I go on a mission to go and pick up what I need for establishing the food forest, the basic assemblage of the seven layers of a food forest, which you can look up and which I'll talk about another and other times, but seven vertical layers of crops that are interactively diversifying the vertical planes of layers of food forest.
Getting all those species, right now, the main factor is having a very secure, fortified nursery area to not plant anything in the soil.
As it is, there needs to be a lot of conditioning of the soil to really support anything.
It's just literally dead sand, which is great as its own resource. But I need to do a lot of alchemy with soil building in order to just plant things.
Of course, you can just throw stuff on the ground and certainly natives and adapted species to the conditions of the climate...
There's definitely a place for just throwing stuff in the ground. But if you wanna plant mostly food, and you wanna accelerate succession with nitrogen fixing support species at a high ratio of nitrogen fixing sacrificial, fast growing trees to every productive fruit tree.
You need to do a lot more prep work in creating that environment, with the earthworks and mulching and irrigation strategies and whatnot, and species selection, and then protecting them and keeping them shaded, and wind proofed.
With the time pressure and getting that assemblage of things, when you make a nursery, anybody who has had this experience I think they'll get a little.
When you take custody of plant stock, from seedlings to little trays, six packs, gallon buckets, five gallons to two foot box trees.
When you take custody of those plants, the clock is ticking, before even considering the transplant shock of taking them out of their boxes or cans or or trays or whatever, you're also changing their relationship to the sun.
I was able to get trees inside the cab of my truck for the most part. But one of them had to get wind whipped the whole way, driving far and I could see it the whole time, I felt so bad, but I guess I had to say, I'm just promising I'm gonna take such good care of you. If you survive this, you'll be such a trooper and you'll have stories to tell about that ride, how you survived it.
Definitely you'll be that much more prepared for for what it could be like, but I plan to not expose these trees to that much of an onslaught but that was pretty much what it was like.
That was basically a simulated storm, driving those trees.
I think about eventually I'll do the right thing and build up those fancy tree transporting walls. You see them where nurseries, know what they're doing. They put wind blocks for transporting trees.
When you take custody and you realize something inside of you kicks into a protective mode, you become like the mama bear for those because you spent money on them.
Because you know they're gonna be suffering. And also, if you're in my circumstance where you're gardening in the wild, you don't get to just pull up like in the city and throw everything in the backyard.
There's a fence, maybe there's raccoons, there's not too many rodents or whatever.
I just think back to how carefree most of my gardening life has been closer to the cities and suburbs and whatnot, urban permaculture, it's not gonna be stripped to the bone.
It's almost like breaking down in a bad neighborhood, do a time lapse of the car, leaving a broken down car, everybody stripping it down to the to the nub.
That's literally what it's like if you make a nursery run and you're permaculturing in the wild, you turn your back on what you brought out a minute, and it gets stripped down to the nub, and all you see is teeth marks.
Yhe remains of a few inedible parts spit out here and there.
I love that there's this much life left on this planet, but I literally feel like when I stop having nightmares about people and society, it's just gonna be nightmares about all the millions of different teeth that are basically always coming in waves to just tear my little fantasy garden reality apart, completely consume it all as though it was never even there.
There's a grace in being in this peaceful war with nature, if you will, with all the critters, it's like, you can't really get emotionally triggered by them, because they're not out to get you.
You can't take it personally, right? You're the fool thinking that you can plant a buffet and then go to sleep, whereas all the nocturnal animals just see, oh, thanks you're a great guy. Thanks so much. Hey, look, we appreciate you so much for offering this buffet that we cleaned our plates and didn't leave a scrap. That's how much we appreciate you. Thank you. They even leave a note, they, lick their paws and you're out all that money and you're crying.
You have that happen enough times, then you get this sense of, like, even the door opening...it's a little bit of a circus act when you take them in.
The funny thing too though, is that you always have this nursery effect of, you know, your eyes are bigger than your or muscles, you don’t moderate yourself. You get these impulse buys and you fall in love with something.
Then all of a sudden in a few minutes of fiending at the nursery, you then set yourself up for all nighters of having to hustle to get stuff secured and planted, if not fully planted, at least like triaging it and watering this and that.
I've had beautiful times working in collectives, where I could take on a bunch of nursery stuck, we could go and get a craigs list store of an entire community garden that was gonna be sold and bulldozed, and them saying, come and have at it.
