The Path of the Warrior Pt.9: The Future

It seems reasonable to me that having begun the first post in this series with the origins of the Warrior in prehistory that the last post have an eye to the future.  When I began thinking on this project months ago it was because I looked at mainstream culture and found myself woefully disappointed by their concepts of Warriors.  The concept is always that the Warrior is some elite force, hell bent on violence and domination rather than the intrinsic spirit to fight back against injustice in a variety of ways that do not always require the use of force.  I am for the latter.  On the other hand, being a Warrior to me is an elite calling.  It is not for everyone though anyone can choose to become a Warrior.  It requires courage and sacrifice, much like military service, but it also requires educating yourself to the needs of your tribe and being a resource to that community.  While it is important to recognize the many traits of Warriors, I also recognize that my mission at the outset was fundamentally flawed.  It is not for me to tell others they are wrong about whatever they consider to be a "Warrior" and as much as I might like to try and convince people otherwise it shouldn't be necessary to do it in this manner.  That is what anyone is trying to do when they "redefine" something.  They are attempting to throw out the previous definition in favor of their own.  With an eye to the future, it is a bad idea to start out anything in that manner.

What the future holds I doubt anyone can say for certain.  We all have our ideas.  I see a future of increasingly depleted resources due to the limited availability of fossil fuels among other things.  The Earth itself is finite and the energy we can take from it is finite as well.  Even the technologies that allow us to get energy from other resources, like the sun, are limited in that they require support systems based on petroleum products to remain viable.  Even if we were to suddenly switch to more sustainable energy practices worldwide, the depletion of oil and the impact of humanity’s folly in its applications will still be seen and felt for generations.  The fact is that even if we have not peaked, we will eventually and there are enough people out there making enough money that telling us the truth is not in their best interests.  There are many ideas out there about what the future may look like but it is increasingly obvious that the prospects tend to be dimly viewed by most.  Even in the seemingly utopian futures created by science fiction the only peace we find seems to be among the stars and not here upon the bosom of our Mother.  Others see a future of economic decline unrelated to resources and others see a dystopian future run by machines or aliens.  There are some who still see a utopia in which humanity lives in conjunction with the natural rhythms of the Earth.  As much as I want to see this and expect that eventually that is what will have to happen in order for our species to survive, we are yet a long way from that.  What I do know is that our future is certain to hold human beings otherwise we have no future and it does no harm to prepare for that future whatever it may look like.

As a person who practices an Earth based spirituality, it seems very apparent to me that whatever the future actually holds, our cultural concerns should be geared towards living as a part of nature as much as we can.  I believe that we should create strong traditions and instill those traditions in our children.  Even if they do not follow our traditions into adulthood, they will remember and perhaps, when the time comes that those traditions develop a greater value for them they will remember to practice them and so on down the line of succession from generation to generation.

The method by which to do this has several necessary steps.  The establishment of respect and recognition for our ancestors, the acknowledgement of all people regardless of sex as being equal partners with one another and the encouragement of all people among the tribe to recognize all others equally and with empathy.  We will, someday, be the ancestors of others whether or not we procreate and create those ancestors along bloodlines.  This is true because we are members of communities and tribes and my child will undoubtedly begin to acknowledge the traditions of the community as much as our own day to day family traditions as he will practice them with us.  The founding of traditions now that will incorporate important concepts like equality and justice, conservation and respect for the Earth will be paramount to the cultures that evolve in the generations yet to be.

At its core, tradition is about familiarity.  Traditions create a sense of continuity for those that practice them.  Tradition, as I see it, must act in three ways.  It must remain relevant, it must have a purpose (such as a lesson to teach) and it also must recognize the past while acknowledging the present.  The purpose of holding hands and being thankful for our meal is to place ourselves in communion with one another and the Earth as we undertake the process of taking in life sustaining energy from the Earth.  We rely upon our ecosystem for sustenance and that ecosystem is as much a constantly moving and changing force as we are.  When we share a meal as a family it is a point where we can all enjoy that communion with one another.  It brings a sense of normalcy in a changing world that connects us as a family between our day to day tasks.  In that sense, every living organism is constantly adapting to its environment to sustain it's energy and human beings are no different.  We may believe that we have brought our environment to heel, but the manner in which we have done so makes us ill more than it feeds our bodies.  Every meal is a reminder of the fact that we have either sacrificed our resources or resources have been sacrificed for us.  As all resources come from the Earth, it is the Earth we should be thankful to for her bounty.

It is important to be thankful and in large part I see this tradition as just that, a way of being thankful.  It transcends past, present and future in a way that allows us to recognize what we should be thankful for.

When I begin sword practice I salute the Earth and pledge my Sword to her service and the service of my community.  To do this I first release the sword from it's scabbard.  I then touch the blade to my forehead where my third eye is.  Depending on the sword I use, this is either the unsharpend back of the blade or the flat of the blade.  I envision blue electricity arcing down into the Earth beneath me, suffusing the ground.  From there, I draw energy up through these electric roots, through my third eye, into the blade and then raise my blade to the sky connecting sky to Earth.  I then extend my arm straight out, envisioning that energy flowing from my third eye to the sword.  I pay attention to my heartbeat and this energy begins to take on the rhythm of my heart as it surges.  I thank the powers for another day, another opportunity to seek balance and another chance to be of value to my community and by extension, the Earth.  I open my eyes and return the sword to it's scabbard before I begin practice.  It is a simple ritual and I hold this energy while I practice, then ground it out when I am done.

The reasons for this simple exercise are varied but it boils down, again, to being thankful.  I am essentially joining my energy with that of the Earth and the Sky, becoming a conduit between them.  In a manner of speaking, I feel much like a lightning rod because the interplay of energy between Earth and Sky is constant and does not require me to act as a conduit in any way.  On the other hand, by connecting to these energies I am focusing them through myself.  I connect directly with the forces of nature that exist both within and without.

In September, I attended a “Pagan Weaving” ritual, the experience of which I shared in this blog a couple of months ago.  The second ritual of this kind undertaken annually, it is exactly the kind of tradition that I am talking about and one that I am excited to have been present on the ground floor for (at least for the second year).  The organizers of this ritual comprise those that will be instructing me at Druid College which I am slated to depart for in a day's time.  While I have several ideas about creating traditions that will provide direction and inspiration for future generations, I have no doubt that my education in this direction will help me breath fire into them.

My experience in writing this series of posts has been inspiring for me and in certain ways very inspiring also.  I've wanted to write something like this for a very long time and never managed to really get my thoughts in order around it.  Quite frankly, I feel as though I am leaving a good deal out already.  The good part is that I can always write more and as time continues flowing outward, perhaps I will too.

We all live in an uncertain world that is beautiful and perhaps a bit more dangerous than we would like.  The dangers we face in the world are often boiled down to physical dangers like muggers, murderers, rapists and abusers but those are not the only dangers we face.  We face the danger of spoiling the ground we walk upon, the water we drink and the air we breath.  Is it not time to create a tradition of Warriors that has a desire to address all of these things instead of simply the "obvious" problems?

As I mentioned only two paragraphs ago, I will be attending Druid College for the next 3 years, two of which will be "classroom instruction".  In that time, I hope to begin the process of not only creating new traditions for my tribe but also having ideas and inspirations I have yet to imagine.  However, the time has come to stop sitting upon the sidelines and its time to get into the fight.  To that end, within the next few months, I will begin building an Order of Warriors.  It is not for me or anyone else to "redefine" the Warrior but I do believe that being proactive with an alternative definition is leading by example.  I don't know what it will be called and I don't know exactly what it will look like but it will begin when I have found at least 9 people who are willing to meet monthly for an afternoon of discussion and fellowship.  It will be open to anyone who wishes to be a part;  You need only be human and willing to be a resource of wisdom and aid for your tribe/community.  For those interested, I will provide more details as they come.

