He closed his eyes for a moment and pulled at the fragments of the elements to light the torches hanging at the pillars on either side of him. The fire did little to warm the night, but Kaustab found its presence reassuring, the flickering blue flames danced and sparred with the shadows on the walls, a battle that the fire couldn’t win.
Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again ... we are survivors. If you are here today... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bare a different name: warriors.
Fighting isn't all there is to the Art of War. The men who think that way, and
are satisfied to have food to eat and a place to sleep, are mere vagabonds. A
serious student is much more concerned with training his mind and disciplining
his spirit than with developing martial skills.
To fight against a war or, better yet, and entire "war machine," we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly - to us - applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the "War on Poverty.
In our modern world, we look unkindly on mistakes and imperfection. But this is far from the samurai ideal. Mistakes are part of the learning process and if you haven't made them then you are, indeed, dangerous because it means you have never learned anything. Mistakes, to a samurai, are the proof of your learning.
A samurai chooses to serve a master and does it out of respect and love, not because they are forced. Service to them is not demeaning; service is an expression of their prowess and their pride; they serve because only they are strong enough to serve with such flawless perfection and such consummate ability. It is a source of pride to them.
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