Like shopping spree, come with the truck and dig out and transplant anything you want.
We had to go down there and send a delegation. It was a frenzy, we ended up with an absurd amount of plant stock that we rescued.
Then the clock is ticking and luckily, I was able to be the conductor of that orchestra of people power to get it all tucked away and everything so that we didn't have any major losses.
But doing it by myself now, always getting more than I then I realize, it's gonna take the time.
Also one of my favorite strategies is stocking up on almost everything that's in the produce section of a grocery store that has an intact root system, or is itself a tuber in which the vegetable is the root.
It's great when you see living herbs. A great thing that's come up in the last, however many years, that process, and I don't have refrigeration, so I had to prep and chop and separate and clean and do brine fermentation with the tops of all the plantable produce section scores that I got and tuck them away.
All of this before the sun comes to scorch everything, and hopefully protecting everything at each phase from being devoured.
I got a metal dome structure and covered it with with a wire mesh, quarter inch mesh hardware cloth.
I would not trust that to keep canines out of chicken coops. It's not as thick as the more standard size 1/2 inch hardware cloth.
So there’s potential for it to warp and weaken and have breaches.
I think it'll stand up well to the smaller critters who would wanna just munch on roots and foliage.
So it's, it's a trade off, but I'm happy with it because it's so pliable, it's so flexible, you can shape it and you can work with it. It's far more agile to work with.
So for just making a little plant nursery box, keeping the moles and the gophers and the rats and the mice out.
Chicken wire does nothing to keep rodents out, because some rodents can squeeze down to the size of a dime.
I got a five foot high ten foot diameter jungle gym bucky ball style metal dome and assembled that and and covered it with mesh. Some genius of math and geometry, far smarter than me, could actually make an efficient design of how to apply the hardware cloth to the dome geometry, to where it would actually overlap consistently and not bow out and be all wonky everywhere.
That doesn't come to me naturally. I don't have the patience for it. So I ended up with a very messy stitching job of placing and wrapping this hardware cloth on the dome.
So the fun was staying up late, nothing like gardening to psytrance at night, and doing something that feels like you're literally in the qubert, pac man, tron games...you're just in that zone.
And with real stakes, I mean, literally, I cannot fail on the mission to secure this dome with hardware cloth, because if I leave even an inch gap anywhere, that's all it takes.
And I come back hours later in the morning, and everything is just a nub. Literally, it can be that bad.
It was great fun to play psytrance at night, and to be securing that with wires.
It felt like being inside of Tron or Pacman or something.
But then even with all of that effort, unless you were to literally hand stitch every linear inch of contact, I'm going every few inches or where it looks like it’s bowing out and wonky, I'm gonna have to put in a bunch more, basically little loop stitches of wire, to fasten it together and to flatten the overlapping parts.
Maybe in a perfect world, there will be a group of people, and we would stitch it 100 % sealed off. But I'm expecting there to be always some breach point.
That actually gave me the idea that I'm so concerned about the welfare of these trees now, because of how far away everything is for me, and how the stakes are high.
So I thought about, actually, putting bells, like permanent Christmas tree ornaments on the trees in the nursery so that, if anything's on there, trying to tear them to pieces, then I would actually have alarm bells that would go off, and it would be a beautiful, ornate thing.
Hopefully they would not be triggered by the wind, that it would require them to be climbed on or jumped on for them to go off.
But I'm deeply immersed in this. Being a tactician of gardening is an appropriate application of the defender, warrior energy.
Some people say, hey, I don't have a deer problem out here, but some people would say, well, I guess I'm deer gardening. If the deer are gonna come and eat everything I'm planting, well, then what do you do then?
Well, of course, all legal considerations for granted. Now you've attracted your much more complete nutrition dinner piece.
That's another way to look at it. But I'm not too keen on eating rats at this point. Nothing against eating rats, but I'd rather just keep them out of there.
They will be happy to scavenge the scraps and the compost and the green waste.
So everybody wins in a good design.
I realized that this was an appropriate time for me to cite influence martial arts on my personal spiritual development.
That chain of events, of having to go into beast mode in defense of building a perimeter for this vulnerable plant stock, and knowing that there's multiple countdowns that are working against me, when are the rains gonna come? When is another storm gonna hit? How soon are these plants gonna get dried out? Do I have enough water for them and me.
