I am the worst at falling. "We need an entire class that just consists entirely of throwing M. on the ground," I said at advanced fighting class on Thursday, but I was working with an experienced student who patiently told me to curl up as I fell, and things got instantly better, even though my timing on the slapping the ground as you go down continues to be abysmal. (I just spelled abysmal right on the first try. Major points to me.)
I am also the worst at knife sparring, but really both worsts are understandable because I am the newest in the class, or was, this week. I don't have the first clue what I'm doing with knife sparring - am I just lunging? how am I supposed to know how to feint? - but I have learned that what this class requires is persistence and a refusal to get discouraged. That, and the willingness to drop without argument to do your pushups when you get tagged with the knife, even if your hand is burning from the good thwap it just got, even if you think you might have tagged the other person first.
"Why do you like fighting so much?" S. asked today, on the way back from walking through the woods, and I didn't really have an answer, except that from the first day I went, it was something I could do. It worked, in a way that no other sport ever has, and I keep wanting to go back. Then, too, I feel stronger and more confident now that I can defend myself. Although whether or not I could defend myself in an actual attack is questionable: I periodically fight back when we practice the scenarios, and any of the people who have been doing this for a long time beat me, regardless of whether they are bigger or smaller than me. It is problematic, but I am going to assume that someone who attacks me on the street is generally not going to be a trained fighter. Also, I can really hit them. If they are a trained fighter, though, I'm screwed.
...
So we walked through the woods today, a straggling crowd of us. Everything was green and growing, and the stream bubbled by happily. At the waterfall, I stood mesmerized. There is something about falling water that makes me feel like I am at the beginning and end of things. I have a hard time dragging myself away.
One end that did not happen, of course, was the rapture. The church I grew up in did not believe in the rapture, so I don't know that much about it, but I did work in a Christian bookstore in high school and I learned some things, mainly by reading that awful Left Behind series (I only made it through the first book; the writing was too terrible to continue, and also I did not care about the characters enough to pick up the second or third or forty-seventh one.). I do know enough to know that the rapture didn't happen today, or that if it did, so few people were taken that the rest of us have yet to notice that they are gone.
I was sitting on my porch at the appointed rapture time, talking to a friend, turning my face up toward the strange yellow object in the sky. (Some of you who see it more often may know it as the sun. We don't see it often enough here to recognize it.) We didn't even notice that the alleged rapture time had passed.
...
When I get out of Universe City, out in the trees and mosses of this beautiful state, I catch myself hoping that I never have to leave. The state, not the city. But it lasts only until I see a photo of Africa on my screensaver, no longer.
I am also the worst at knife sparring, but really both worsts are understandable because I am the newest in the class, or was, this week. I don't have the first clue what I'm doing with knife sparring - am I just lunging? how am I supposed to know how to feint? - but I have learned that what this class requires is persistence and a refusal to get discouraged. That, and the willingness to drop without argument to do your pushups when you get tagged with the knife, even if your hand is burning from the good thwap it just got, even if you think you might have tagged the other person first.
"Why do you like fighting so much?" S. asked today, on the way back from walking through the woods, and I didn't really have an answer, except that from the first day I went, it was something I could do. It worked, in a way that no other sport ever has, and I keep wanting to go back. Then, too, I feel stronger and more confident now that I can defend myself. Although whether or not I could defend myself in an actual attack is questionable: I periodically fight back when we practice the scenarios, and any of the people who have been doing this for a long time beat me, regardless of whether they are bigger or smaller than me. It is problematic, but I am going to assume that someone who attacks me on the street is generally not going to be a trained fighter. Also, I can really hit them. If they are a trained fighter, though, I'm screwed.
...
So we walked through the woods today, a straggling crowd of us. Everything was green and growing, and the stream bubbled by happily. At the waterfall, I stood mesmerized. There is something about falling water that makes me feel like I am at the beginning and end of things. I have a hard time dragging myself away.
One end that did not happen, of course, was the rapture. The church I grew up in did not believe in the rapture, so I don't know that much about it, but I did work in a Christian bookstore in high school and I learned some things, mainly by reading that awful Left Behind series (I only made it through the first book; the writing was too terrible to continue, and also I did not care about the characters enough to pick up the second or third or forty-seventh one.). I do know enough to know that the rapture didn't happen today, or that if it did, so few people were taken that the rest of us have yet to notice that they are gone.
I was sitting on my porch at the appointed rapture time, talking to a friend, turning my face up toward the strange yellow object in the sky. (Some of you who see it more often may know it as the sun. We don't see it often enough here to recognize it.) We didn't even notice that the alleged rapture time had passed.
...
When I get out of Universe City, out in the trees and mosses of this beautiful state, I catch myself hoping that I never have to leave. The state, not the city. But it lasts only until I see a photo of Africa on my screensaver, no longer.
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