If we wish to pass down the wisdom of our own mistakes to future generations then it behooves us to begin now.  The Warriors of our past live on in us as the we will live on in the Warriors of our future.  Honor, tradition, loyalty and community are the things that will carry our message through the generations yet to come.

The Path of the Warrior Pt. 8: The Spirit of the Warrior

This week has not been as prolific in the writing department as last week.  A few days of rather cold weather had my metabolism preparing to slow down and burn less energy in conservancy for the winter and the change took me a bit by surprise as it does every year.  A good dose of coffee and a break from social networking have given me the time and energy to once again forge ahead with Part 8.

Spirit.  I wish I could think of it as something intangible...like a thought or a purpose but to me it is much more than that.  The Spirit of the Warrior is a fire.  It takes in everything you hear, touch, taste, smell and sense.  It consumes these things and that fire spreads from your heart to your hands and bellows out of your mouth like a Dragon breathing flame.  It makes you want to stand up and fight for the things you believe in, the things you know to be true.

What I know to be true is balance.  I believe that balance, harmony, equilibrium or whatever other name you wish to call it, is at the core of every being.  As I have outlined many times in this series of posts, it is the misalignment of humanity with nature that I believe is the central issue with how unbalanced our species has become and that is the fire that consumes me and leads me to act.  Later this month I will be 39 years old.  Not an old man by any stretch (perhaps a teenager may think so though) and yet swiftly approaching middle age.  Years of living unbalanced to the needs of my body and the natural world may mean a shorter existence than I would have liked.  I was caught up in the material world and while I had turned to Paganism several years before the birth of my son, his existence is all the proof I need that the Earth is worth fighting for and defending.

Since I came to that simple realization I feel as though I surge with power and yet is not power over others, it is the surge of the flame of Spirit within me.  It is the line of my ancestors going back thousands of years.  I can hear their cries for battle among the halls of Valhalla, the rivers of the Otherworld, the golden gates of Heaven.  They cry out to me "FIGHT! TO BATTLE!" and I yearn to heed that call, to take up my sword.  I feel that power and know that I control it through my hands and through my eyes and through my tongue.  It transforms everything I see, hear, touch, taste and smell into knowledge and wisdom that is consumed and pours out of me like fire.  The spirit of the Earth is within me.  In the grander scheme, she was the first Mother among us all.  She gave us life and continues to do so.  She is our most common ancestor.  Her descendants are the stars themselves and their descendants might well have been a giant explosion which was the sum of all matter and energy in the known universe, blown out to the expansion of space and time.  Everything that is now, existed once inside that small and incredibly dense piece of matter and energy.  Billions, perhaps trillions of years later, here we are and in a trillion years we may be yet another footnote in the annals of the history of the universe, no less and no more unique or important than any other sentient being to rise or fall in that time.  We are here now though and the fire of spirit runs through us.  It drives us, it compels us and it asks us to live for a reason and perhaps the secret of life is that there is no secret.  Perhaps the secret of life is to believe in something and live as best and as balanced as we can.

The goal I set myself when I began this was to "redefine" the Warrior but in truth, to do so is rather presumptuous.  Instead, I wish to create a new order of Warriors and if that grows and builds upon itself so much the better.  I believe that if that were to happen, it would be a wonderful thing because I also believe that the concepts I have outlined in this series of posts will be valuable to future generations.  Creating an order of "Neo-Warriors" will begin the process of establishing the education and tradition that future cultures might need to avoid the mistakes we have made.  What I envision of course, when looking back on all of this, is something very similar to the Jedi though I doubt that even the arc of progress will guarantee us lightsabers and droids.  What I wish to bring to the table here is the establishment of a group of people who are agents of balance.  I know this, I can do this and I sincerely hope that there are people out there that are willing to help develop this with me.

Spirit is that which connects us with the Earth and through the Earth to all other living things on our own planet and beyond.  The recognition of this is paramount to this re-imagining of the Warrior and the establishment of a new order.  What the future may look like for us and those that do so, will be the subject of the last post in this series.

The Path of the Warrior Pt.7: Education and Action

In the last post in this series I discussed the responsibilities that Warriors have to their community and why.  I also gave some examples to what those responsibilities may look like if we accept that the calling of the Warrior is not that of violence but peace.

In order to accept the responsibility of being a Warrior (in my estimation) I have outlined a bunch of different concepts throughout this series of posts that Warriors should aspire to in an effort to fulfill the necessary and important role of the Warrior in their communities.  In between bits and pieces of environmentalism and political commentary, a structure has taken shape that has it's own direction and velocity and I am unable, nay, unwilling to escape it's grasp.  You see, I have come to terms with who I am even if I have not yet discovered every tiny corner of my heart.  I know myself and I am comfortable with who I am and what I believe.  I am comfortable with this because I have educated myself.  I have some college but have not received a degree yet.  While I believe that a college education has many merits, I also believe that the education that I have provided for myself is what makes me an asset to my community.

I'll take the opportunity here to explain a few things about myself that you may want to know.  Perhaps you do not want to know and you are welcome to skip it though I will try to be brief.

It was not that long ago in my life that I was a self serving, misogynistic prick.  I was a walking hormone and a great believer in Republican/conservative rhetoric to the degree that I would nearly live and breath by it.  I was an angry person then and rhetoric of any kind is like air to angry people.  It gave me a sense of purpose to think that if I joined the NRA and voted Republican I was actually making a difference in the world.

Long ago, I saw a shadow on my wall that was cast by nothing.  There was nobody there and yet the shadow danced and waived until I screamed for my parents who came running and the shadow disappeared around the darkened edge of my door before they could see it.  That among other experiences in my early life led me to understand that there were beings beyond plain sight that I could not explain and I spent a good portion of my adolescent and teenage years trying to learn more about what it could have been.  At that point in my life I had only been exposed to Christianity in any legitimate way though I had read about Wicca and other Pagan religions I passed them off at the time as being a bit of lunacy mixed with misdirection.

My father is so Agnostic he is nearly Atheist, my Mother was raised Methodist and until recently my Brother was a Deacon at his Wesleyan church.  My older sister is Mormon. My early spiritual upbringing was far from non-existent, it was all over the place presenting me with a variety of avenues I might approach (all of which were Christian tradition) and then I met Beth.  Beth was a 35 year old woman fresh out of an abusive relationship when we wound up together.  She was a Wiccan and she first introduced me to witchcraft when I was 24 years old.  Up until that point I knew a bit about Wicca from reading but learned a lot more about the practice from Beth.  During our 3 month courtship, I bought a book about the Northern Tradition called "The Rites of Odin" and while I knew little enough about it even from reading decided then and there that I was what you might now call a "Heathen".  Shortly after Beth and I broke up I returned to Christianity, got myself a nice Christian girlfriend and joined her Pentecostal church.  I had been arrested for operating after suspension of my license (I had been unaware it was suspended for failure to pay a fine at the time) and felt that my life had hit an all time low and that I needed to "Get right with God".  So I threw my energy into Christianity though I never actually spent much time in the Church itself.  Paganism had left an indelible print upon me and I found that I was much more comfortable practicing my worship of God in the temple he created.  Meanwhile I spent a lot of my time listening to conservative talk show pundits and Christian spiritual leaders, eventually beginning to see the overlapping and alarming dissonance that existed between the natural world and what Christianity expected from it.

By the time I met my ex-wife I was an expatriate Christian/Republican and delving a bit further into ecology, environmentalism and earth based spirituality.  I met some new friends online one a Witch, the other a Druid and they explained a lot about their personal spiritual philosophy (Thanks Greenman and Donna!) and then I stumbled across a book entitled "The Bardic Handbook" about 7 years ago.  I read it cover to cover (even though I was really supposed to pace it out a little).  The Author, Kevan Manwaring, described things like honoring the ancestors and Awen and all of these other things that seemed to make perfect sense to me.  So I started reading, feverishly, anything I could get my hands on and by the time that marriage ended I decided that I was on the Path of the Bard.  Even that felt unsettled to me because it described some of what I identified with but not all.