Am I gonna be able to protect them and keep them from just being wiped out?
I can't go to sleep until I know that that they're secured so what does that push me to do in that kind of beast mode?
It pushes me to not just throw my back out from one activity. It's like a compounding, snowballing back throwing out thing.
For younger people who have never had that experience of having your back thrown out, I don't know what to compare it to, because it's not localized at your back. It feels like any movement that you make with any limb whatsoever. You turn your head, you bend down at all. You're just in this war with the way gravity and contortion just triggers this highly sensitized pain.
I could be much more educated on this anatomy and the pathophysiology of lower back pain.
But, this is an interesting study for me. I’m definitely not telling anybody not to listen to the signals of pain and to rest whenever they feel the signals of pain.
But the reality is, if you have to go in a beast mode with back pain, because you've decided that is the trade off you're willing to make, for whatever reason, then what is it?
It's worth me spending some time to honor the strength and the resolve and the resilience of staying in the fight, so to speak.
So staying in the fight that I chose, the fight with nature to do this project here alone and if I'm gonna stand in that fight, I don't get to tap out if I start to feel that back pain and for better or worse.
The best I can do is just limit the amount of heavy objects I have in my life that I have to deal with but once you have that back thrown out experience, you try not to lift something that is way too heavy, or twist, or not bend the knees.
.
That's what a lot of people do. That gives them repetitive injuries in the mechanized, industrialized factory workforce.
I've been there, I've been a delivery driver. I've been in a landscaper, where you don't get to choose to do lighter tasks because you threw your back out, you just have to grin and bear it, and soldier on through having thrown your back out, you’re really compounding, making worse.
Now, after having done that for so many years, lifting something light carries a stiff sentence, and then it stays with you.
If you have to keep doing what you're doing, even if it's light, it doesn't matter because you cross that line.
I was just constantly, nonstop, grimace and nonstop, just yelps and like biting a stick or biting a bullet with pain for hours and hours and hours, nonstop, and moving as fast as I could because of the time pressures upon me and not doing it to impress anybody.
There was nobody around to impress to be doing this. I'm not so macho with myself.
It's been like this for enough years that I just can't even remember before.
It's gonna be one of those days. It's gonna be one of those nights.
Unless I'm paralyzed, or I go numb, or I can't move, and I'm collapsed, I hope I’m not just setting myself up for a worse disaster in the future.
It's all compounding, but it's basically like, well, you know what?
I gotta get things established now, because I'm only gonna get weaker. I'm only gonna get older. It's only gonna get more painful.
The man, as it were, stole 40 years of my life, the productive years of my life.
What it left me with was really nothing to show for it.
Not chronic back pain, but a very fussy and very unforgiving tendency, to just go into bouts of dealing with that pain.
I don't ever wanna be in a situation where I push anybody else to push themselves through what I push myself through.
That's not in alignment with the ethics of permaculture. So tactical permaculture, using the the ethic of people care, means if you're gonna try to run a boot camp, you can't be grinding people down.
They sell you on being the tip of the spear, but they treat you like the tread of the tire.
I'm not gonna elaborate on that, but I will say, I feel like the fucking tread of a tire.
I feel like when they wore me down, they replaced me and that was just the civilian, private sector world of you're an employee, you're expendable, you're replaceable.
You either work hard at a consistent pace, nonstop, for 8 hours a day, or you're gone, and we don't care.
We're not responsible for you after you leave.
However, we can cut corners that's just the way it is. That goes for day laborers. That goes for contractors, everything, you're on your own a lot of times.
I choose to put myself through that as my own drill sergeant.
At least I’m in control. If you join the military you sign away your rights and they can grind you into a pulp.
What's the ratio that the people who fail out of those selection processes, the reason that the seals and the rangers and all of the different elite units within the different branches, the reason that they're put on such a pedestal is the ratio of how many people got ground down to the nub, and we're permanently injured or even killed in that selection process.
It is a combination of genetics, will, luck and many other forces, the quality of the training.
But it's pretty merciless. They don't have a lot of remorse about self care.
Certainly a huge factor of it is putting people through extreme physical and intellectual arduous tasking, while engineering and inducing a chronically sleep deprived state to see who can actually keep their wits together in a combat zone.
