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A Taekwondo Story
Taekwondo and the Butterfly
April Carothers
Introduction
Change. It may be the single element in our lives we resist the most, yet change is perhaps the one thing we cannot resist. All things in the universe are in flux, and for human beings, it’s harmful to resist this forward movement—but we fight it anyway. Occasionally, something comes along and acts as a catalyst to force us into motion. Taekwondo is the single element that has brought the most change to my life, pushing me out of my chrysalis and into the world.
In 1991, the year I began Taekwondo, I was lost. I had grown up very sheltered, had married very young, and had never lived on my own or had to fend for myself in any way. I was immature and unprepared for any real challenges in my life. A physical attack shattered me. I lost my job. I stopped going anywhere and was afraid to leave the house. I wouldn’t go to the grocery store, or to the post office, or to the bank. I feared everything and everyone. Every night, I woke repeatedly with my entire body clenched, my hands in fists in front of my face. For six months, I was caught in limbo. I seemed to feel nothing, to think nothing, only survived from day to day.
One summer afternoon, I went with my family to the Vernonia Jamboree. Among other activities, there was a Taekwondo demonstration, led by my art teacher from high school. I had known Master Tesdal for many years, and I was very glad to see him, but I was also fascinated by what his students were doing: performing hyungs, sparring, breaking boards, self-defense… I was especially interested in the self-defense.
For years, I had driven past Master Tesdal’s dojang in Forest Grove, wishing I were part of those classes but knowing that I was the wrong kind of person to do martial arts. My interest in martial arts had been born many years earlier when, as a child, I watched my father work the heavy bag, every punch, chop or kick rocking the entire building, it seemed. Martial artists are brave people, powerful fighters, not afraid of anything. I didn’t believe that I could ever have the courage to try it, but watching the demonstrations in Vernonia, I began to imagine being a martial artist. My son asked Master Tesdal if he could take classes, so my husband inquired about cost. At that time, we had barely enough money to buy groceries, much less pay for Taekwondo, but Master Tesdal made it clear that what mattered most to him was that students commit themselves to coming to class. His generosity made it possible for me to even begin to consider training.
I refused to think about starting class, but the possibility lingered in the back of my mind. My son was begging to take Taekwondo, so when the next classes started, I put on loose clothes and went with him, not telling anyone, including my husband, that I planned to start with him. I’m not sure that I even admitted it to myself until I stepped out onto the floor with my son. That was the first step in a very long journey.
When I began my training, I was thin and sickly. I had developed symptoms of arthritis at the age of 13, and after having two children, it had worsened to the point that I could barely dress myself. I was also mentally unhealthy, afraid of my own shadow. The three step sparring was so difficult for me, I found that I couldn’t move when anyone punched toward me. I had to memorize the steps, then go home and teach them to my husband, so that he could practice with me until I could respond to the punches by blocking instead of standing frozen. I was so sore those first few months, I could barely walk to my car. My muscles shook with every movement. At first, I began to lose weight, and I thought I would have to give up Taekwondo for fear of becoming too thin, but after two weeks, my weight stabilized, and I began to build muscle.
I had made up my mind that my abilities were limited, and that I would never promote. I remember admiring the skill of an eight-year-old blue belt and feeling that I could never reach such a high rank. To my surprise, Master Tesdal, who had known me for many years, never asked if I wanted to promote: he simply told me when it was time, and he took me to the tests. Amazingly, I found the money each time to pay for promotion, money that I had put aside for paying tuition, and that Master Tesdal told me to hang onto.
One day, as I was doing my form, I turned and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror—and I didn’t recognize the brown belt I saw there.
Mentally, I was growing stronger as well, but it took ten years before I found the strength to finally learn to stand on my own feet and to follow the path I was meant to follow. Slowly, I was learning that I could set goals for myself and reach them. I found that Taekwondo was its own world, a place full of conflicts, victories, politics, humiliations, and triumphs. I could face my fears here in this martial arts world, so I gained confidence in being able to face my fears in the real world. For instance, I learned to perform hyungs or spar or break boards at tournaments or demonstrations in spite of terrible fear, in spite of shaking like a leaf and wondering if I would throw up. I could do what I had to do in spite of the worst dread, and I took this knowledge and applied it to my life. I found that I could mask my anxiety and accomplish whatever needed to be done. I didn’t stop being afraid: I learned that fear didn’t have to paralyze me.