It was when I was reading a story about Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster and how he required the people who fought for him to have had a Bardic education to a certain point (I forget what it is at the moment) that I became really excited.  It was around that time that my marriage dissolved and I began dating another lady (my current wife) not too long after.  Up until that point, she and I had been friends and in fact, many of the books I had read were books she had lent to me.  Our long discussions upon the subject of Earth Based Spirituality eventually blossomed into a romance, then a baby and then a handfasting.   It was about the time that I joined with the local Pagan community that I realized that being a Bard was always a point along the path for me not the clearing at the end.  My wife is the person that taught me how much I already knew instinctively about my own spirituality and how much I had taught myself and over the 4 years we have been together I have expanded that self education greatly.

The point of spelling all of this out is simple.  I have a unique set of experiences that swing from one end of the spectrum of human proclivity almost all the way to the other.  Even though I am sometimes imperfect with the details, I have an intrinsically accurate intuition about things, people and human behavior.  No, I am not claiming superpowers but I also suspect that the cumulative effect of these gifts makes me uniquely qualified to act as a Warrior for my community.  Even though these "gifts" as I referred to them have always been there, I have not always been qualified to be a Warrior for any community let alone the tribe I find myself in now.  It is only through educating myself that I have can consider myself worthy to be an asset to my community.  That is not to say however, that my community feels this way about me.  I am, in essence, new to them and they are still getting to know me in many ways.  Given time, they will either find my presence productive or unproductive.  The early results seem to indicate though, that I am well liked and valued.  Even were that not the case you can bet that I will find a way to be useful though because my tribe means more to me than having some level of notoriety.  Given time they will find a use for me and if I must raise my sword to protect them, metaphorically or otherwise, I will.

The education of our experience is what makes up the core of who we are and what we are willing to give.  Had I never seen the shadow of a man on my door when I was 4 years old I might never have walked this path or learned the things I needed to know before I truly committed myself to it.  My life is full of half-hearted attempts to define or redefine myself and what I have found every time is that I have gotten a little bit closer to doing just that until I met this community and was welcomed by them.  Here, I have found a place where I am valued, where I don't have to define myself in any way that is based on another persons value of me, where I can be a Warrior and lend my protection and where the protection of others is lent to me.

I would encourage anyone who chooses to walk the path of the Warrior to educate themselves as much as they can.  Read history, philosophy, practice social justice and question everything.  Learn, then unlearn, then learn again.  It is only through this type of education that a Warrior equips themselves with the most important weapons they will ever need and that is wisdom, experience and education.  A Warrior needs to know these things because even by example, a Warrior is an educator, an enabler and a role model to others.  By living, by acting and by doing, we forge a path that others might follow long enough to forge their own paths as well.  Warriors are leaders by default, even when they are not asked to be so.

The important thing to understand in all this, at least in my estimation, is that education leads to action.  When we realize that we have been subject to our own cognitive dissonance for too long about anything, the moment of wakefulness that follows can be frightful and disorienting.  It is that moment that defines how the following moments will roll forward.  Action is necessary to order ourselves and our thoughts and take what we have learned forward with us or sink back into lying to ourselves about whatever it is that kept us in the dark.  What is more important is to remember that we all go through this self education and realization.  There is not one person alive that is born with perfect knowledge.  It is what we do with that education that makes it important.

Educating ourselves is a step that Warriors must face as it is the cognitive reality of seeking internal harmony.  Honesty and brevity in understanding our own fears and proclivities and striking a balance with them leads to a cleansing of spirit that allows us to be useful and relevant to our tribe.  It is just this concept, that of the Spirit of the Warrior that we will be discussing next.

The Path of the Warrior Pt.6: Responsibility

In the last post in this series I discussed creating traditions that would guide our descendants  down the cyclical path of time.  While that post could be taken on it's face without including the path of the Warrior as the basis for it's existence, such traditions will become a part of the community that it is the Warrior's calling to protect and support.  In this post, I hope to shore up some of the considerations that we should have when creating traditions that will guide future generations of Warriors more specifically.

In the first post in this series I posited that one of the primary reasons that Patriarchy became an institution was the concept that the male dominated Warrior class became revered in a world of consistent danger and upheaval.  Along with the concept of setting our Warriors upon a pedestal followed the concept of Sovereignty that allowed such men to place more importance upon themselves than upon the people that provided them status.  Of course, I recognize that this is a bit of oversimplification and if I decide some day in the future to devote an entire post to the subject you can bet that the ins and outs of such a project would take up far more space on the interwebs than the total word count of every blog post I have ever written, published or unpublished.  Suffice to say, that is a lot.  For now, I choose to use the wider brush strokes to illustrate my point and the point is this:  Once the Warrior was seen as a person whose community was responsible to them rather than a person responsible to their community, people gave away their own sovereignty.  In my estimation, this loss of autonomy is not unseen in nature, wolf packs are an obvious example of social structure that supports a leader among the population.  Using that same example, the pack alpha also makes certain that the pack has it's needs met.  They may fight violently to protect their status as leader but once a leader begins to become to weak to lead the pack as it once did, younger wolves step in and challenge the alpha's status until a new leader is appointed.  The point here is that this is what works for wolves and other wild dogs because it is energy efficient and successful.  It is a paradigm that can be seen in most social predatory species including humans.  The difference is, that our rapid social evolution has precluded a slower adaptation of these instincts into something that fails the test of energy efficiency.  When 100 people toil to support a single leader who lives in luxury while those that serve them remain in squalor, efficiency is tossed out the proverbial window.  Alpha leaders in the wild hunt, with a few exceptions, hunt along with the pack.  If we were to observe the same thing in nature that we do in humanity, we would see that the alpha wolf sits on a rock while the rest of the pack hunts down game and lays it before them.  Here's a hint: that's not what happens.  There can be little doubt that this is what happened in most early cultures at least to some degree and has been happening ever since.  However, if the same held true today, Clan Chieftains would be more likely to be those whose business acumen was the measure of their contribution to their culture as opposed to martial prowess or the continued success of the Clan which is exactly what has transpired.  Those same wolves, faced with a leader that did not, could not or would not lead the hunt, would no longer follow that leader then fight it out to see who would replace them.  When we look at the history of the Warrior class and recognize that the sovereignty of the tribe was married to the sovereignty of the land (a common Celtic/Gaelic rite was when the newly appointed or elected chieftain literally married the land itself), then we see that common natural instincts developed in uniquely spiritual ways.

It is my not so humble opinion that the Warrior is a resource for the tribe and gives their service freely, without the expectation of recompense or reward.  They do it because they feel compelled to do the right thing by their community and by accepting the title of Warrior, they understand that makes them responsible for defending and supporting them.  It is an honor to be a Warrior among your people and the reward should only ever be that honor and nothing more.  This is not to say that as a Warrior we would not enjoy the fruits of community labor but we do so because we are a part of that community as well.  As a Warrior, if I am given any status within my tribe, I wish it to be a status of value to my community.  An ear for troubles, a friend for advice, a trusted source of wisdom and an objective voice of balance and harmony.  Notice that none of these things are something that I can provide without other members of my tribe recognizing their value.  The value of my service is not what I make of it, but what the members of my community make of it. This is an important distinction.  I happen to think I have many fine ideas and give good advice.  There are times where I may take that advice to others and give it to them freely.  If they do not make use of it, that is their affair.  If they do, and that service seems to them to be of value, they may ask my advice the next time they encounter a crossroads and the value of my counsel is established.  I also recognize though that there are limitations I must set for that involvement.  There are always going to be people in every community that are negative, lazy or ignorant.  They may not pull their own weight or fail to shoulder a fair share of the burden of being a member of a community.  One thing I can say about Pagans is that everyone has at least a little baggage.  The only difference I find between Pagans and more mainstream communities is that Pagans tend to "put it all out there" and in mainstream culture folks tend to want to bury it and pretend everything is alright.  This is precisely why Warriors are so important.  It takes a measure of intestinal fortitude to accept that you have baggage and Warriors help to create a safe space for that.  The problem always comes when one or more person's negativity threatens to upset the apple cart.  This is the place where the Warrior knows to step in and keep the balance, set the harmony and embrace the equilibrium.  That sometimes means pissing people off.  Sometimes it means those folks are just going to need to learn how to deal with their own baggage and recognize it is not the job of the community to carry it for them.  If they reach out though, the community is almost always willing to lend them a hand.