I'm not saying that they should soften those processes. I'm just saying to myself I wanna be able to still play guitar, I wanna be able to still play drums, can't I serve my country in other ways? Don't put me in that meat grinder.
I will show lots of respect for the people who put themselves through that meat grinder, who are willing to risk life and limb to be in those units.
That was never me. I did not want to put in that level sacrifice. So here I am choosing and imposing on myself violating permaculture ethics of people care by carelessly pushing myself through pain.
But thinking that it's a calculated risk, I just don't know how to put into words what it feels like to push through with a higher purpose of serving the protection of and defending and serving the protection of the life of others.
It's like I've become a first responder for the plants that I take custody of and the animals.
I don't do that every day. I used to have to do that. It was called a job. It was called work. And I've been blessed to not have to do that right now, and hopefully for forever after.
Though when I have to do it for myself on my own projects, something clicks, something gets activated deeply. And that transmutation of that pain, knowing that when the mission is accomplished, you I will be able to rest.
So I finished the dome in the middle of the night.
I'm sleeping for the first time in what felt like eternity.
Being able to give the back a rest, and therefore not feel pain in moving everything and it was funny because I was about ready to just go okay I've earned my beauty sleep for tonight, I will have to get up early before the sun starts baking things, to make sure to water everything, and to double check, that the work done at night didn't have a bunch of errors.
Also be aware if I hear any sounds I'm gonna have to jump out and fix breeches. But it a sweet moment where being a full moon being quite magical.
I have my little boogie down moments, of course, at the at the crescendos of the psytrans tracks, where I'm doing the job.
But also, since I'm not at work for someone else, I can actually, boogie down a little bit while I'm while I'm doing the work.
When I'm feeling those, epic psytrance, crescendos, just actually, put a little bit of dance groove into the workflow.
But I didn't think I was gonna have a second wind, then the moon grabbed my attention and just sort of said to me like, oh, the feeling I had was like no you need to dance now.
The mission is not over because you need to dance to celebrate.
You need to drink some of your blueberry, honey wine mead and really howl at the moon.
Because now the mission that you have been planning for quite a while, factoring in COVID and factoring in tons of logistics and tons of design considerations for procurement and really doing the 99 hours of design so that you have 1 hour of work, of course, I had more than 1 hour of work. But there was a lot of planning that I put into getting to this point.
So this was really the success of and the culmination of all that work.
It was a soft sell for the moon to get me to dance on the full-ish moon, even though it was freezing fucking cold and late.
I was burnt but the moon nudges me to look up at it, and then in my peripheral vision, I see that honey wine sitting there, and I'm like, there's no way I'm not celebrating this milestone without having the equivalent of two glasses of wine, followed up by an equal, if not greater amount of of water to stay hydrated, and really get down and dance.
Realize that the dancing is required to reset the nervous system from all that back pain. I'm not giving medical advice. I'm not saying that I know what is best for anybody with lower back pain. But I know that for the most part, unless you are in an intact indigenous culture, where you sing and dance throughout your horticulture and your labor so that you prevent injuries, and you stay synchronized and in a groove and in a cadence so that you don't bang shovels and drop things on each other. You're in an cadence. Everything in many indigenous societies, practicing horticulture and doing labor is all metered out by rhythm and song and dance.
Throughout Africa, many things are just embedded in that tapestry of sound harmony.
It's not the hippiest most woo woo thing to say, if you're gonna break your back more than you should ever have to, it stands to reason that, in addition to stretching, and yoga, there’s ecstatic trance dancing.
I would imagine that also for other people if they do it as a practice would discover it. For me it was just a reminder that I had not been dancing enough.
There was a lot of chi, a lot of prana, a lot of energy that was stagnating.
What would have been that experience, of ecstatic trance dancing in a group ceremonial ritual.
That's been gone and since the scorpions stole the night in the middle of the summer, I have basically been living between the truckstead tiny home of my main original truck, and the new truck, four by four as my dance floor, dining hall, kitchenette, outdoor office space. But basically, I have lived between two truck bed lofts mainly because of the scorching heat of the summer sun on the ground and and because of the seasonality of snakes and scorpions I had to elevate my ground camp to the truck beds, because I didn't want to be stepping on scorpions.
