I meet with a writing partner every other Friday. We share what we will be working on for the day, and then we sit together for an hour and work on our respective pieces. Today I told my partner that I wanted to write a blog post I could complete and publish today. My main practice in writing right now is getting comfortable sharing again, so posting regularly and being OK with what I post is my main goal at the moment.
My laptop wasn’t working right at the coffee shop, so I closed it and opened my journal. I decided I would write and draw about my martial arts practice, specifically, the pieces I am working on right now. When I finished the drawing/writing above, I told my partner that my martial arts practice feels invisible sometimes, except to the few other people I train with.
Sharing this little piece makes my practice start to exist in the bigger universe, rather than just in the few tiny universes in and around me.
I was recently talking with my friend J about karaoke. “When I sing karaoke, it’s a feeling of glory that I’m ultimately going for,” I told her.
You know, the feeling you get when you’re belting out the chorus of Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” and all your friends come in with falsetto backup at just the right moment. Or when a dude puts Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did it Again” in the karaoke queue as a joke but there’s no one to sing it, so he says, “OK, who’s got this one?” and you grab the mic and YES, you do know all the words. AND the dance moves. Or when you sing The Strokes “Heart In A Cage” at a karaoke bar and the MOMENT you start singing, two scantily clad women start gyrating on your legs because you are instantly a rock star.
Glory.
All of those moments happened to me, save the last one, which happened to my husband. But I haven’t felt a lot of glory in my life lately. Largely this is due to the combined socially isolating forces of covid and parenthood. I also haven’t done karaoke in a long time. And even though I do LOTS of glorious dance moves and singing in my own home, glory is a feeling best shared. Perhaps glory only truly exists when it can be honored within the presence of others…
Martial arts is also a place where I have felt glory in my life. (Boy, was that a lightning-quick if rocky topic transition!) Landing a new move, getting someone in the head with a sweet kick, surprising myself with a thought-free but perfect retaliation to my partner’s strike. Yes, glory is a sweet feeling of hard work paying off with a beautiful success.
I’ve really been wanting to post the picture below for a while, and I chose today’s topic of glory with the photo in mind. It’s me and three of my old kung fu buddies after a tournament. The four of us had been practicing our point sparring quite intensely at the time, and our hard work was rewarded with the huge pile of trophies we won at the tournament. Our teacher laughed at how many and how big they were when we brought them back to our school.
Yes, this was a moment of glory…but even more, it was a moment of shared joy with my friends. I had so much fun that day– there were loud musical forms presentations, teenage boys spinning sticks real fast, a table where you could buy big ol’ knives, and if I remember correctly, there was Hawiian plate lunch to eat.
It was really tasty.
So in the spirit of looking for glory anew in my life, I take a moment to note a glory of the past:
That one time we went to that tournament and CLEANED UP.
My tournament career is over, but I’ll be doing karaoke again very soon. I’ll let you know what glory I find there.
I remember my friend Zach telling me that he didn’t really remember anything that happened the year after his mom died. Grief hits hard and in strange ways.
I did remember what happened the year after my dad died in 2020.
I did remember what happened the months after my mom had a massive stroke in 2021.
I didn’t drift away from memory, I drifted away from other people.
Away, distant from my friends and family. I became unreachable, unavailable. I went into a massive state of withdrawal and social overwhelm. I couldn’t answer texts, I still haven’t answered emails, and social media became terrifying, so I stopped participating in it pretty much altogether.
My internal world felt safer than the scary external world where people I love really do die and are gone forever.
My internal world felt safer, but it isn’t safer. I know that.
I love my friends, I love my family. My life is bleh without them. I need them to keep me from feeling like a ghost. To remind me that I’m real.
When Alex and I lived in Chicago, we trained in Karate at Thousand Waves Martial Arts & Self Defense. We initially joined the dojo as a way to get fun exercise, but the students and teachers at Thousand Waves also became great friends over the three years we trained there.
Alex receiving his blue belt, Michelle peeking out from the end of the line.
After belt tests such as the one pictured above, we’d go out for dinner with our fellow testers. We were in our early twenties and full of energy, so along with our beers and burgers and fries, we’d order shots to match the color of the belts we’d just received. I seem to remember that apple pucker, drambuie, and sambuca all played somewhere into the mix, but to get the correct listing one would have to ask our friend Lynne, who, as a former bartender, kept a mental tab on who should order what.
Me, Alex and other TW friends performing at the annual “Art with Heart” school benefit. Not the Break-a-Thon, sure, but still looking tough.
Our karate school, which was a nonprofit, held a few annual benefits, one of which was a Break-a-Thon. We raised pledges based on the breaks we were trying to do. Different breaks offer different difficulty levels: one board with a front kick is fairly easy, eight concrete slabs with a hammer fist is somewhat harder, one board thrown midair and broken with a jump kick offers a different challenge. I don’t remember which breaks we did, nothing too flashy. But board breaking was part of our practice and something we did regularly.
So when it came time to plan our wedding, I realized I could incorporate our love of chopping things in half with our hands with the cake cutting ceremony. We would karate chop our wedding cake. My brother made us styrofoam dummy cakes covered in fondant and frosting. He and his wife, who, of course, both also had martial arts experience, held the cakes for us. It looked like this:
Ferocity in satin and a suit.And then, we lived happily ever after.
What a crowd-pleaser. And so much better than the kissy face cake feeding, I thought.
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So, that’s the end of this blog post. It felt a little uneven perhaps–it included details that didn’t come into play in the end…but you know? I’m really just going for a little snapshot of my life, and I think I’ve accomplished that.
Michelle Folk Johnson 