There is more than one path to the goal of being a Warrior in your community. If I make myself available, the individuals of my community place their own value upon me if they come seeking my help or advice.  It is my hope that many of the "battles" our descendants face will be battles that can be settled with words and wisdom not violence and bloodshed.  It may be a vain hope but to me, a true Warrior does not need the smell of blood and the ring of steel to feel like a Warrior, they need only the peace after a well fought battle in whatever way that battle might manifest.  It could be helping out another person with physical labor, a personal problem, good advice for dealing with something or even staying out of it altogether.  It could be taking up the banner of a cause and making a change for the better in their community or it may be accepting that their community isn't ready for the change they see as necessary.  Often, the battle is simply restoring balance to your own life.  When your community recognizes that you are seeking balance, they will seek you out.  The only manner in which they can recognize this is when we project that balance outward.  This requires that we battle ourselves constantly, something that can only be done by being honest with ourselves.  Recognizing others in your community that are not being honest with themselves can be very frustrating but you must also remember that not everyone is cut out to be a Warrior and the decision to walk this path is a difficult one to make and even more difficult to stick to.  The victories of the battles we fight within ourselves is not to reverse but to establish harmony and victory comes in many forms, as does battle.  Why then do we collectively seem to insist that violence is the only manner in which Warriors are allowed to settle problems?  If we are to create traditions to act as guiding principles for our descendants so that they might avoid the mistakes we and our ancestors have made, does it not make sense that we should also cut through the hogwash that media has made into Warriors?

Responsibility to the community MUST be the first call of the Warrior if that Warrior is to have any value to their community.  If the call of the Warrior becomes to act for reward, then the Warrior is not a Warrior any longer, they are a mercenary; a soldier in service to coin.

There are many cultures that have a practiced the concept of a "Life debt".  Wookies in the Star Wars films and books practice this concept as well.  The idea is that if you save someone, you are responsible for their life.  I suspect, though I have not done any research to verify this, that "Life debt" came from a simple concept that if you save someone's life then everything they do from that point on becomes your responsibility.  By saving them, you have enabled them to continue their path in the world.  Why this became an inverse ratio of they are then indebted to you and often acted as a servant or companion until the debt could be paid (in some cultures) or remained with you for life (in other cultures) is a philosophical discussion for another time.  In the context of this discussion though, the Warrior is someone who, by walking the path of the Warrior understands that they owe their community a life debt that can never be paid and yet will work to repay it anyhow.  The manner in which they work to repay this debt can vary depending upon their own personal abilities and gifts but the common cause of community and harmony is always the goal.  If a Warrior is an agent of balance for their community, they need to accept that the balance they seek and espouse also means that they must serve their community.  Sovereignty is personal, not bestowed.  Each of us is a sovereign individual capable of making our own choices.  The Warrior as an agent of balance must seek a method of balancing themselves with the rest of their community.  They cannot do so if they operate under the assessment that those in their community owe them something.  When they feel they owe their community though, their works are done out of Love and fellowship.  When I stop to think about the concept of "world peace" it strikes me how that lofty goal isn't necessarily about actually reaching that destination but in uniting for a common cause to reduce war and violence.  This is something every Warrior should think about in the context of their own lives and the lives of their community.  The wars we fight now over resources like oil are more to preserve our own opulent lifestyle than they are to ensure balance and harmony with nature and with ourselves.  In that context, serving and sacrificing ourselves for our communities (the highest calling of the Warrior in my estimation) is not about taking the safest path, it is about doing what is best for the good of those you serve.

Servitude though can also come in many forms.  Blind obedience is never a smart option for a Warrior because it reduces the Warrior's personal sovereignty and character as being tied to the whim of another for whom their skills are merely a tool to be used haphazardly.  Such may not always be the case but eventually it always becomes  the case.  How many are the stories of good Kings having raised children who perverted their every good deed?

Responsibility to the community is the first and greatest calling of the Warrior.  It does not mean that as a Warrior you are required to give up your autonomy and blindly follow the will of others.  It means that as Warriors we must educate ourselves to aptly understand what our community needs of us so that we can aid each other as much in times of ease as in times of duress and of peril.  We need not be the wisest or the most brilliant or even the most intelligent.  What we need to be is in tune and in harmony with our community.  To do that, we need to learn many things and unlearn many others which will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Path of the Warrior Pt. 5: The Future of Tradition

In previous posts in this series I've talked about where Warriors come from, where we have been, where we are now and hinted at where I believe we should be going.  In the latter context, I believe that we need to establish new traditions that we can pass along to the next generation of Warriors so that they can adequately protect and support the communities and tribes that will develop down the road.

It is no secret that I believe the American Empire is failing.  I do not believe (though I once did) that this will be the result of some major meltdown or Earth shattering apocalyptic scenario either.  Instead, I believe that the arc of our culture is tied to the massive quantities of cheap, abundant energy provided to us by the extraction of oil from the Earth's mantle.  In essence, whether it is tomorrow or 300 years from now, it is a fact that we will eventually run out of oil.  It is not a renewable resource on the time frame we would need it to be under the best of circumstances.  I rather believe the forecast that Oil will be all but dried up in 20-30 years though I won't deny hoping that estimate is wrong by several hundred.  Despite the timeline, we use oil in increasing demand for everything.  Anytime we assess the value of something we need to assess what our lives would look like if it suddenly disappeared and without oil our lives take on an entirely different set of values.  It would be a great disservice to my tribe and community to make the assumption that "they" (whoever the mysterious "they" happen to be) are suddenly going to pull something out of their asses that is going to provide the same level of cheap energy that oil does.  Like all civilizations, the fall of empire is predicated by the availability of whatever resources led to it's rise.  There is no doubt that the rise of American empire is tied directly to the flow of oil and that flow is waning.

The point of all of this is to indicate that whether it is immediate or long range, our culture will be shifting down the slope of decline at ever increasing speed as the future unravels.  As this happens, we can expect that decentralization will occur at relatively the same pace.  When the military can no longer afford to fuel it's tanks they can no longer roll them into neighborhoods and point them at people in a manner threatening enough to convince them to stop growing their own food.  That level of decentralization will return us to smaller communities and trade will likely occur between people, not people and banks.

There is little to suggest that we will once again live in wattle huts and act as hunter gatherers but communities will likely need to pool resources together in a manner that benefits all and this is where the Warrior will once again find their place as the protector and supporter of the community culture.  In the context of a long decline, most communities will likely have the opportunity to slowly adapt to the changing paradigm of their time.  Future generations will likely never know the bounty that we have now and therefore have nothing to compare it to their own years upon the Earth.  It is therefore imperative that we create traditions now that will help our descendants to honor their own ancestors (of whom we number) in a way that gives them information enough to avoid our same mistakes.

In the complex cycle of human existence we have many common experiences with our ancestors.  It has been shown many times that the rise and fall of human civilizations follow a similar course and no doubt there will be more civilizations in the future that look much different than those we have experienced and yet have a similar set of common experiences.

It is not enough to me that we look around us and gift our descendants with the folly of our throwaway culture.  Oceans mired in trash; wildlife sick with radioactive waste; fields fallow with chemical residue, all because we allowed a handful of people to make decisions that benefit them financially while allowing us to shop at their big box stores for food that made us sick.

