Oakland's great. I love it. Its got the opportunities I need and want and its got the necessity for the ideas I want to manifest. And having this blog is great cause it allows me to sort out my thoughts and take the risk of having others read my thoughts (which they may disagree with). Which is important because, for an artist like myself, taking that risk to put yourself out there for whatever potential audience and allowing your thinking and work to be challenged needs to become the habit. That to me is Dialectics. Anyways, save that for another post.
With that being said, there are two things I recently started doing here that I think are on their way towards achieving the goals I've set for myself with regards to karate.
#1:
About a couple weeks ago I enrolled myself in a Wing Chun class being taught at a dojo that is only a 10 minute or less drive from where I live. I had become particularly interested in Wing Chun primarily from my time spent in Detroit. I mean, Wing Chun is probably most famously known as the art in which Bruce Lee was a student of. While I of course knew of this, my ambitions had nothing to do with being like Bruce (I mean, who doesn't want to be a badass with what they do right? Like Bruce was. But each of us has got to cultivate our own Inner Badass if you know what I mean). My ambition, as of recently, is to better understand how karate functions as a martial art. As I've blogged about before, modern karate is not functional for "fighting". However, its origins were very much about practical fighting skills. I don't think it was any one YouTube video I was watching nor was it any person that turned me onto Wing Chun (nor was it the Ip Man movie series!); I guess I was just noticing how some of the hand movements, kicking, body movement, and other basic principles of the art were relatable to what I had been reading (particularly articles by Iain Abernethy) and what I knew from the kata I had practiced for the last 4-5 years. I did take a Wing Chun trial class in Detroit at Eastern Market, but lacking money, I never enrolled. Which makes my move to Oakland interesting because I just read somewhere that Oakland is one of the major Wing Chun "centers" in the US. Cool. I'm in the right place. So, I just started doing that. Sifu Greg LeBlanc is an interesting guy. Out of the other two places I visited that offer Wing Chun training, Sifu Greg seems to have the most serious approach, plus he's got an amiable demeanor which makes learning a new art not so "hard". And the per-monthly class fee was reasonable ($85 for 3x week) and like I mentioned the dojo is really close, so all of that was a factor in why I started there. Already the first few classes have shown me how karate was once a functional and brutally effective martial art for close-quarter "fighting" (I'm using that word in quotations now because something Sifu Greg said last night made sense: "There's no such thing as self-defense". I think he must have been rephrasing one of his teachers, but something about that made sense to me. I just want to emphasize that I'm not using that word to imply that I can go into a UFC ring and "fight". I'm talking about fighting to prevent someone from further harming you or to save your life. That's totally not the same thing). While of course Wing Chun has its differences with the karate of Okinawa, I saw it as being the best approach to begin understanding how I could make my karate functional. I mean, schools that teach "functional" or "practical" karate are, to my knowledge, few and far between. I don't have the money, nor the ambition to fly to the UK to train under Sensei Abernethy or go to Australia to be a student of Patrick McCarthy (well-known karate researcher, historian, teacher). I mean it's really like Grace says, you gotta make a "way out of no way". If something isn't there, if the opportunity doesn't exist, you have to recognize your power to make it exist. This is one of the greatest lessons I learned from my time in Detroit. So that's number one....
#2:
The second thing I've been less getting myself involved with but more in the research stage of right now is in the area of "Personal Safety". I'm looking into various groups and organizations that offer this type of training/service in order to see where I fit in. I think actually that I can make a living within this field. There are instructor training courses that are being offered in order to teach Personal Safety. I recognize that's a broad term, but where I'm focusing in on right now is groups like IMPACT Bay Area who focus on teaching things like "self-defense" tactics to women (that's really a semantics thing isn't it? What sounds more civilized, self-defense or fighting?). I'm also looking into another organization that focuses on teaching martial arts to young people. I can't be for certain at the moment, but I am recognizing that this field is the most attractive in terms of where I'd want to make a living. The author Matthew Fox in his book, The Reinvention of Work advocates for us to locate our soul work; work that is healing and transformative. From what I've read and listened to, the kind of work that IMPACT and other organizations are doing is definitely along those lines. I'm very eager to see where my investigation into this field leads me and what can come out of that.
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That's all for now. This coming month and the rest of the summer should prove to be interesting and provide for some good blogging material. (Funny, I almost sound like I have some kind of reading audience that I'm speaking to. Yeah, that's right. The imaginary one in my head! Peace y'all!).
Elbow SMASH!
- Hiji Até
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