I could make a dance out of staring at the ground and making sure to avoid scorpions. But I settled for doing my dance routines and even yoga routines on the bigger truck bed.
That was a great, nice, little elevated view. But I was not at all coming close to the full range of motion that you get when you dance and you spin around and basically move, doing flow arts.
Magical things happen when, either like at a tai chi pace or at like a festival, flow arts, people with glow sticks and hula hoops and things moving at the pace of psytrance, bpms and whatnot.
Between in that range, from tai chi to psytrance, bpms. What the body will do naturally, is move over the course of a night of dancing to rotate through almost every imaginable range of motion and the points of rotation that you get to through a normal flow of ecstatic trance dancing.
It really rapidly accelerates and resets the aches and the stiffness and the lactic acid build up and of course, the spiritual dimension of just stuck energy and emotional energy and having, your bosses bad vibes get stuck in a cramp, all that stuff, so dancing is critical.
Ecstatic trance dancing is a niche thing for meet ups, for people who are into that, who will go and find stuff like that. It's a sub culture within a sub culture. It should be far more widely adopted.
But what I like to do, and I've always sort of naturally done as a martial artist, as I fell in love with psytrance, is for me, the flow state of ecstatic trance dance is expressing the full range of combatives.
I studied of Jeet Kune Do, founded by Bruce Lee, which is really a sampling of all of the great martial arts and sciences of the world.
If you've just seen pictures of his book shelves, and you've read The Art of Expressing the Human Body, which was a compilation of his notes on fitness training. If you've read The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, if you have studied in lineages with his students, as I have...
I grew into it more and more and really feel like I
push myself to a standard that he lived by in a lot of ways. He set such a high standard of performance and of study and of a philosophical approach to just being embodied on this planet.
The philosophy and the training, ethics, everything I studied it religiously, and I use that level of fighting proficiency to avoid combat as any good, peace, loving martial artist would.
You are saving your knuckles and saving your emotional content for worthy opponents.
There’s a line from a film, the sniper mentor is saying about the other marines, they just wanna shoot a million rounds and blow stuff up. The point that he was making, which is a very elegant point, is that he's talking about one shot, one kill.
Another sentiment from an investor was that the sniper lives in a hole with his own sh*t and waits for that perfect opportunity.
It's such a deep study and exploration of how martial arts training makes you less inclined to engage in petty violence over the dumbest things,
Road rage is beneath me, bar brawls are beneath me, mouthing off in a traffic stop to a law enforcement officer is beneath me.
These aren't the droids you're looking for kind of a thing.
You have bigger fish to fry. You're choosing your battles, and you respect the body temple that you're that you’re building so much, if you have to engage in combat, if you have to engage in mortal combat, you're gonna want it to be with someone that you actually respect as a warrior, as an opponent.
I've experienced this effect where the battle I was training for, by the time I encounter the enemy that I thought I was training for, I realize that they're actually not a worthy opponent.
I put in all that effort to prepare for something then I discovered I've grown bigger than that.
The path of a martial artist to where, you just rise above pettiness and ultimately, the spiritual dimension of it...it’s all on the chess board.
Do you wanna be a pawn, or do you wanna be a more sophisticated combatant.
The military knows how to sort out the people who have brains and brawn the hard and smart men.
It’s worth developing multi dimensions of the self. Bruce Lee was a cha cha dancer.
So combative ecstatic, trance dancing to psytrance under the full moon, celebrating the securing of a fledgling food forest against the extreme conditions of a climate disaster and trying to keep your wits and drink that blueberry honey wine and enjoy.
This is the thing. Everything was agonizing pain, grimacing, wincing, whimpering, shouting, just sounding like an old man, everything is triggering him to be a grump, just agonizing pain that was happening for hours and hours and hours and hours.
And then all it took was a wink from the moon and a couple glasses of that wine, I’m now in the zone dancing through these flow arts and combatives, to where all of that pain goes away, and I wake up with no pain.
If it was a work week where I didn't get to do that, that pain would be following me all next week and it would just get worse and worse and worse, and until the weekend when I would get to dance it off.