That is not the tradition I wish to hand down to my descendants and I doubt that anyone else would disagree with me save, perhaps, for those who have made a good deal of money by pillaging the Earth of her natural resources.  It is here of course that my Pagan spirituality truly raises it's head and begins breathing fire for the traditions handed down to us by more mainstream religions have been perverted into the acceptance and tolerance of disassembling nature for the heady pursuit of financial gain.  When it is told to you by your God that you needn't worry about the state of the Earth for you will be rewarded with a glorious kingdom after death in which there will be no pain, no suffering and no trash littered upon the streets of gold then there is nothing wrong with destroying the Earth, after all, the rapture awaits.  However, it is the Earth based spirituality of Pagan nature that honors the ancestors and seeks to create new traditions to pass down to our children that are centered upon the rhythm of balance and harmony that nature proffers all things that to me, makes the most realistic sense of the world.

Of course, I am very biased since I am a "Pagan" myself.  However, it seems to me even from an objective point of view that those who honor history through their ancestors and those who honor the earth through spiritual practice are more likely to pass down the relevant information to their own descendants that will encourage future generations to avoid the same mistakes we have made.  I say encourage because in point of fact, our species should have learned it's lesson now many times but has failed to do so.  On the other hand, hope springs eternal.

What our "Traditions of the future" need to incorporate for the Warriors of tomorrow is a conscious embodiment of responsibility.  As I pointed out in the last post, violence creates limited outcomes and so the Warrior cannot allow themselves to be constantly backed into that one single corner no matter how much modern context wishes them to portray violence as the primary tool by which Warriors complete the tasks they take upon themselves.  We must teach that being a Warrior is a philosophy, a responsibility and most importantly, a series of actions intended for the benefit of the community.

As a Pagan, I celebrate the 8 major holidays of the wheel of the year.  Saimhain, Yule (Winter Solstice), Imbolc, Ostara, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Mabon.  While the celebration of these holidays can be esoteric in nature, each of them represent an important point in the passing of the solar year as it relates to our biosphere.  In fact, many of the older holidays celebrated by our ancestors held traditions that had a practical as well as spiritual element to them.  At Saimhain, the weaker animals of the herd (Cows, sheep, etc.) were killed off and stored for winter food.  The stronger animals were run between  two bonfires so close that it would singe their hair, thereby killing parasites without truly harming the animals.  With herd animals packed in tight over the winter to conserve energy by sharing warmth, it makes perfect sense that you would want to avoid having them riddled with parasites that might jump in between the animals and make them sick.  If you ever have time to review the cattle raid stories of Irish mythology, you may begin to understand the immense value placed upon these animals.  Cattle represented life for the tribe.

This is an excellent example of how our traditions must reflect practical applications to the way our descendants will live in the future.  The tough reality is though, that we really have no manner of knowing how they will live.  We can project ideas about what that will look like but we cannot really tell what that may actually look like.  So we must also create traditions that can be extrapolated and modified for the changing times that our descendants will encounter.

As I believe I have mentioned before, I have a young son.  While he was still floating around in his mother's womb I had the idea that we should create a family tradition of creating something for our family members to thank them for being a part of our lives.  It has always struck me oddly that on our birthdays we are the ones who receive gifts when in practice, we should be thanking others for the impact they have upon our lives that makes each added year so valuable to us.  In my minds eye, I imagine a future where this tradition has taken root in a fantastic way, where people receive gifts from one another all throughout the year, to thank them for the indelible and positive impact they have had.  It's a wonderful dream even if it seems a bit overwhelming at present to think of all the people I would need to make gifts for in the next 16 days if I were to begin now.  However, that is not to say that it cannot be done.  In fact, I may get started after this post is completed.

The example above, while not in active practice, gives an idea of what I am going for here.  Our traditions should also consist of ways that help to tie our community together.  The birth of a child is a gift to the tribe.  It seems important that a child recognize that they rely on the tribe for their survival and therefore thank them for their support.  Of course my idea has it's flaws but I like it nonetheless.  I do however doubt that my parents will ever sign off upon not spoiling their grandchild on his birthday.  That said, to begin a tradition like this it might best to begin small.  My family could make small gifts for everyone when it was time for their birthday that they could give out as a thank you.  Something more than "Party favors", these could be gifted to people in a way that makes them understand that they are a special and important part of our lives.

So, to recap:  Traditions should begin simply so that they are capable of growing organically to meet the changing needs of the future; traditions should embody the responsibility individuals have to the community; traditions should foster a sense of community among individuals; and  they should also have a practical element to them.

I am sure that there is much more to it than these four simple tenets and as this is an evolving concept I am sure that in time (perhaps with the help of others in my community, *HINT, HINT*) we can create traditions that will last down through the ages.  One tradition that I have recently become involved with is the Pagan Weaving, the experience of which I wrote about in an earlier post.  A yearly ritual, this is a way for Pagans all over the State of Maine to come together and share thoughts and ideas for the future of our community.  In time, I hope to create similar traditions a bit closer to home for others in my community that cannot make the trip south.  It is experiences like this that are needed to underscore our community and bring us together in word and in deed.  It is just this type of community experience that will help to draw us together as resources continue to wane.  If those resources do not evaporate as I expect they will, our community will be that much closer and that much more resilient which is not a bad thing no matter how you look at it.

Tradition will become an important part of any future regardless of limited or unlimited resources.  Let me give you a hint, there is no such thing as the latter but that is beside the point.  The most important tradition that a Warrior must respect will be traditions that underline the responsibility of taking the path of the Warrior in the first place.  Responsibilities I will discuss in the next post.

Path of the Warrior Pt. 4: Modern Warfare

In the last post I discussed a bit about the use and breadth of Violence as it relates to the Warrior and hope that I made a case for the context that a Warrior need not be prone to violence nor employ violence to be a Warrior which tends to run counter to modern beliefs about those who claim the title.  One more thing I would like to add about that (which is a response to the comment of a dear friend of mine via social media) is this:  The use of Violence provides limited outcomes to any scenario.  The Warrior should always be careful to remember this as limited outcomes often prevent the possibility of good outcomes.  Violence, in my opinion, should be utilized only when the potential outcomes of not employing violence have been so severely limited that there is no other reasonable option.

In modern times, what we have is a focus on the violence of the Warrior and not upon the most important tenets of what the Warrior represents for their tribe or community.  In media (Film, Television and Literature) the concepts that have been common to the Warrior class for thousands of years often play second fiddle to the violence used by the "Warrior" to solve the problem presented before them.  It is certainly there, it can be seen when the main character has his or (less often) her moment of doubt as to whether their plan for setting right to wrong will work or whether it is worth the effort, right before they let loose a flurry of .50 caliber bullets and explosions at the mean kingpin of crime that accidentally slaughtered their village.

I tend to prefer tragic heroes to those who end up smiling and getting the girl at the end of the story because most often this is how the Warrior ends their life:  Blood and pain.  Of course, it need not be real blood or physical pain but even as a metaphor it is not the same as dying comfortably in bed surrounded by loved ones.  Historically, our tribal ancestors (especially those from European ancestry) looked down upon those who died this way.  To them, the greater glory of the battlefield was to be admired.  Dying while in combat wrote the Warriors name into books of those who might sit at the table of Odin waiting for Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world story.  Even a cursory look at the mythologies of our ancestors often showed that the Gods looked with favor upon those who rose to hero status because they took the field as Warriors.

Today, we tend to tell our children (after a fashion) that the only manner in which they can achieve such hero status is to go oversees to foreign shores and shoot people from 100 yards away or push a button from 100 miles away.  We now have drones that can be flown from half a world away in time for the pilot to wipe out a small village of people and be home in time for dinner.  This is not the Warrior culture of our ancestors and to mistake it as such is folly.  There were times when our ancestors would settle inter-tribal conflict by single combat, when Warriors faced off and looked each other in the eye while swinging their weapons.  Today we have snipers, missiles and drones.