Like a butterfly coming out of the chrysalis, at last I found the courage to leave a broken relationship, and to go back to college after an eighteen year absence. Grandmaster Kim had just made everyone at the last promotion test stand up and promise to get straight A’s. “All students,” he said. Rolling my eyes and blushing with embarrassment, I stood up with the children and vowed that I would do my best to earn only A’s. I thought to myself, “I’m too old for college—I’ll never be able to get better than B’s.” To my shock, I began to earn A’s in each class… It was Master Kim forcing that promise out of me that opened the door in my mind to the possibility. As they say, if you can imagine it, you can achieve it.
Now I’m a teacher of martial arts and a teacher of college writing courses. Not only can I stand on my own feet financially, but I have a career with a future. This is something I never dreamed of before Taekwondo.
Teaching philosophy
My husband Ed and I run a small Taekwondo school in McMinnville. Ed’s teaching philosophy is based on Body, Mind, Spirit, or the idea that by training the body toward discipline and health, the mind become disciplined and healthy, and the mind will influence the spirit. I ag
ree, but I also believe that the mind and the spirit must influence the body also. We must each find the motivation to train. Mine comes from the examples set by my teachers, my students, and my husband.
For a long time, I believed that Master Tesdal had achieved a perfect state of tranquility. It took me years to understand that to control emotion doesn’t mean one doesn’t feel it. I have seen him stand calmly as another man screamed in his face, and I have seen him turn purple with rage when I once suggested that he might be mistaken. I’ve seen my husband Ed, a fifth dan black belt, approach a fellow little league coach and suggest quietly but firmly that he stop shouting abuse at his players; I’ve seen him bellow in fury when his son bragged about playing Russian roulette with an airsoft pistol.
With both men, there is a moment of stillness when the line has been crossed, as if they decide when it is time for calm and when it is time for rage. There will be no explosion without warning, without thought.
I don’t know if I can ever achieve their kind of strength, but my students teach me to value myself. Some days it is difficult to be motivated to go to class: my schedule is extremely busy, and I teach several classes every week. It’s often hard to want to go teach another, one I am not required to teach. But my students look forward to my being there. They work very hard in class, and they dedicate themselves to improving their technique and their knowledge. They look to my husband and me for guidance and inspiration, and I am motivated and inspired by their energy and commitment.
However, it’s my husband who motivates me the most. He works harder than anyone I’ve ever met: he never slows down. He comes home from work exhausted, yet he washes his face, shakes off the worries of the work day, and begins loading the equipment in the car for yet another night of teaching Taekwondo. He never complains, only accepts his responsi
bility to his students. In 2009, he faced death, then months of slow recovery. He missed only a week of Taekwondo despite fourteen broken bones, crushed muscles, and a punctured lung, arriving back at class white-faced, supported by a cane, but determined. Not surprisingly, the rest of us have stopped making excuses about being too tired for class! In return for his dedication, we love him and follow him.
With this example, as well as the example of my first teacher, Master Tesdal, I could never turn my back on my students. Taekwondo is a force for change: as it changed my life and healed me, it has the potential to do the same for others, and I feel honored to have the chance to guide someone else toward finding their path to health and wholeness.
How can a butterfly be a martial artist?
Despite occasional, petty disagreements between styles, a certain mysticism surrounds all martial arts. Even now, after fourteen years and four black belts, I still feel it. There is something about training the body so carefully, about the repetition of patterns that trains the mind. I found a way to demonstrate this to students: when they are new, a low block seems the ultimate challenge. All of their concentration must go into getting the two arms to move in two different directions. Add footwork, and all their attention is absorbed.