It's an interesting combination of factors the extreme conditions that kind of boxed me into where I wasn't getting to do my full range of weaponized ecstatic, combative, trance dancing with sticks and machete and knives, and doing the, the formations to where if you are doing combatives with weapons, blade weapons and sticks and then you're getting extra bonus effects of this emergent property that is putting that little bit of weight and momentum. It’s gonna help you stretch deeper and further into the full range of motion. And, of course, you could overdo that and cause injury. But if you're holding a machete or sticks, or training knives, or even real knives.
I'm not giving medical advice, but for me, an even more therapeutic effect, not to mention you're training consistently to be hard to kill, and you're training to be yourself a lethal weapon.
I feel pretty low on the totem pole of martial artists. But I do know that per the advisement of who I consider to the highest ranking martial arts hero in my lifetime, who I have the honor to share the Earth with, and have had that honor to share the Earth with is a grand master of blade culture.
I've had that pleasure of being a contemporary and training within the official licensed school and instructor of an advanced, shall we say blade culture art.
I'm not gonna say exactly who I trained under, and I'm going to, as per my promise to him, keeps his trade secrets and his training secrets offline, but, I can speak freely in the generalities of the system.
Tactical culture, blade culture, the evolution of Chinese farming tools into kung fu weapons, this continuum of the warrior gardener and the traditional ancientness of what I'm calling tactical permaculture.
That is what Lapu Lapu killed Magellan with, and hence protected all of his people from the first wave of colonization.
So I'm basically reverse engineering what is native to any indigenous Filipino practitioner, whether they're a master teaching the military and the law enforcement agencies across the world or you are just a woman walking down the street who in the Discovery Channel series called Fight Quest, when the two fighters do this reality TV show of fast track training in martial arts systems all around the world, it’s one of the best.
If you played Street Fighter Two and you haven't watched Discovery Channel’s Fight Quest series, you are missing out, and you're in for a treat.
They do the actual Filipino training camps. That is the stuff every montage in every martial arts film from the eighties that built my passion for martial arts...They live that over the course of a week, basically, they got to get trained up in a crash course on the system, and then they got to do a bit of a tournament to test their skills with that they had learned.
You get some of the philosophy from about the system, how deep the roots are in indigenity and in defending ancient life ways and defending against waves of colonizers.
If you go down the rabbit hole of his discourse on blade culture, I think it's the most compelling storytelling of everything, all of the American Ninjas, all of the Ninja Turtles, all of the kick boxers, all of the Segal material, as compelling as all that stuff is to initiate and activate the warrior responsibility of everyone, not just the 1 % of Americans who join the American military.
The many people, it seems are steeped in the tradition of street stick fighting in the Philippines, traditionally, that was just I guess you could call it a rite of passage. It was just like a sport, lethal, combative knife and stick fighting, because you might need to use it to save your life, because the bully isn't just gonna take your lunch money, they might slit your throat.
It’s compelling for anybody in the world who has ever been sexually assaulted, who's had anyone they care about ever be sexually assaulted, to be negligent with leaving it to law enforcement to come and clean up the mess after you've been raped and killed.
This is bone chilling narrative that you get from the grand master. I have not met him personally.
It's been almost ten years since I was formally in in training, it has been embedded in me and instilled in me into my bones through a transmission.
That sort of ceremony that very much looks like something out of being knighted, or something like from the scene in Blood Sport, where he gets his ninja knighthood with the master.
So the palpability of something you can't explain, which is a transmission of energy and knowledge, sort of like a download that comes from physical contact with a master I had that experience in training with my instructor when I going through the combative motions of the knife fighting tactics and the stick fighting tactics and the grappling tactics of that system I noted very distinctly the moment at which I felt a spirit like electrical circuitry.
But it was coming through these combative movements, and there was a quality of something that was beyond both of us, that was non human, similar to a kundalini awakening experience.
I’m not saying that I need to make a movie about that moment, or that makes me the chosen one, or that makes me an initiate, no, when you look at what those guys did in fight quest to be considered initiates I would have I went nowhere near that level of enduring pain and suffering and a beating.
Taking beatings. I didn't get jumped in the way they did. But what I can say is that there is a palpable transmission experience, and there is also a very deep, like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg caliber story behind the interchange of Indian martial arts and spirituality in peaceful delegations of trading throughout the Philippines before the let's call it white European colonial era.
