Today marks the one year anniversary since I began posting my writing to this site. While an anniversary can be little more than an accident of the calendar, it can also be a means to notice change, to mark passages, to reflect on work done.

Some of you have asked me if my goal is to create a book as the title of this site implies. Certainly one of my goals in this work is to explore the terrain and see if there is a book in here somewhere. While I find that goals are often moving targets, I also find they are good for navigation. So, yes, I would like to turn this work into a more cohesive whole, a book, at an appropriate time.

In my first martial arts school, it was common practice to have a
beginning student teach a newcomer, with a more advanced student overseeing, and the teacher keeping an eye on the group. There are few better ways to learn a subject than to teach it. A beginning student can teach a novice subtleties and relevant points the teacher will have long since forgotten. A teacher can learn about their teaching from watching their students teach. To teach well, be a student. To learn well, be a teacher.

My point, of course, is that I am learning as I do this work. The more I write, the more I understand about the subject, about how to teach when you are a seeker of truth, and of how much more I have yet to understand.

What does it mean to seek truth? What does it mean to find a scrap of truth, hold it tight, only to find it melts away into the air? As teachers, how do we teach others what we ourselves cannot hold? The additional challenge for me is using words to discuss these things, because words are never what they represent, and the moment I freeze my meaning into them, no matter how well I have crafted, I have inevitably lost what created them. I can hint at but cannot truly convey the inspiration and insight, the heart and spirit and mind behind the words.

My words must stand without me, of course. So I groom them as best I can before they leave me. But whatever good they do, it is only because my reader already has within them the seed of what I am saying because they recognize something in my words that comes from their own hearts and minds. The reader creates my meaning. Or invents their own.

Teaching is similar, though when you have physical presence, you know a bit more about the person with whom you are speaking. Even so, the same gulf exists: you offer what you know and see, what you think the student should have, and they take it however they will. If they understand you, it is because you have inspired in them a reflection of your meaning, because you have somehow managed to make your words and tone and body carry the seeds of your meaning. But the meaning is always created by the student, just as the meaning is always created by the reader.

Today, this moment, that would be you.

And so, whatever meaning you have created out of my words, if it has given you insight, perhaps this is a good time to consider how the seed of the meaning was in you to begin with, and how this echos in your teaching of your students. When they nod in understanding, it is because they understand from the inside what you are telling them from the outside. You give them clues, but they must find the truth.

It seems to me that this says something about my path. I find what seems to be a scrap of truth — perhaps one I tripped over to find — I rise to my feet, clutching it tightly and say “ah, now I really have something!” only to watch it evaporate into air. Perhaps what I held in my hand was the clue, and not the truth within, and this is why it melts away. Perhaps truth, like thoughts into words, cannot be held frozen.

My thanks to you all for reading my words, which has allowed me to do the work of writing them, which has helped me walk my path and to sometimes find these clues. With your kind help, I am learning to pick these things up, to hold them gently, and watch as they evaporate. I may even be learning to appreciate that moment.

Thank you for this year.