Eventually, after repeating the movement again and again, the subconscious mind will take over. I can demonstrate this just by talking to them as I go through the first movements of the form I will teach them the second week: Chon Ji, or Heaven and Earth. Anyone who drives knows how this works: we all remember struggling to coordinate letting out the clutch, putting on the gas, moving the stick into the right gear. A couple of years later we’re taking a corner, chewing gum, shifting madly, and singing with the radio. Only when we begin to teach someone else do we remember that these movements were not always automatic.
Repetition hones focus and control of body and mind. We imagine working toward invincibility and perfection… dream of being able to move like Bruce Lee. Traditional practitioners may seem uninterested in street fighting, but we all fantasize, I think, about winning the Ultimate Fighting Challenge. This kind of fighting happens only in a ring (a steel cage in Texas or a TV sound stage); the only way to train for it is to do it all the time, but the body can’t endure many years of that kind of battering. Most of us don’t have the resources, physically or financially, for such an endeavor, but that doesn’t change the fact that we wish we had the drive to train harder, be perfect physical specimens.
Is that the goal of martial arts? Ed and I had a student who had achieved his black belt in another style, one he felt was more challenging than ours. He stayed with us for a time because he no longer had access to his old school, and his children enjoyed ours. When he applied for black belt testing with us, he wrote the required autobiography, and in it, he detailed why we are not martial artists. Reading it, my partner nodded, sparking a bitter argument between us over just what the definition is. He says Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris are martial artists, but we aren’t. By that definition, only a tiny fraction of those practicing will ever achieve such lofty status. By that definition, a martial artist is one who defeats all challengers. Is it a title bestowed for fighting ability?
Grandmaster Kim tells us we are working toward becoming the “whole person.” The theory is that control of the body leads to control of the mind, which in turn leads to control over the spirit, the force that drives us. We’re supposed to be perfecting that spirit, learning self-discipline, self-respect, self-control. The last seems most important to me in a world where little league parents beat each other to death or murder a coach over a game. Self-control is all: it’s the only control we have.
But there are other values we must honor as well, especially as we learn and teach techniques which can kill. Courtesy, integrity, perseverance, se
lf-control, indomitable spirit. These are the tenets all styles share, from Tang Su Do to Kung Fu to Capoeira to Aikido.
In my head exists a picture of the ideal martial artist, someone who exemplifies these tenets. Not someone who wins every fight, but someone who has practiced for many years: wise, calm, never acting without thinking, more interested in talking down the bad guy or controlling him with a twist of the wrist than in smashing him. Apparently emotionless, such a person has achieved a Buddha-like unity with the cosmos.
Fortunately, I have real examples to follow, real martial artists who guide me.
I have a photo that was taken to celebrate and document Ed’s achievement of fifth degree black belt, the rank of Master. Pale blonde hair dark with sweat, he stands at the left side, tired but satisfied at the finish of his testing. Beside him is our teacher, whose curly blonde hair and beard are tinged with grey. On the right side of the photo is Master Campbell, a slender black man with white hair, Ed’s first instructor. In front of them, seated, is Grandmaster Hong Sik Kim. What they have in common, other than a black belt uniform, is the look in their eyes. I’m not sure what it is, but I can see in their eyes that these men know they won’t run from the enemy (which is sometimes ourselves). I hope one day to have that kind of confidence in myself, and that kind of self-discipline.
It has been a long journey for me, and becoming a black belt was only a new beginning. In 1995, I was a newborn black belt at a tournament in Idaho. I had held the exalted rank a whole two weeks, had practiced my new form feverishly every day. My uniform was cardboard stiff, and my belt wanted to stand straight out. I felt as though I had stolen it.
“We need to put a team together,” Master Tesdal announced. Do we have to? I wanted to ask, but knew better. I was the only student who had come with my teacher. Camilo, an advanced black belt with his own school in Vancouver, had also ridden with us. To enter team competition, which involved doing a form together, doing a self-defense demonstration, and breaking boards, we needed four people. Another instructor, John, a stocky advanced belt, had come alone from Estacada, and he joined us.