There was a golden age of cultural transmission throughout East Asia and there are artifacts of what was in training called the naga, the snake head on the end of the blade weapons that are basically like swords that are about the size of machetes, but quite a bit heavier and shaped sort of like shears. If you took apart a pair of shears, it would look more like that.
They're kind of pointing into each other and that is, I believe, the official translation. But I held one in my hand, and it's no joke, that is a spiritually charged weapon, and they have a blood lust of their own, that's part of the lore.
I have a respect for defensive violence, and I don't take it lightly, I don't like to joke about it, I understand, there is a need for people to be willing to defend the perimeter and prevent rape and abuse.
That can't just be the police and the army and some sketchy conspiracy militia that gets stalked by the ATF. Those can't be the only options so there just needs to be more well trained ethical dutiful community citizen first responders who are actually capable of physical security and who are educated in blade culture, if not directly, hopefully, indirectly, through the tutelage and the lessons learned from the Filipino practitioners, who can talk very eloquently about the history of the Philippines fighting with blade culture, traditional, ancient blade culture, going back to the days of Lapu Lapu.
There are monuments and great tableaus and murals of this of the glorious event.
Imagine the entire Western hemisphere, if only Lapu Lapu could have been magically teleported to every place that the conquistadors landed in the Western Hemisphere, you'd have a much different map and you wouldn't call it Columbus Day if you catch the drift.
But who do I want to learn from? Who do I wanna bow down to and honor. When he says my heart is pure.
He knows what it was like to experience, and he's an elder, so he's talking about his memories of the transgressions of the priests, of the colonizers.
There's this fresh rawness to the cultural wounding that occurred in the Philippines at the hands of the Spanish, the Japanese, the Americans, the three major waves of occupation that were fought off in different durations of protracted wars and protracted violence. And in the end, against what he calls firearm and explosive culture, the blade culture, time and again since time immemorial, has won out.
He is the foremost advocate for retooling the military and law enforcement agencies of the world to be adept with blade culture, and tactically be prepared to fight with not just hand to hand, but being willing to be equipped and trained to deploy edge weapons.
He talks about the statistics of blade stabbings and slashings of police officers.
It's like, how could you just forget? How could you be so enamored with things that go bang and boom, that you would forget that you need to be backwards compatible.
You need to have that built in. So he trains and and leads some of the only military personnel on the planet who still actually fight with a bladed weapon in one hand and a firearm in another.
So you are interchangeably flowing between knives, for all kinds of purposes.
The specialized Filipino martial arts weapon that is expensive for one thing, but a machete will do probably, nine times out of ten, if it comes down to defending your life.
Certainly the uprisings in Latin America that use machetes and could be trained in a more systematic way.
So hey, if you think it's primitive and backwards to be dancing in the moonlight with a machete, I’m not the only one.
I'm not threatening anyone. Probably the best use of my machete is gonna be to chop and drop nitrogenous tree material to mulch my food forest.
And god if forbid anybody comes to mess with my food forest, they might have to do a little bit of sparring with me.
But we'll make it a good time. It'll be a dance and that's the beauty of the martial arts, ritualizing violence and avoiding that unchecked aggression.
I wanted to take a moment to pay a bit of an homage to how I am healing my horrific, agonizing monster of a back pain curse with the combative, ecstatic trance dancing arts.
I don't know if there are any militaries or martial arts studios anywhere in the world who are actually bumping psytrance for their routines, for their initiates and their infantry people, or whatever.
I don't know that that is happening. There was some pretty good Goa sounding music in that Discovery Channel soundtrack.
Warriors are shaped by music as much as by being barked at by their drill sergeant or their instructor.
I would not be here if it wasn't for the just cheese dripping eighties montage, power ballad, epic music.
I guess I will always think back to Iron Eagle And the way that he pissed off the instructor by blasting his heavy metal in the cockpit to give him that extra juice he needed to complete the mission.
I gotta wonder if there is a ministry of adrenalizing work out music and combative music, it would be a very interested niche anywhere in all of those hierarchies of instruction and intelligence.
I really felt that spirit swoop in to reunite with me just the other night. Just being like, dude, don't stray from the constant conditioning of the sticks and the blades and the footwork.
Always get ready for the storms to really come wreck you.
The best way to be ready for all the forces of nature and bad guys, be always dancing and be always training and keep that spirit alive.