The point here is not to berate the military.  In fact, I have a great respect for the women and men who joined the armed services because even if I do not agree to the uses our military is put, I believe earnestly that those who choose to serve do so in the belief that this is a great nation and are willing to support it, with force if necessary.  However, what makes these folks Warriors has less to do with their service to their country than it does with their service to one another.  In essence, military personnel, especially those in direct combat operations, often rise to the level of being a Warrior because of the profound sense of support and protection they provide to their comrades at arms.  As a Warrior, I can respect that even if I cannot respect the mission to which they are assigned.

Robert Heinlein, in his seminal work "Starship Troopers" once said of War that:

"The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--'older and wiser heads,' as they say--supply the control. "

This quote, while taken from a page of science fiction, demonstrates the difference between the Warrior and the soldier aptly in my opinion.  A soldier is not required to think for themselves beyond carrying out the orders given by those who see them as a tool of war.  It is not for the sniper or the Drone pilot or the missile boat commander to question why they are placing ordinance on a birthday party, it is only their place to make it happen.  Where Warriors tend to flourish within the ranks of the military is often in the units of soldiers who need to rely upon one another to survive.  That sense of duty to one another and connection to each other is what creates Warriors, not the wanton violence of the theater of war.  It is exactly the willingness of a soldier to place the well-being of the group before their own personal interest that makes them a Warrior.  In this manner it can be said that a great many warriors were created in the crucible of military service.

What we need today from our Warriors is not the willingness to impose violence but the willingness to fight for the principles of our communities.  This could easily be different from community to community but it remains the same throughout in the sense that the values of the tribe require protection and support by those who are willing to step into the space between sword and shield.  Our culture is in decline and most people recognize that to be true even if they care not to admit it.  The consistent wearing down of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in our society has created an foreboding that I see more and more inherent on social media.  The messages of light and love are staggered throughout with outrage over the disrespect we have shown our common Mother, the Earth and the "inalienable" rights afforded us by our founders.  One can barely deny the credible claims of climate change, man made or otherwise, while simultaneously shouting alarm at the overwhelming lack of social justice in our culture.  Our future, without those willing to fight for our communities and protect them in a myriad different manners, is a bleak one for certain.  If we should wish for something to survive us, it is now that we need to consider educating the next generation of Warriors that will carry our traditions into the future and that will be the subject of the next post in this series.

The Path of the Warrior Pt.3: Violence

There are a lot of complicated issues when we talk about human nature.  It is not complicated because of nature, it is complicated in the manner that we wish to make excuses for our behavior that exist outside of nature.  As a species, we tend to think of ourselves as apart from the wilderness when in reality, we are as much a part of the wilderness as any other organism in nature.  The only thing that separates us from nature is our lofty impression of ourselves as being greater than what we see out in that wilderness.  In large part, it is terrifying for us to consider being out there like other animal for two simple reasons:  1.) Most of us could not survive and 2.) Without the technology we have cultivated we cease to be apex predators.  This desire and necessity to be at the top of the global food chain will not serve us when we can no longer fuel our technology with cheap and easily obtainable fossil fuel resources but that is a topic I will discuss another time.  The short version is that like any Warrior worth their salt, the cultivation of mind and spirit should take place before the physical aspects of violence should enter the equation.  In essence, now is the time for us to cultivate the next generation of Warriors by accepting a new paradigm that places more importance on Spirit and intellect than upon martial prowess.  In this way, the Warriors that follow us down the path of history will be more valuable members of their culture than the point and shoot violence that we expect of our Warriors today.  In the last post, I discussed Warrior codes, outlined expectations of conduct among Warriors and their responsibilities.  Part of the reason (in my opinion) that such codes came into existence is that Warriors, by the nature of their existence, possessed in some manner authority over life and death because they were trained to use violence in the protection and support of their community.  Warrior codes provided a framework by which that violence should be turned against threats to the community and not the community itself even though that did not necessarily stop those who had no morality to begin with from doing both.

I've heard it said more than once that War is an inherent part of the human condition.  This is usually stated by those that desire to convince us that the acts of war and with it the acts of violence perpetuated by war are a byproduct of this genetic predisposition.  I call bullshit.  As human beings, we are no more prone to violence than any other species on our planet.  When we look at organisms in Nature though, we tend to see violence for 3 basic reasons:  Defense and control of available resources, Mating/social hierarchy and sustenance.  I have never heard of packs of wolves or herds of deer going to "war" with one another.  If I were to hazard a guess, there are a certain number of instincts coupled with environmental parameters that determine how animals in the wild interact during resource scarcity.  However, I am no biologist though I tend to think of myself having an above average grasp for a layman of how things tend to work in nature that is one part intuition, one part understanding my own natural instinct (most of the time), 3 parts reading and talking to people who know more than I do and two parts watching documentary films about animals in the wild.

In essence, violence in the wild is about energy.  Every organism requires a certain amount of energy for subsistence.  When an organism finds an environment that provides them with more than enough energy to survive, that also means that they have enough energy to protect it and this is where the concept behind territoriality comes in.  What is more important is that we can see this, at least to some degree, in almost every organism in Nature, including us.  After all, when a human being has a violent impulse it behooves us to ask the question where that impulse comes from.  When we look at examples of extreme violence perpetrated by one or more people, our minds tend to simply assume that they were some deranged crazy person even the event was planned meticulously.  This type of pre-planning does not lend itself to insanity in most cases.  Here is my two cents before we move on:

We may believe that we have, through the use of our "advanced intellect", transcended the instincts that kept us alive in the wild when we were little more than roaming packs of tribal cavemen but the truth is that we have not.  In essence, it took us millions upon millions of years to develop the instincts that we used and since we began spamming our environment with more and more copies of ourselves and built complex civilizations upon the backs of our ancestors we have not actually evolved as quickly as we would like to think.  Evolution takes time and pressure, much like geology, and especially due to our technology (thanks to millions of years of stored solar energy listed as "black gold", we have been able to proliferate our species across the Earth in even the most inhospitable regions to which other animals require specific adaptation through nature.  There are reasons that people don't live in the middle of the desert or the middle of Antarctica that have nothing to do with air conditioning or heating.  They have everything to do with the fact that as adaptable as the human race tends to think of itself, the physical adaptations needed to thrive in those environments would take too long for us to develop that we can expect to gain in the immediate future.  By comparison, in the same time it took our species to develop the instincts to successfully thrive upon the African continent before we expanded outward, Penguins have been adapting to extreme cold and Camels to extreme dry heat.  For us to adapt to such environments without the use of tools would require a great amount of time and evolution, perhaps more than we have left as a species.  So too we have not developed the instincts necessary to live in such climates  Continued use of technology will likely prevent us from needing to adapt and therefore our species, on the physical level is impossibly stymied in a constant eddy along the river of evolution.  The connection here is that because we (largely) live in a culture in which we needn't learn the natural rhythms of our habitat in order to survive, we seem to think that we are unattached to the instincts we developed over our long history that enabled our survival.  Suppression of those instincts despite their insistent presence leads us to behavior that is recognizable only to those who are paying attention in a certain manner.  However, that is just my opinion.  Eventually, as our dependence upon cheap energy wanes, we will once again need to live by the standards Mother Nature set for our species and all other species and we may, if we are fortunate, be able to evolve in the way it was intended for all organisms to evolve...organically.