The next morning, we all met for breakfast, then later walked into the Boise high school gym two hours early. Before long, it would be packed with white belts and their satellites, but now this great empty space echoed back at us. Grandmaster Kim accepted our bows, a startling smile breaking across his face in a moment of intimacy with his highest ranking belts, and I shook his hand humbly, awed at the privilege of seeing him briefly as human. He immediately put the men to work marking off rings. I began setting glittering trophies in order, my hands shaking as I handled what I felt was sacred.
The gym filled slowly with competitors. Some stretched, some sparred together, some went through forms, worrying over perfection at the last minute. Kids raced around knots of people, pursuing each other in a kind of martial arts tag. Done with my tasks, I found an empty space and lay down on my back to stretch.
I thought about what was ahead of me in individual competition: board breaking or forms first—sometimes both at once as competitors raced from one ring to the other as their names were shouted over the din—then sparring last as the rings were transformed to fighting arenas with black belt judges poised with flags at all four corners. Always passionate about winning in forms, I found the fighting competition miserable: I had little drive to win and usually came off the ring with goose eggs up and down my arms and legs. Master Tesdal made it clear that his students would enter all catego
ries, but if I’d had my way, I would have left off the fighting.
Above me, the fluorescent lights seemed to pulse and sway, and suddenly I thought I would throw up. The women’s bathroom was in another building, but I closed the distance in seconds. Nothing. I splashed water on my face and paced. Reluctantly, I went back to the gym.
“Where have you been?” Master Tesdal demanded. “We need to practice for team competition.” There wasn’t much choice over which form to do: we all had to perform the same form, but I knew only the first black belt hyung, Gwang-Gae. The others knew several (Master Tesdal knew 22) but would have to settle for the least challenging. He put us in place, back to back in a square, then began to explain how it would work, how we would do the movements of the form in sync. I could hear his voice, but it seemed to be coming from farther and farther away—the sound of my own heartbeat was drowning everything else out. Blackness crept around the edges of my vision, and I sank to my knees.
“OK, everybody ready?” he called.
I wobbled to my feet. My vision cleared. But instead of calling the command to begin the form, he started to lecture again, giving us advice on how we might stay together even if we couldn’t see each other. His voice grew thinner, and I found myself on the floor again.
Master Tesdal was there, pulling me up and holding firmly to the shoulders of my dobok. “Are you alright?”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
He felt my forehead, realized I was not ill, then stared into my eyes. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. You’ve been to a hundred tournaments.”
A hundred? Maybe ten. “Not as a black belt.”
“No difference. It’s just another color. You’ll probably have fewer opponents at this level since so many drop out at black belt.” His pale eyes warmed to cornflower. “Okay, close your eyes. Just breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” His voice was a murmur.
My heart slowed, and the world came into focus again. I sighed, glancing over my shoulder at the faces of my concerned teammates. They smiled reassuringly, but an invisible gulf lay between us that they refused to acknowledge. Our uniforms were nearly identical—the others had black leg piping—but we were not equals. “How long did it take,” I asked my teacher, “before you felt like a black belt?”
He grinned at me. “Two years.”
I have a stripe down my own pant leg now, and my students call me master. It feels strange, and I wonder what it means. Am I a better person yet? Am I fearless? Powerful? Am I a martial artist?
What is a martial artist? Perhaps one day more people will understand what that means. It is not the ability to control others through force: it is the ability to control oneself. A martial artist is not a fearless automaton or the perfect fighting specimen but someone who has set out on a path toward change and growth through daily training and exercise in the martial arts.
Except for perhaps a moment or two at a time, I will never be emotionless or one with Heaven; I will always be rooted firmly in the Earth, tied to my passions. I will never have a large, powerful body, and I don’t know if I will ever have the same look in my eyes as the men in the photo. It seems unlikely; I am more a butterfly than a tiger. Will I run from the enemy? I’m starting to think I will only run if that is the best choice. I have learned this: I am not less afraid, but I am less afraid of my own fear. I am confident in my ability to find and follow the right path for me, and I am confident in my ability to face what I have to face along that path. Am I a martial artist? Yes.
