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.