Now, let me connect the two concepts.  Both the aggressive violence enacted by "deranged" individuals and the concept of instinct as it relates to energy resources.  First, in order to truly understand the point here you must accept that human beings are predators.  We share many of the characteristics of other predators including two eyes set in front of us so that we are capable of judging the distance between us and our prey.  Other primates, though often considered cute and cuddly in Youtube videos, share similar predatory instincts and characteristics as well.  Being a predator means that we do indeed have the capacity for violence and the instincts to use it but what happens when our technology is advanced to the point where we no longer have a natural outlet for those instincts?  There have been some very interesting studies done that discern a credible link between shopping and the satisfaction of Hunter/Gatherer instincts inherent in our species.  The same parts of the brain that indicate increased dopamine levels when someone gathers a harvest successfully are activated when another person goes to the store and buys something that they really want or feel that they need.  I find it very compelling evidence that the two are linked and so did the studies.  With this example we can see there are instincts that, lacking another reasonable outlet, find a way to manifest.  I believe that in some manner, the same instincts for violence that we have no reasonable outlet for also manifest in the aggression shown by those who go on killing sprees.  My guess is that for whatever reason, that violent instinct is a more exposed nerve for people who snap like that and eventually they just break and start hurting and killing as many people as they can.  It seems as though one predicating factor is that many people who engage in such violence were "loners" which might lead one to believe that they felt marginalized by mainstream culture.  Acting aggressively to defend or secure resources has no real place in our culture anymore since resources (generally) are plentiful.  However, when people are loners and have no resources or community with which to integrate, they often have no outlet for violence because there is no common cause under which they can be of service to their community.  Given that Warriors, even historically, were not simply persons of violent intent, some of that energy was put to other uses when they were not fighting. The manifest violence in video games and cinema are a poor substitute for the violence necessary to satisfy our instinct to protect our resources or struggle to common cause, especially when those resources seem limited to those for whom violence and rage are a second nature.  However, it is also important to remember that such things, while not necessarily the cause of violence, do provide a catalyst by allowing the person in question to be taught that violence relieves some of the pressure those instincts present.

So far I have explained some of what I believe about the presence of violence in nature and where it comes from in our own nature as well.  It would be a gross misrepresentation to make the suggestion that violence has no place in the calling of the Warrior.  History and Nature demonstrate that violence has been the purview of the Warrior from before recorded history.  I have fought this particular battle on many fronts over the last few months as I was developing the concepts behind the presentation I did for Pagan Pride Day.  What I encountered were people who were unwilling to accept the suggestion that a Warrior did not necessarily have to be a violent person in order to be a Warrior and this was most often expressed to me by people who would, in the same breath, suggest that our instincts are the sad remnants of a bygone era of human evolution and have no more place in our lives than living in a cave might.  Personally, I find this type of reasoning rather hypocritical on more than a few levels but the primary source of my frustration is this:  If we are capable of "evolving" socially away from our baser instincts then why should anyone be able to say that Warriors are incapable of evolving past the point of needing violence to be considered a Warrior?  On some level, I agree that our species possesses violent instincts but I would also posit that those instincts are no more or less present than they are in any other organism.  To me it is hypocritical to say that we can eschew the one and fail to accept the other, especially when we do not live in resource scarcity.  To be sure, there are many millions of people in the world for whom resources are scarce but that is not because resources are scarce it is because the world chooses not to share the vast resources we have to see that people are fed and have roofs over their heads.  For people who live in such places (some right here at home in the United States), the term "Warrior" might well mean an act of violence to ensure the continued support and protection of the community but this does not necessarily have to be so if we can wipe out the poverty that creates that necessity.  In essence, there is really no need for violence in our culture and yet it remains pervasive.

I know many people, both smart and intellectually challenged who will make the case for the "Enter my home to take my possessions and you will leave in a body bag" mentality.  For me, this predisposition to possessions is missing the mark on a grand scale.  I would much rather lose my television than take another human life just for the point of "That's my TV and you can't have it" but there is also the point that in this day and age you can never be certain that a person entering your home to steal your belongings will not do you harm to get them.  It is the same with capital punishment for me.  Capital punishment should not even be termed as such.  The prerequisite for terminating another human life for committing any crime should be simply that their continued existence represents a clear and constant threat to others.  The same holds true for those that might want to steal my TV.  If they are a clear and present danger to my life or the life of my family I will raise my sword against them.  I am capable of that but I would much rather take the TV off of the wall myself, see them out and call the police than to take their life.  The element that I most wonder is, in that moment of choice, which will be the correct path?  There are so many people in the United States that want to walk around brandishing firearms like it is the old west because they feel that to do so will ensure continued security.  This idea that we we might wander into a firefight at any second is unlikely to the point of insanity.  What I find is that the need to carry a firearm, ultimately an intensely destructive device, often comes more from insecurity and fear than it does from a feeling of balance and harmony.  The likelihood of dying in a vehicular accident far outweighs the threat of dying from violence and yet people consistently get behind the wheel and speed to their next destination taking many crazy risks along the way, including those who have a firearm strapped to them.

One need not be violent by nature to understand and respect the language though and I would certainly propose that any Warrior, peaceful or otherwise, be at least passing fair in the language of violence as violence can be a valuable instrument should it become necessary to restore balance.  This of course is a deeply personal choice and there are many more ways to be a Warrior without resorting to or training in martial skill.  However, the application of violence to restore balance can have many unintended consequences that even a well balanced and intelligent Warrior cannot foresee.  To me, it is crucially important that anyone who chooses to learn a martial art of any kind be working towards harmony as discussed in the last post in this series.  Violence is one tool among many and should not be the first to be used unless there are no other options available.  For my own part, I train with sword, spear and shield.  I am training currently in how to aptly use the Katana (Kenjutsu) at which I am passing fair.  My occupation has trained me in unarmed self defense techniques which, added to many others over years of practice and experience make me (again) passing fair at the utilization of violence to reach a desired outcome.  Generally however, I prefer diplomacy over any other application.  I am prepared for violence but in actuality, it is rather unlikely that I will ever have to employ the use of a sword, spear or shield in the routine of my life.  There is however, something to be said about the feeling of having a sword in my hand, a shield on my arm or the thrust of a spear going into an imaginary opponent.  Training in this manner allows me an opportunity to vent those violent instincts in a way that is supremely constructive.  It allows me time to meditate and think upon the things that concern me and the things that enlighten me.

As a species, we have turned our violent heart against nature herself in an effort to continue a way of life that is unsustainable in the long term so that we may remain comfortable in the short term.  It may be that once we are down the backside of decline our Warriors may need to more readily embrace violence to serve their communities but that time is not now.  It is now that we should be indoctrinating our next generation of Warriors by creating new traditions that will help all people to understand the value of all life and the cost of taking life without need.

There will always be those who cling desperately to the concept that a willingness to violence is the factor that separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to being a Warrior.  It is my opinion that in large part, this is due to media depictions that rely upon age old preconceptions that focus more upon the fear and threat of violence from others, and the necessity of stopping that violence by the Warrior (hero) by the use of violence that has us rather misinformed about the nature and service of the Warrior to our culture.  There is a difference between a soldier and a Warrior that is unspoken by many.  A soldier takes orders from another and carries them out at the behest of the body politic.  In my view a Warrior does what a Warrior does because it has a direct correlation to the protection and support of their tribe or community.  While soldiers and Warriors may have many things in common, it remains in my view that a soldier can become a Warrior but a Warrior can never be a soldier.  I will be exploring the differences between the two in the next post.

The Path of the Warrior Pt.2: Warrior Codes

One thing that frequently occurs when you try to define anything in a new way is that you encounter those who are unable to break from the classic context of a term and will violently oppose anyone who tells them that their version of something is outdated or impractical.

I won't make too much a show of it but I do believe that the contextual definition of the term "Warrior" as it is perceived by many needs some fiddling.  We can wax poetic about our ancestors as much as we wish, but we are products of our time and culture as much as they were.  Honoring and respecting them means filling the same niche in our culture as they did in theirs.  Defending and providing for the tribe was first and foremost what the charge of the Warrior is about and that is, in large part, what I am trying to point out in this series of posts.  What does that niche look like now and how can we, women and men who are far cries from the tough, no frills warrior of our ancestors, hope to fill that niche?

In the first post in this series I talked about those ancestors and pointed out some of the commonalities they shared across cultures.  In this post, I seek to take aim at a relatively modern development:  The Warrior Code.