Taekwondo has given the butterfly wings.
April Carothers
Introduction
Change. It may be the single element in our lives we resist the most, yet change is perhaps the one thing we cannot resist. All things in the universe are in flux, and for human beings, it’s harmful to resist this forward movement—but we fight it anyway. Occasionally, something comes along and acts as a catalyst to force us into motion. Taekwondo is the single element that has brought the most change to my life, pushing me out of my chrysalis and into the world.
In 1991, the year I began Taekwondo, I was lost. I had grown up very sheltered, had married very young, and had never lived on my own or had to fend for myself in any way. I was immature and unprepared for any real challenges in my life. A physical attack shattered me. I lost my job. I stopped going anywhere and was afraid to leave the house. I wouldn’t go to the grocery store, or to the post office, or to the bank. I feared everything and everyone. Every night, I woke repeatedly with my entire body clenched, my hands in fists in front of my face. For six months, I was caught in limbo. I seemed to feel nothing, to think nothing, only survived from day to day.
One summer afternoon, I went with my family to the Vernonia Jamboree. Among other activities, there was a Taekwondo demonstration, led by my art teacher from high school. I had known Master Tesdal for many years, and I was very glad to see him, but I was also fascinated by what his students were doing: performing hyungs, sparring, breaking boards, self-defense… I was especially interested in the self-defense.
For years, I had driven past Master Tesdal’s dojang in Forest Grove, wishing I were part of those classes but knowing that I was the wrong kind of person to do martial arts. My interest in martial arts had been born many years earlier when, as a child, I watched my father work the heavy bag, every punch, chop or kick rocking the entire building, it seemed. Martial artists are brave people, powerful fighters, not afraid of anything. I didn’t believe that I could ever have the courage to try it, but watching the demonstrations in Vernonia, I began to imagine being a martial artist. My son asked Master Tesdal if he could take classes, so my husband inquired about cost. At that time, we had barely enough money to buy groceries, much less pay for Taekwondo, but Master Tesdal made it clear that what mattered most to him was that students commit themselves to coming to class. His generosity made it possible for me to even begin to consider training.
I refused to think about starting class, but the possibility lingered in the back of my mind. My son was begging to take Taekwondo, so when the next classes started, I put on loose clothes and went with him, not telling anyone, including my husband, that I planned to start with him. I’m not sure that I even admitted it to myself until I stepped out onto the floor with my son. That was the first step in a very long journey.
When I began my training, I was thin and sickly. I had developed symptoms of arthritis at the age of 13, and after having two children, it had worsened to the point that I could barely dress myself. I was also mentally unhealthy, afraid of my own shadow. The three step sparring was so difficult for me, I found that I couldn’t move when anyone punched toward me. I had to memorize the steps, then go home and teach them to my husband, so that he could practice with me until I could respond to the punches by blocking instead of standing frozen. I was so sore those first few months, I could barely walk to my car. My muscles shook with every movement. At first, I began to lose weight, and I thought I would have to give up Taekwondo for fear of becoming too thin, but after two weeks, my weight stabilized, and I began to build muscle.
I had made up my mind that my abilities were limited, and that I would never promote. I remember admiring the skill of an eight-year-old blue belt and feeling that I could never reach such a high rank. To my surprise, Master Tesdal, who had known me for many years, never asked if I wanted to promote: he simply told me when it was time, and he took me to the tests. Amazingly, I found the money each time to pay for promotion, money that I had put aside for paying tuition, and that Master Tesdal told me to hang onto.
One day, as I was doing my form, I turned and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror—and I didn’t recognize the brown belt I saw there.
Mentally, I was growing stronger as well, but it took ten years before I found the strength to finally learn to stand on my own feet and to follow the path I was meant to follow. Slowly, I was learning that I could set goals for myself and reach them. I found that Taekwondo was its own world, a place full of conflicts, victories, politics, humiliations, and triumphs. I could face my fears here in this martial arts world, so I gained confidence in being able to face my fears in the real world. For instance, I learned to perform hyungs or spar or break boards at tournaments or demonstrations in spite of terrible fear, in spite of shaking like a leaf and wondering if I would throw up. I could do what I had to do in spite of the worst dread, and I took this knowledge and applied it to my life. I found that I could mask my anxiety and accomplish whatever needed to be done. I didn’t stop being afraid: I learned that fear didn’t have to paralyze me.
