Just before I left for karate camp, the School of Love promoted our very first teenage black belt. It is impossible to describe the grace and dignity of this young woman, or her enormous martial skill, or what this test meant for our school. But I must try to record the gift she gave me—a gift of healing and of hope.
I have reminded women preparing to test for rank at the School of Love, “It’s not as if we’ve never seen you do karate before.” I mean to say, "Do not be afraid to stand up in front of us. Your teachers love you and we have watched your progress. No one is trying to catch you in a mistake or set you up for failure." Quite the opposite: our leader, Janet Superhero, is consummate at creating tests that set students up for success beyond their imaginations. It is thrilling to train and prepare for an event both athletic and spiritual, both physical and emotional, both solitary and communal, and to triumph at it in ways that you never anticipated.
But I’m lying to my students. Because a test—especially a black belt test—is exactly like we’ve never seen them do karate before. What comes forth from students on tests is so consistently surprising and amazing that it’s as if the art is created anew. We watch each other practice every day but on every test we see something we have never seen before.
Karate is an art that exists only in the minds and bodies of its practitioners. It is a sculpture manifested in the bodies of its players. Our bodies are instruments of rhythms that sing only so long as we move in our forms. “Karate is a folk art,” one of my early teachers said. “We are the folk.” In an empty dojo, there is no thing that describes the art: no book, no picture, no video can capture the practice and the teachings. The only way that it is passed along is by teacher to student, in the teaching and the doing, and the art is both maintained and transformed through the heart and mind and body of each practitioner.
Karate is a giant game of telephone, spread over centuries and cultures and language, where the essence of the message miraculously endures even as the individual expression varies.
I have not even mentioned the nuances of karate style. Like dance, there are hundreds of styles and genres of martial arts. It is wonderful to see someone dancing, someone practicing martial arts. But to see someone doing your dance—replicating the style of your art—is to see your people, your history, and perhaps your legacy. You think,
we move our arms to strike like that, we hold our hands in those positions, we stand in those stances, we put that sequence of moves together into that combination. I have seen people from other countries practicing forms I know, and though we could not speak to each other, we have moved together in a common language.
So we promoted this girl on the cusp of womanhood. And those of us who have been in the art for ten or twenty or thirty years got to see it reinvented in a young and flawless body. We got to see our teachings move through her, we got to see her hold and move her body in the ways that mark her as one of us:
we move our arms like that, we stand in those stances. We got to see her mastery of the basics as she broke forth into brilliant improvisation, making poetry of the simple alphabet of our style.
But that was not the most remarkable part of the test.
It has been a hard year at the School of Love. Last August, we lost one of our own, a black belt twenty years in our community, beloved by all. Over the winter we faced a new challenge—the sudden departure of another beloved student in circumstances of rage and regret—made more difficult by our grief. We asked each other for help, and we showed up with our whole hearts, but our hearts were broken and our best efforts could not always make everything right. Our black belts developed wanderlust and travelled to Germany, Mexico, Israel, South Africa, and China.
Someone was always leaving. Someone was always angry. Someone was always crying.
We tried not to put too much onto the narrow shoulders of the young black belt candidate, but at the end of that winter, we were desperate for hope and light. It was time to come together without recrimination or regret, to let down our pall of sadness. It was time to love each other, to laugh. It was time to live again.
I have felt especially broken this year, caught in one of those folds of time that had me wandering the saddest parts of my own history. Small went off to Kindergarten days before my 40th birthday, and I felt five again: scared and lonely and smart and stressed out. Over and over I had to remind myself that her story is not my story, that she is resilient in ways I was not. But motherhood has been described as letting your heart go walking outside of your body, and Small’s vulnerability was nearly unbearable to me, bent as I was with grief.
Somehow, I also got snagged on another moment in my history: when I was seventeen, in the throes of clinical depression, trying to come to terms with my lesbianism, in a coercive relationship with an older woman. Perhaps it was because the student who left the School of Love was of a similar age; perhaps it was because depression folds in on itself like an accordion so that no single episode stands alone, but is magnified by every sorrow that has come before. I felt that moment of my life a lot this year, a moment when I should have been on the cusp of my life, but I was so sad and broken that I could not reach for the gold ring. Some days I could not get out of bed.
There were days this year when I was consumed with regret for the opportunities that passed me by that adolescent year and in the years that followed, when my best energies were devoted to figuring out how to live. Not how to build a successful career or make a great life, but simply how to stay alive: how to keep from getting shipwrecked by sadness, how to choose people and actions that would nourish rather than deplete me. I felt cheated for having to give my youth to this endeavor. I felt ashamed that I had not applied my intellect earlier to professional or financial concerns.
And then: the test.
I did my black belt duty for the first hours, observing and writing comments about the student’s technical strengths and weaknesses. But eventually, the poise and joy and ease and trust of the young woman who was testing overwhelmed me. I was crying more than commenting, and I closed my feedback with a final observation:
“This is a girl who is not broken.”
Too many women I know were terribly broken at that tender age: depressed or suicidal or being sexually abused. So many of us were unable to come into our lives with clear hearts and open spirits. There was a time in my life that witnessing a bold, beautiful, strong young woman would have roused my adolescent envy:
why does she get to live in the light? What about me?
But I am a mama now. And the hope that a girl child could grow up confident and capable with her spirit unbroken is all that I want from this life.
And something else. I hold an image of forgiveness from an essay by Anne Lamott in which she is angry at a child who unintentionally hurts her son. For a while Lamott seethed at the kid, and then suddenly she “made the radical decision to let him off the hook.” She says, “I imagined gently lifting him off the hook of my judgment and setting him back on the ground.”
Sitting in the promotion circle, I jolted into understanding that it is not my fault that it took me this long to find the wholeness that some girls wear like a birthright. It’s a shame that I did not have it in my youth, but it’s not my shame. I thought of all the people who might have helped me back then and the ways that they fell short of what I really needed. And I thought,
what if they were doing the best they could? I thought of our long clumsy year of grief and leaving and getting in one another’s way and I thought,
what if we were all doing the best we could?
I felt myself lifting us all—but most of all myself—off the hook of my judgment. A judgment born of misguided belief that I could have and should have made things turn out any differently than they did.
Katy Mattingly told us at the self defense instructors’ conference that when survivors of violence blame themselves, they are often seeking control. “If only I knew exactly what I did wrong,” the logic goes, “I’ll make sure to
never do it again.”
If only vigilance could keep me from slipping down the rabbit hole of depression or having conflict with people I love. If only it could keep my friends from dying or ever being hurt. If I could take away a fraction of the pain that is carried by the women I love, I would never close my eyes again.
But we can’t be one another’s wholeness. We can only be each other’s students and teachers and sisters on the journey. We can only act as if we love each other. We can only do the very best we can and have hope—the shining hope of a brave girl becoming a triumphant woman—that it will be enough.
Source: Anne Lamott, “Why I Make Sam Go to Church.” From Travelling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Anchor Books, 1999.
Labels: depression, karate, love