I had originally intended to look at specific Warrior codes and break them down, specifically Bushido and Chivalry.  There are a great many people however that I feel may become offended by my interpretations of either or both of these Warrior codes of conduct and the purpose of all of this is not to offend, not even to educate, but to discuss.

The only problem I have with either Bushido or Chivalry as warrior codes is simple:  They are too rigid. Rigidity creates centralization and does not take into consideration the needs of individual communities as much as it should.  For instance, the 7th Virtue of Bushido is loyalty.  The Samurai were duty bound to commit ritual suicide for violating loyalty to their liege lord and many did so to avoid disgrace as it was considered a manner to reclaim your honor to die that way.  Even if that liege lord was a petty, merciless thug (and many were), his Samurai had to do what they were told.  There were a great many more factors to it than Samurai simply following orders but the drift I am hoping that you will catch is simple:  If a warrior intends to support and defend her/his own community, then doesn't it seem a bit of a stretch to kill those people on the order of the local Retainer or warlord?  Unfortunately, things like that happened all the time and it wasn't simply because a Lord or Retainer told their Knights and Samurai to go slaughter innocents.  It happened because those who were trained and given the power to grant death under protection of the aristocracy had no intention of following any moral code no matter how many times they might have sworn to it as long as they had land and title.  Both Chivalry and Bushido were widely accepted and both Knights and Samurai boasted great numbers, yet only a pittance compared to the total number really applied themselves to fulfilling the tenets of their warrior codes.

While both Chivalry and Bushido have their merits neither really speaks to me as being truly inclusive of my own personal philosophy, nor do they speak specifically enough about the concepts I hold dear to my Warrior heart.

So, I created my own Warrior code.  It's tenets are something I can live by but not so comfortably that I feel I have nothing to achieve.  I won't pretend that I am perfect, I stole most of it from Bushido.  As a Warrior code I rather prefer Bushido.  It is simple, it calls on the warrior to weigh their decisions before making them and it holds them to honorable word, deed and thought.  In my opinion, it is a head above Chivalry which was originally a set of instructions for wooing ladies of the court.  In essence, a Knight may lay his cape over a muddy puddle in order for a lady to cross it but a Samurai who held Bushido as his code would lay himself over the puddle and never think another thing about it.

So, the changes I made are simple.  I added a virtue, Harmony, something I felt was missing from the overall picture.  It could easily be said and perhaps rightly so that if one follows all eight virtues of Bushido then what I added need not be spoken.  That is all well and good but I also feel that it deserves mentioning so I included it.  I also included my personal definition for each and named it something different.  Perhaps it will be difficult for some people to swallow but if that is the case, it is not my intent to improve upon nor culturally appropriate.  I have long believed that if you see something that works and add your own spin on it then it is not cultural appropriation, it is cultural respect.  This should not be confused with the context of wearing Native American brave costumes on Halloween.  People like that should have to face down a Native or better yet an entire Tribe of Natives, get their blessing and then deposit the costume in the nearest incinerator...

I do not call myself a Samurai nor do I don the traditional clothing and armor of a Samurai.  What I do have is a deep and abiding respect for their ways, traditions and culture which is a reason that I was so willing to not only adopt Bushido as a code but also adapt it in a manner befitting my own philosophy.

To set it apart, I decided to call it "The Nine Fold Path of the Warrior".  I wanted to do it in Gaelic but, quite frankly, I don't know Gaelic (although I am, at some point, intending to learn).  The 9 virtues are as follows:

I.  Harmony
The Warrior seeks harmony in three ways:  Physical, Mental and Spiritual.  In seeking harmony on all three planes, the Warrior enters their first, last and most prolonged combat.  The Warrior is a human reflection of Nature, constantly at war with itself, constantly shifting back and forth over a fulcrum in an effort to maintain stability, harmony and balance.

II.  Rectitude
The Warrior sets a goal and decides on a course of action to achieve that goal.  They do not waiver, they do not back down.  This is why the Warrior must always make a decision based upon consideration of Balance and Harmony.  Any course of action that begins to upset Harmony and Balance must be reconsidered and a new plan put in place.  Warriors may do this many times but the goal will remain the same unless it is discovered that the goal is not reflective of harmony.

III.  Courage
The Warrior will know fear and so the Warrior will learn courage.  Courage is not the absence of fear but the determination to overcome fear in service of Harmony and Rectitude.

IV.  Benevolence
A Warrior is a person who makes it their responsibility to change their own life in an effort to be of service to to others.  This means that the Warrior becomes a force for change when needed and change requires benevolence, the placing of others needs before the Warrior's own.  A true Warrior will do this not because it is a part of his Warrior code but because it is the right thing to do.

V.  Courtesy
The Warrior displays courtesy to others, even at times, those who identify themselves as the Warrior's enemy.  The Warrior does this because they can.  They are fighting a war with their own Harmony on the Physical, Mental and Spiritual levels and should not allow themselves to be dragged into petty rivalry.  Such issues are about ego.  A Warrior does not need others to feel exactly as they do, a Warrior needs only to know through the battles they have fought, that they know and understand the path they must take.  Knowing this allows the Warrior to be courteous even with those who refuse to return that courtesy.

VI.  Honesty and Sincerity
A Warrior, in order to be a resource to their community must be Honest and Sincere.  In this way, those who come to the Warrior for advice or assistance will know and understand that what the Warrior says is what they mean.  Knowing this allows the Warrior to be a quantifiable presence in their community.  Honest and sincere, open communication is essential to a good working relationship within the community the Warrior has accepted the responsibility of supporting and protecting.

VII.  Honor
Honor is a reflection of personal dignity and value.  The Warrior achieves a state of honor by fighting the battles within themselves towards the goal of harmony on the physical, mental and spiritual levels.  In this way, the Warrior knows and understands their strengths, weaknesses and limitations and has a legitimate understanding of their own worth.

VIII.  Loyalty
The Warrior's first loyalty is towards harmony.  Beyond that, it is the purview of the warrior to decide whom they extend Loyalty to.  Loyalty should never be blind devotion but a measured and well thought out consideration of what that Loyalty represents.  If they find that their loyalty is somehow misplaced, the Warrior should rescind that loyalty as a matter of honor.

IX.  Character
The Warrior is true to who they are and what they represent.  They reflect this in their everyday actions, words and deeds.

So, there are my Nine virtues...the Nine Fold Path of the Warrior.  You may notice a few things about this.  I did not use any gender specific pronouns.  I believe that Women, Men, any combination thereof or any neutral variant can be a Warrior.  To me, there is no limit to who can be a warrior.  This is largely because becoming a warrior is such a personal choice that even though I feel qualified to present and discuss the topic, I do not believe it is for me or anyone else to place limitations on someone because they do not represent a specific enough demographic.

To me, a Warrior can be anyone as long as they are willing to do the important work of self discovery and make the effort to strive for Harmony on the physical, mental and spiritual levels.  Physically this may mean exercising and eating right in an effort to stay healthy.  This doesn't mean that you need to eat rabbit food, it means that you begin making positive changes and you keep making positive changes.  On the mental level, it means that you recognize your strengths and weaknesses and how each one of those is both a strength and a weakness.  Spiritually is a bit different.  I believe an Atheist can be as much a warrior as the most well trained, Kung Fu Master monk.  In terms of the Spiritual level, it simply means being in harmony with what you believe and why.

Along the path of the Warrior, a code of virtues that exist already or one that you design yourself in whole or in part can be a valuable tool to help you on your journey.  When you come to a crossroad, that code becomes a map key that you can use to make a judgement about the terrain ahead of you and make an educated choice on which direction to choose.  If you create your own warrior code you may find that some of the virtues you aspire to do not or no longer apply to your path.  You should only discard a virtue you have developed after careful consideration as to what made you choose it in the first place.

For some, the method by which they choose to approach being a Warrior is by means of violence and their only code of conduct is generally to discard "fanciful" notions like protection, support and sacrifice.  Next post we will discuss the concept of the Warrior in regards to violence.