Like a butterfly coming out of the chrysalis, at last I found the courage to leave a broken relationship, and to go back to college after an eighteen year absence. Grandmaster Kim had just made everyone at the last promotion test stand up and promise to get straight A’s. “All students,” he said. Rolling my eyes and blushing with embarrassment, I stood up with the children and vowed that I would do my best to earn only A’s. I thought to myself, “I’m too old for college—I’ll never be able to get better than B’s.” To my shock, I began to earn A’s in each class… It was Master Kim forcing that promise out of me that opened the door in my mind to the possibility. As they say, if you can imagine it, you can achieve it.
Now I’m a teacher of martial arts and a teacher of college writing courses. Not only can I stand on my own feet financially, but I have a career with a future. This is something I never dreamed of before Taekwondo.
Teaching philosophy
My husband Ed and I run a small Taekwondo school in McMinnville. Ed’s teaching philosophy is based on Body, Mind, Spirit, or the idea that by training the body toward discipline and health, the mind become disciplined and healthy, and the mind will influence the spirit. I ag
ree, but I also believe that the mind and the spirit must influence the body also. We must each find the motivation to train. Mine comes from the examples set by my teachers, my students, and my husband. For a long time, I believed that Master Tesdal had achieved a perfect state of tranquility. It took me years to understand that to control emotion doesn’t mean one doesn’t feel it. I have seen him stand calmly as another man screamed in his face, and I have seen him turn purple with rage when I once suggested that he might be mistaken. I’ve seen my husband Ed, a fifth dan black belt, approach a fellow little league coach and suggest quietly but firmly that he stop shouting abuse at his players; I’ve seen him bellow in fury when his son bragged about playing Russian roulette with an airsoft pistol.
With both men, there is a moment of stillness when the line has been crossed, as if they decide when it is time for calm and when it is time for rage. There will be no explosion without warning, without thought.
I don’t know if I can ever achieve their kind of strength, but my students teach me to value myself. Some days it is difficult to be motivated to go to class: my schedule is extremely busy, and I teach several classes every week. It’s often hard to want to go teach another, one I am not required to teach. But my students look forward to my being there. They work very hard in class, and they dedicate themselves to improving their technique and their knowledge. They look to my husband and me for guidance and inspiration, and I am motivated and inspired by their energy and commitment.
However, it’s my husband who motivates me the most. He works harder than anyone I’ve ever met: he never slows down. He comes home from work exhausted, yet he washes his face, shakes off the worries of the work day, and begins loading the equipment in the car for yet another night of teaching Taekwondo. He never complains, only accepts his responsi
bility to his students. In 2009, he faced death, then months of slow recovery. He missed only a week of Taekwondo despite fourteen broken bones, crushed muscles, and a punctured lung, arriving back at class white-faced, supported by a cane, but determined. Not surprisingly, the rest of us have stopped making excuses about being too tired for class! In return for his dedication, we love him and follow him. With this example, as well as the example of my first teacher, Master Tesdal, I could never turn my back on my students. Taekwondo is a force for change: as it changed my life and healed me, it has the potential to do the same for others, and I feel honored to have the chance to guide someone else toward finding their path to health and wholeness.
How can a butterfly be a martial artist?
Despite occasional, petty disagreements between styles, a certain mysticism surrounds all martial arts. Even now, after fourteen years and four black belts, I still feel it. There is something about training the body so carefully, about the repetition of patterns that trains the mind. I found a way to demonstrate this to students: when they are new, a low block seems the ultimate challenge. All of their concentration must go into getting the two arms to move in two different directions. Add footwork, and all their attention is absorbed.