For actual street self defense, for people who wanna do more than sportive arts. Bruce Lee had so much to say about the difference between martial arts, martial science, self defense, street fighting, tournament, fighting, clean fighting, dirty, fighting a determined attacker versus a somebody who's doing a tournament for points or whatever.
If you are someone let's say, who has been raped. And you say to yourself, I'm never gonna let that happen again no matter what and then you start your search for how am I going to become hard to rape next time?
You see the options, all the martial arts. There are innumerable sportive martial arts systems that are all beautiful. However, when it comes to what is gonna make it hard to rape you? What will make you hard to rape?
What most people are gonna go to is probably a women's self defense course.
There's the there's the model mugger training, there's the bullet man training, there are a lot of of adaptations of martial arts to street self defense combatives.
I would recommend anybody do that first, then do martial arts later, but start with the fundamentals of self defense street fighting.
Be able to know the difference and be able to tactically know the difference of why you wouldn't do fancy jump spin kicks to defend your life or to prevent rape.
You would be sharpening your knee cap targeted low sidekick, and then doing lots of running so that you could do that and run, the palm strikes, the finger jabs, the finger flicks, the knee to the groin, all those fundamental street self defense combatives.
I trained with a very astute Krav Maga student. He was not the master, but he was a very dedicated student. We had an open source martial arts training collective for a while and we all brought different fun stuff. I learned a little bit of that and I have tremendous respect for the end result of what Krav Maga delivers for people to be hard to kill, hard to rape, hard to mug, hard to kidnap, hard torture, hard to interrogate.
Because it is, to my knowledge, an elite Israeli military adapted system where it's hardcore. The training is intense and it has a reputation for having a lot of accidental injuries during training, more than maybe some other systems.
I have a phobia of training much in that because of what I've heard about how it can go wrong. Not that anything can go wrong while training in any system.
I will just say that one thing that I learned from my instructor, and believe me, he wasn't a softy and he wasn't like pulling punches or trying to water it down.
He was making it more potent for me, expressing an attitude of how critical it is that in training, you do not wear out your fists, you don't wear out your sticks, you don't wear out your blades.
You train in a manner that you're not sacrificing strength and power and perfection of the sacred geometry, of the forms of training, the way it's done very precisely.
You are just taking extra measures, or we took far more measures to protect ourselves in training than I had experienced in any other setting.
I can't say that this speaks for everybody training in this way, but I'm saying, there seemed to be a people care aspect that is very permaculture.
I wanna be tactically correct. I wanna have defensive wherewithal I wanna be able to offer sensible, physical security to myself, to my project, to my guests, to my lovers, to all life that I love and care to defend.
I want to be competent and strong and capable and I don't wanna cripple myself or injure myself or anyone else in the process of learning and conditioning and maintaining that skill set.
So it stood out to me things like this notion of the slap and the hack versus the closed fist punch, so that's just one thing, that point stood out for me.
You could tell me that you've been doing this your whole life, and it's all about smashing and grinding and tearing yourself up and wearing out every bone. But I got a sense that if you care about your soldiers and you're training them to fight to defend the safety of your people, they're not gonna be expendable to you.
And you see the shamanism that is involved. You see that in that Fight Quest series.
You see the sacredness, and you see the respect.
That is something that I don't necessarily see in the Stoicism of military boot camps.
I've only been hearing the stories of other people, but there is a lot of cynicism.
You hear about how they treat these guys and gals, the drugs they put in them, the way they chew up and spit them out.
When I think about the sacredness and the shamanism and the people care, the tactical permaculture of the Filipino blade culture, they're informed at a deeper spiritual level, and the duty of care that that is in that lineage of blade culture...
It's not this, like a factory of fodder, of pawns.
I don't get that feeling from them. Look into it and maybe bring back some of that people care to the tactical training.
Maybe bring a little bit more of that training in nature and training with natural elements.
Maybe you train by building and growing your fort, like grow your base and instead of MRES, tactical permaculture. When you see the embeddedness of the force recon Marines in the Philippines, initiating this Westerner, you’d want to have these warriors be your mentors, be your father's.
Imagine how unrapeable everyone would be if grown up in that culture.
In that series, you see this random stranger woman on the street, she gets down with her sticks.
I pray and am dead serious about not being reborn into a culture that does not empower every person to become a walking blender.