Like Water

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I used to practice martial arts. It started with capoeira, inspired by my equal parts aspirational and impossible college roommate, and humbly adopted by me during a confusing period of my early 20s. Let’s be honest: most of my 20s were confusing. I began my exploration in Portland, Oregon at a place aptly named The Friendly House during a year between college and graduate school. . . then went on to a short-lived immersion in the playfully murderous energies of classes in New York with celebrity capoeristas.

Following what felt like a couple of innocence-shattering endings – September 11th and the break-up of my first ‘real’ relationship -- I saw a sign posted somewhere up near Columbia University for another art form, one whose name I recognized from Portland. I’d spent my teenage years working in a restaurant staffed in a nepotistic fashion with a bunch of warriors from this particular fighting tradition. Life in New York, the world at large, and in my own world all felt precarious: the relentlessness and filth and vitality of the city were interrupted as planes flew into towers, people lept from 100-story windows, and charred diary pages fell in the backyards of Carroll Gardens like January snow. In this landscape, a free training session that came with a tee shirt sounded appealing. Perhaps it would be an antidote everything that felt heartbreaking, senseless and uncontrollable. Yelling, sweating, punching pads, being called ‘Mas Hilary,’ using my arms to drag my prone body face-down across the wood veneer floor on the second story of the studio at 14th Street and 8th Avenue: none of this would heal my heart, but it would pump my upper body to Marvel character proportions, just in time for the season of my life as a bridesmaid. It would make me if not impervious, then at least less afraid of pain.

The last week and a half has had a similar flavor to those strange, dark days in New York City following the attack on the island of Manhattan – a web of tension wrapped itself around life like fascia around a muscle, constricting the flow of blood. People wandered the streets in varying states of shock and horror. At the same time, there was more kindness and gentleness in the air – perhaps people were inclined to stick together while it felt like the world was falling apart. While I’m not in Los Angeles, I’ve been in touch with family, friends, and colleagues there -- and have scrolled upon scenes of devastation set against sunny blue skies. The juxtaposition of hope and apocalypse in these images is not unlike views of the towers of smoke spiraling into the heavens on that clear day in September more than 24 years ago – a day that marked the end of a sense of security that many of us had taken for granted. For years afterward, I couldn’t walk past a garbage can on the sidewalk without contemplating it bursting into flames, exploding -- sending paper coffee cups, broken umbrellas and bags of dog shit to the winds. This I suppose was among the deranged certainties of living in America: knowing one could be shot in a grocery store or a movie theater, but that most likely it would be by a US citizen.

Safety has been elusive to residents of California for a long time – and not just them, but to people in most parts of the world. Most of us have seen images of places perpetually war-torn -- places that seem to have been abandoned by grace. Maybe the unreliable nature of safety is nothing new at all. What does it even mean to be ‘safe?’ I guess we like to believe that knowledge and information can build a certain scaffolding around us, but the notion of safety has always been a slippery proposition at best.  It’s no accident - pun intended - that safety and its accessories have thus become increasingly popular commodities within consumer capitalism: helmets, seat belts, guns, parental controls on devices and social media apps. . . Living in the west now, I drive among a lot of gigantic pickup trucks. They’re loud, bombastic, and I’m willing to bet that the majority are not being used to haul manure or construction equipment. Trucks are like gated communities on wheels – they provide a false sense of security, both to the sympathetic and the paranoid among us. If being taller, bigger and heavier were equal to being invulnerable, there would still be two dark towers at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. Returning to principles of fighting arts and self-defense, size and weight were rarely the determinants of superiority in a fight – fortunately for skinny mercenaries like myself.

After hanging in a closet for more than a decade, my berimbau – an instrument made with a hollowed-out gourd and used in the play of capoeira -- has since been dismembered, its constituent parts misplaced and discarded during various apartment moves. The principle of training for combat while appearing to dance and play has stayed with me. The majority of my training, though, was in the somewhat obscure and ultimately cultishly organized Indonesian martial art called Poekoelan. Disturbingly cultish characteristics notwithstanding, the art itself and the training were powerful and empowering – both physically and mentally. I’ve come to understand that activities like martial arts, yoga, meditation and pursuits involving a search for something ineffable tend to lend themselves to flawed leadership philosophies.

Another principle from my fighting days that I’ve always remembered is attributed to Bruce Lee – though he probably wasn’t the first to think it or express it: be like water. When you encounter something hard, you can flow out of it or around it by becoming soft, formless, fluid and adaptable. This way of thinking seems counterintuitive because it conflicts with the framework that governs our society – a framework that promotes a false sense of control and that organizes our failures and triumphs in an absolutist fashion. Nonetheless, human logic rarely prevails in arguments with nature – so I will stick with the logic of water.

We can turn to the natural world to remember the paradox in how both survival and transformation work: water and fire are similar in their capacity to engulf, to nurture life, and also to render transformation. Most of us live on land that was once either submerged in or sculpted by ancient oceans. The great teacher and scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, reminds us that the hero’s journey – that’s the one that we’re on -- is a journey of transformation, a journey that might ask us to transcend our minds, our worldly identities and all that is known. We might be asked to become formless and adaptable. We might be asked to relinquish our illusions in the service of truth. . . to submerge ourselves in the waters of the unknown, confronting whatever demons might live there – and being spat back out upon the earth, liberated.