Ondine

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Ondine
She's got everything she needs, She's an artist, she don't look back. She's got everything she needs, She's an artist, she don't look back. She can take the dark out of the nighttime And paint the daytime black. --Bob Dylan

2004-07-10 10:50 AM
Acceptance and Old Mother

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Mood:
Proud

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Master Armen told me that I had been in the back of the pack and then I shot out to the front. That pretty much describes the last year, culminating in my getting accepted into the Viable Paradise workshop and earning my second degree black belt at almost the same moment.

It took me five years to earn my first degree black belt--but I earned it. It took me 7 years to write my first novel--but I wrote it.

Then I wrote this little short story about a cowboy and a boogie man and a woman who is too afraid to love so she runs away. I wrote it in two weeks, submitted it to the TOR guys last February and a week ago they accepted me into the workshop.

A week before the test, Master Armen tells me I am ready to go for my second degree. I owned that story and I owned that test. And I won't stop working, no matter how long it takes or how hard it is or how old I get. I won't stop.

Effort Etiquette Character Sincerity Self Control

Those are the five principles of my dojo.

On the test I told Master Bob my weakest link was effort. Jenn chose effort as well. We are both writers of fantasy. We understand effort. Jenn owned her test too. So did my daughter, Angela.

We ran and fought and did our forms and survived Fred's Tomb and the Pacific Ocean and seaweed and three pounds of sand in our bras and hypothermia and bad knees and menapause and exhaustion and fear.

And we passed.

I am cleaning the dojo now. I get my lessons free for the work, but I'd do it for nothing. The dojo is the Old Mother. We are born in her and we grow and bleed and sweat and work and work and work inside her until we shoot ahead like stars. And I get to clean her--the dust and grime of effort. I have to vacuum east and west. It's like knowing if it's a foward or back handed punch. It's the details. It's the work. I clean the dojo as if she were my old mother. I play Master Armen's goofy tai chi music and I vacuum in the correct direction. I polish Master Armen's desk with the sweet orange smelling oil. I dust the photographs of his daughters, of my daughter, of all my karate family. We are children of the dojo, Old Mother.

The hardest part of the test was standing still. Kung fu teaches a series of 'resting' positions that are pure torture. The worst was a modified push up. I watched my sweat drip from my nose and chin to the floor, three torturous inches below my face. Plop...plop...and all I could think of was..it's still the first hour--8 more to go. And I am 51. Old Mother.

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