Eventually, after repeating the movement again and again, the subconscious mind will take over. I can demonstrate this just by talking to them as I go through the first movements of the form I will teach them the second week: Chon Ji, or Heaven and Earth. Anyone who drives knows how this works: we all remember struggling to coordinate letting out the clutch, putting on the gas, moving the stick into the right gear. A couple of years later we’re taking a corner, chewing gum, shifting madly, and singing with the radio. Only when we begin to teach someone else do we remember that these movements were not always automatic.
Repetition hones focus and control of body and mind. We imagine working toward invincibility and perfection… dream of being able to move like Bruce Lee. Traditional practitioners may seem uninterested in street fighting, but we all fantasize, I think, about winning the Ultimate Fighting Challenge. This kind of fighting happens only in a ring (a steel cage in Texas or a TV sound stage); the only way to train for it is to do it all the time, but the body can’t endure many years of that kind of battering. Most of us don’t have the resources, physically or financially, for such an endeavor, but that doesn’t change the fact that we wish we had the drive to train harder, be perfect physical specimens.
Is that the goal of martial arts? Ed and I had a student who had achieved his black belt in another style, one he felt was more challenging than ours. He stayed with us for a time because he no longer had access to his old school, and his children enjoyed ours. When he applied for black belt testing with us, he wrote the required autobiography, and in it, he detailed why we are not martial artists. Reading it, my partner nodded, sparking a bitter argument between us over just what the definition is. He says Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris are martial artists, but we aren’t. By that definition, only a tiny fraction of those practicing will ever achieve such lofty status. By that definition, a martial artist is one who defeats all challengers. Is it a title bestowed for fighting ability?
Grandmaster Kim tells us we are working toward becoming the “whole person.” The theory is that control of the body leads to control of the mind, which in turn leads to control over the spirit, the force that drives us. We’re supposed to be perfecting that spirit, learning self-discipline, self-respect, self-control. The last seems most important to me in a world where little league parents beat each other to death or murder a coach over a game. Self-control is all: it’s the only control we have.
But there are other values we must honor as well, especially as we learn and teach techniques which can kill. Courtesy, integrity, perseverance, se
lf-control, indomitable spirit. These are the tenets all styles share, from Tang Su Do to Kung Fu to Capoeira to Aikido. In my head exists a picture of the ideal martial artist, someone who exemplifies these tenets. Not someone who wins every fight, but someone who has practiced for many years: wise, calm, never acting without thinking, more interested in talking down the bad guy or controlling him with a twist of the wrist than in smashing him. Apparently emotionless, such a person has achieved a Buddha-like unity with the cosmos.
Fortunately, I have real examples to follow, real martial artists who guide me.
I have a photo that was taken to celebrate and document Ed’s achievement of fifth degree black belt, the rank of Master. Pale blonde hair dark with sweat, he stands at the left side, tired but satisfied at the finish of his testing. Beside him is our teacher, whose curly blonde hair and beard are tinged with grey. On the right side of the photo is Master Campbell, a slender black man with white hair, Ed’s first instructor. In front of them, seated, is Grandmaster Hong Sik Kim. What they have in common, other than a black belt uniform, is the look in their eyes. I’m not sure what it is, but I can see in their eyes that these men know they won’t run from the enemy (which is sometimes ourselves). I hope one day to have that kind of confidence in myself, and that kind of self-discipline.
It has been a long journey for me, and becoming a black belt was only a new beginning. In 1995, I was a newborn black belt at a tournament in Idaho. I had held the exalted rank a whole two weeks, had practiced my new form feverishly every day. My uniform was cardboard stiff, and my belt wanted to stand straight out. I felt as though I had stolen it.
“We need to put a team together,” Master Tesdal announced. Do we have to? I wanted to ask, but knew better. I was the only student who had come with my teacher. Camilo, an advanced black belt with his own school in Vancouver, had also ridden with us. To enter team competition, which involved doing a form together, doing a self-defense demonstration, and breaking boards, we needed four people. Another instructor, John, a stocky advanced belt, had come alone from Estacada, and he joined us.
