There's a startling amount of growth involved in this training. 

It's not really about, or narrated by the training itself. 

It's about the things I was working all along, which have simply simmered to the top. 

It's a lot, for me, about that iron, light and fire I have kept so insecurely under the proverbial bushel basket. 

I'm working hard, on how I got told to keep it hid. 

My inner life has always been a realm apart from what I kept as "tate-mae" my outer gate/face. 

I've been contemplating the Buddhist tenet of making your "insides match your outsides" and it's increasingly clear, that mine do not. 

One of the most telling things I ever experienced, was my teacher telling me that I took tiny ladylike steps into kata, exploded into action and space, and returned to a kind of quiet primness. 

I remember my teenage years, feeling what I thought might be more than the usual internal violence, expressing it in award-winning artwork and poetry. I also pulled knives on ugly junior high/high school boys, and made some of them walk funny forever.  I carried a switchblade, and wore Fryes. They judged me as crazy, but I knew.. I just didn't care to play the games. 

Lack of respect/empathy is a disease.. the cure is more painful than what I dished out at the time, and I wonder, if I had cranked it up, if I could have made a difference. 

The outside is accommodating, silly, solicitous, almost submissive. 

The inside is uncompromising, steely, principled and bloody-minded. 

I run into a lot of extra work, slamming people who think they can railroad the blonde. One outer aspect is, that I have toned down the blonde and am headed more for auburn. Very few people think they can railroad a redhead. 

My mom and I are both Dixie Chicks fans, but we have different favorite songs. 

Hers has always been "Not Ready to Make Nice" and mine has always been "Long Way Round" but now I am listening to her song, listening for the notes I need to take. 

It's been 20 years now, I've been studying budo. 

It's healed so many of my disconnections. I learned that I love touch and connection. I learned that I can take this inner demon, and give it a job. Trained and aimed, our dragons thrive. 

I'm not without direction, in my rage and aggression. It has a home. Thus, I am so much more peaceful and at home in my own skin. I have integrated my dragons, and they serve me. 

From this point, comes the silence of a healthy life. 

Now, I just need to work on these extra points of healthy expression of my fierce nature in my personal, professional and political life. 

Otherwise, it will come out in fits of incoherent insanity, as I am forced to express the forces in me, as they escape in twisted fits of acts, writing and other things .

My dream is to find a coherent expression for all of this energy in a combination of art and narrative. This blog is but a tiny bleed for all the ideas and energy which flood me. 

Written under a waxing spring moon..