Saturday, June 25, 2011

A wakeful dream...


My name is Rōnin, and this blog is my story. At nearly 29 years old I woke up one day as if I had been asleep for a very, very long time. Summer. The day was beautiful, the sky was a brilliant azure that seemed to make the life pulsate in everything green. Everything seemed so surreal. I was awake but unsure…for the boundaries of time and space had been distorted in my mind, rendering the past in a dreamlike and distorted two dimensional tapestry, simultaneously both familiar and foreign.

I am what you might call a lost or wandering soul. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. Mountains and oceans and the sounds of birds in the spring, these things have always had more of a pull on my attention than the world I’ve been conditioned to accept, the world of commerce and hustle and noise, the world of strife and work and success. My failure to adapt to this way of being, and my relentless attempts to force myself to embrace it, have damaged my soul and shattered my worldview to the extent that I still wonder if I am truly capable of healing. This profound rift has been present from the beginning, or at least as much of the beginning as I can recall. It is this rift that has challenged my sanity, broken my spirit, and brought me to the very portal between life and death, between this world and that which lies beyond the veil…Passion and despair, serenity and chaos, honor and shame, life and death, such has been the nature of this waking dream of mine.

I am a fighter, a martial artist, a student. This too has been with me for as long as I can remember, though I do not know where its origins lie. I have been a student of the martial arts my entire life, so much so that even when I have tried to walk a different path I am always compelled back, as if under the command of some invisible force. It is a bit ironic, because as far as I can recall I’ve always been afraid of confrontation, always gone out of my way to avoid conflict. Or at least so I imagined. Conflict, however, always had an amazingly sneaky way of finding me wherever I might try to hide…

There are no words to express what it feels like for me to step into that arena, facing an opponent who has spent a great deal of his time and energy training his mind and body to defeat me in unarmed combat. I always wrestle with emotions in the lead up to the fight, but once I stand at that threshold and there is no possibility of turning back something else takes over. There is no anger, no fear, no emotion whatsoever. Time itself seems to slow down, the crowd and the noise fade away into the blackness of the void. There is only the moment. In that moment there is nothing more to say, nothing more to do…it is the calm in the eye of the hurricane.

I remember looking up at the clear night sky, countless stars spanned on and one into infinity, captivating my attention. And then I remember looking at the space between the stars and focusing on it, until its unfathomable blackness seemed to draw me in and it was the stars themselves that became the background. Further and further I was pulled in, as if caught in a black hole’s crushing gravitational field, distorting space and time...the void was me, and I was the void.

This blog is the story of my wanderings. Perhaps not a single soul will ever read it, but this outcome doesn’t matter in the slightest. This is blog is a memoir and a mirror, a reference point for an aimless madman with no sense of direction.

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