Fuuuuuura

Little squeak 

This friend of mine has been very consciously raising her young daughter outside of stereotypical gender norms. They’ve done quite a number on my friend, and she’s like, “Nope, my kid’s life will be different.”

Her daughter is small for her age, and will probably remain small. This has affected her self-confidence. Earlier this year, my friend decided to tell her daughter a slightly sanitized version of Arya Stark’s journey in GoT, to basically demonstrate how a small girl could learn to be badass.

Six months go by, and the daughter turns from 5 to 6. Her mom asks her what she wants for her birthday. The daughter says, “I want to learn how to fight.” So my friend, who has zero martial arts experience, looks up a place, and they go there.

The moment they get there, my friend is thinking, “This may not be the right place.” It’s a Krav Maga/MMA gym. Lots of burly dudes beating the crap out of each other, basically. Not your kid-friendly karate dojo.

But she doesn’t want to tell her daughter that they have to leave because the place is filled with intimidating men – it would pretty much fly in the face of everything she’s trying to teach her. So she says, “Okay. I don’t know if they have a kid’s class here. Why don’t you go ask who the teacher is, and then ask them?”

So her daughter walks up to one dude, asks for the teacher, then gets pointed to this tattooed, musclebound dude with his head shaved and a goatee. As my friend put, “The guy looked like your bigger, meaner younger brother.”

She trails behind her kid a bit, ready to step in, and listens in. Her daughter walks up the guy and says, “Hi! Do you have classes for kids? I want to learn how to fight.”

The guy looks down at this wee little girl, and he says, “Uh, well, no, we don’t really. Maybe I can talk to your mom and suggest some places for you? This isn’t really a place for little girls.”

Her daughter reaches into her jacket pocket, pulls out a nickel, holds it out to the guy and says, “Valar morghulis.”

The guy takes the nickel, looks at it, then says, totally deadpan: “Valar dohaeris. Of course I can teach you.”

Check it out……

Train and fight!

“What is dead may never die

The Unfolding Self (Ralph Metzner, 1998)

“Each of the many kinds of journeys, with its mythic variations, provides a recognizable symbolic description of a type of transformation experience.

The completed journey always ends with a return, a homecoming, to the ordinary world of conventional reality that was left behind. (…)

People in this phase of the process may feel that they have returned to a place they knew before, but that they now know it with a new and different quality of awareness.

Much has been learned, they may feel, on the outward journey, and these insights and lessons learned about the external world now form the background for a new transition. (…)

To recognize is to re-cognize, to “know again,” to discover again that which was in the beginning. On the return path we get the “shock of (self-) recognition.”

The homeward journey is one of self-revelation, in which we gain insight into our true nature and awareness of the alienation of our ordinary condition. 

We may see, if we are so graced, the original face we had before we were born, or become one with our primordial nature. (…)

The seeker who returns to her family or tribe, bringing gifts of power, healing, or vision, is a transformed individual.

This metaphor is employed in all the spiritual traditions. The ancient Chinese sages spoke of Tao as “the way” or “the track.”

It is “the way that cannot be told,” the way of heaven and earth, that humans are to follow.

This Tao-way we cannot perceive; we can only see its tracks and traces in nature—in patterns of flowing water, in swirls of wood, lines of stone, curling smoke, the veins of leaves and clouds.”

Destined Daughters. It’s in your blood