childish at best. I walk. I sit on tree stumps and sip my tea. I climb over fallen trees and try to outrun deer. I do try handstands at a tree and tumbles down a slope. I thread through the thicket and drink from the sunlight. I shoot my sling or my arrows at rotten trees (and fail to hit still;-)) and hit the soil with my hands and fists. I do my pushups and situps and "yoga" positions and do them for the fun and joy of it. I run until I am exhausted and simply lie on my back to watch the leaves dance in the sun. It makes me strangely happy. None of this I do for any purpose, and I concentrate on the joy that fills me when I do a movement according to, well, what feels right, you know? I could draw this in a whiplash line, but only because the fern grows that way, the spring flows that way and the cat jumps that way.
I do this all in a feeling that... well... cannot be intelligently described, but that simply feels the way. I watch the owl at dawn hunting and the buzzard kill its prey. I watch the deer running and the hare exploding from the thicket, jumping farther than any human would expect for such a small and harmless creature. I watch the adder in its camouflage and the spider weave its web. They all teach me an art that is far removed from just being "martial", that has no name any human could pronounce, no positions or lectures given.
I still write this blog. This is presumeably the only reason I feel the urge to call it anything. And I want to create a myth for myself, and give hope to others. One drop of filth can poison a million gallons of clear water. And there is a lot of filth in our world.
I have decided that I do not want the filth that much. Most everything is rotten. We eat shit and chemicals, wear special waste as clothing and tie our body down with strange clothes like to webbing load restraint assemblies. Most of the work we do is ridiculous and futile. Ah yes, I have to bend to those circumstances, too.
But I asked the forest. If you are gentle and polite, you are welcome there. He waits for you to shut up and be happy and fierce.
