mind body mama: Formerly Known As

When Jender and I left the School Formerly-Known-as-Love we left our teachers and our students, old and beloved friends, the style of karate we had in common, and the blue tumbling mats I bought for my black-belt test.

Our hearts were burned by betrayal.  

Fool me once, we said.

We’re done, we said. 

Never again, we said.

So we played tennis and watched softball and tried some kickboxing classes and went to the bar.  We talked about Rachel Maddow and shiny lipgloss, women’s soccer and sex toys, zombies and Joss Whedon.  We talked about survival and racism and religion.  We loaded the jukebox with dollars and played fuck you songs and hoped for a bar fight.  We wore tiny dresses and did tequila shots at the most badass birthday party I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes we taught self-defense to women and girls and knew that this is the work of our lives.

Everytime I thought about training my heart hurt.  Everytime I thought about not training my heart hurt.

Sometimes I stood at the studio window at the gym where I work and watched the traditional Korean martial artists in their white gis punching and kicking.  Sometimes I watched the Coach teaching a mat class, holding someone in a crazyass pin while he explained a detail of technique to the two or three others leaning in to see.   Sometimes I went to boxing class and wailed on the hanging bag and jumped rope while the theme from Rocky blasted my eardrums.

One day I bowed into that mat class full of boys and started learning how to wrestle.

A blunt bulb of desire sent out tentative roots in the scorched earth of my heart.  The quiet space of beginner’s mind to which I have returned over and over for twenty-three years opened up in me like a still silver lake. 

People think martial arts is discipline, self-control, mastery. But for me it is a hunger.  It is insatiable curiosity.  It is a blind and wordless drive like lust: to know more, to do more, to feel for one more moment the power of my body and another’s body and the meeting of our abilities.

I asked the Coach to be my teacher.

I asked Jender to come along.

So once again I am having that life in which my car has striking shields and breaking boards and boxing wraps and a canvas gi in it.  I find scraps of paper on which I’ve written “confrontation management, straight arm, ram shield, low tackle, canines” and it makes sense.  Before worship Jender and I meet at the gym to punch and kick and grapple, and we find bruises like love bites the next day. 

Sometimes my heart still hurts but more often it sings of hope.