The next morning, we all met for breakfast, then later walked into the Boise high school gym two hours early. Before long, it would be packed with white belts and their satellites, but now this great empty space echoed back at us. Grandmaster Kim accepted our bows, a startling smile breaking across his face in a moment of intimacy with his highest ranking belts, and I shook his hand humbly, awed at the privilege of seeing him briefly as human. He immediately put the men to work marking off rings. I began setting glittering trophies in order, my hands shaking as I handled what I felt was sacred.
The gym filled slowly with competitors. Some stretched, some sparred together, some went through forms, worrying over perfection at the last minute. Kids raced around knots of people, pursuing each other in a kind of martial arts tag. Done with my tasks, I found an empty space and lay down on my back to stretch.
I thought about what was ahead of me in individual competition: board breaking or forms first—sometimes both at once as competitors raced from one ring to the other as their names were shouted over the din—then sparring last as the rings were transformed to fighting arenas with black belt judges poised with flags at all four corners. Always passionate about winning in forms, I found the fighting competition miserable: I had little drive to win and usually came off the ring with goose eggs up and down my arms and legs. Master Tesdal made it clear that his students would enter all catego
ries, but if I’d had my way, I would have left off the fighting. Above me, the fluorescent lights seemed to pulse and sway, and suddenly I thought I would throw up. The women’s bathroom was in another building, but I closed the distance in seconds. Nothing. I splashed water on my face and paced. Reluctantly, I went back to the gym.
“Where have you been?” Master Tesdal demanded. “We need to practice for team competition.” There wasn’t much choice over which form to do: we all had to perform the same form, but I knew only the first black belt hyung, Gwang-Gae. The others knew several (Master Tesdal knew 22) but would have to settle for the least challenging. He put us in place, back to back in a square, then began to explain how it would work, how we would do the movements of the form in sync. I could hear his voice, but it seemed to be coming from farther and farther away—the sound of my own heartbeat was drowning everything else out. Blackness crept around the edges of my vision, and I sank to my knees.
“OK, everybody ready?” he called.
I wobbled to my feet. My vision cleared. But instead of calling the command to begin the form, he started to lecture again, giving us advice on how we might stay together even if we couldn’t see each other. His voice grew thinner, and I found myself on the floor again.
Master Tesdal was there, pulling me up and holding firmly to the shoulders of my dobok. “Are you alright?”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
He felt my forehead, realized I was not ill, then stared into my eyes. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. You’ve been to a hundred tournaments.”
A hundred? Maybe ten. “Not as a black belt.”
“No difference. It’s just another color. You’ll probably have fewer opponents at this level since so many drop out at black belt.” His pale eyes warmed to cornflower. “Okay, close your eyes. Just breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” His voice was a murmur.
My heart slowed, and the world came into focus again. I sighed, glancing over my shoulder at the faces of my concerned teammates. They smiled reassuringly, but an invisible gulf lay between us that they refused to acknowledge. Our uniforms were nearly identical—the others had black leg piping—but we were not equals. “How long did it take,” I asked my teacher, “before you felt like a black belt?”
He grinned at me. “Two years.”
I have a stripe down my own pant leg now, and my students call me master. It feels strange, and I wonder what it means. Am I a better person yet? Am I fearless? Powerful? Am I a martial artist?
What is a martial artist? Perhaps one day more people will understand what that means. It is not the ability to control others through force: it is the ability to control oneself. A martial artist is not a fearless automaton or the perfect fighting specimen but someone who has set out on a path toward change and growth through daily training and exercise in the martial arts.
Except for perhaps a moment or two at a time, I will never be emotionless or one with Heaven; I will always be rooted firmly in the Earth, tied to my passions. I will never have a large, powerful body, and I don’t know if I will ever have the same look in my eyes as the men in the photo. It seems unlikely; I am more a butterfly than a tiger. Will I run from the enemy? I’m starting to think I will only run if that is the best choice. I have learned this: I am not less afraid, but I am less afraid of my own fear. I am confident in my ability to find and follow the right path for me, and I am confident in my ability to face what I have to face along that path. Am I a martial artist? Yes.
Taekwondo has given the butterfly wings.
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