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Hey, thanks for being a part
of the conversation. This is for stories.

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I am the Poet in the Forest, a children's series that I pinned

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out in the nineteen nineties. Now, none of it would be possible if

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it wasn't for this forest right here
in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I

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talk about it so much that I
thought maybe it's time that you get to

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know what has inspired me for thirty
years. Thanks for being a part of

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the conversation. Welcome back to the
forest. This was a tough one right

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here in the meadow between our home
the creek the lake. Amazing tall grasses

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survive. But I chose to study
my martial arts inside this meadow, and

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as I practiced my pumss, my
forms, my kicks, my blocks,

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you could always tell that there was
something that was here. And as I

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look at this lay of land right
now, which is so smooth, with

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this amazing green, you would never
know that a third degree black belt put

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his soul into this soil. It's
very difficult because this was my place of

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study, this was my place of
receiving. And I know for a fact

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that history will never ever see the
black belt grew from this area, from

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first black belt to second to third. We called them dons in taekwondo.

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And yet, as I stand here
in twenty twenty four and the long,

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tall grasses are as smooth as waves
on an ocean shore, somewhere out there

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are my footprints, my kicks,
my blocks, my forms. I remember

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that I felt so bad that when
I was doing it, that I was

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destroying the life of a living thing, when especially our mantra was learning to

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love all living things. And yet
I chose, I chose to come out

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here with my bare feet on this
forest floor and do every single Pomsey,

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every block, every kick, everything
that was going to be tested on those

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days. Now, as I look
at it, I'm deeply saddened because what

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I see today, all of the
screen, doesn't represent the black belt path.

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It represents what is in the moment
of now. Nobody's going to remember

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this, nobody, nobody, And
yet I was here, and when I'm

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gone, nobody nobody is going to
know that this was my Dojon. You

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have no idea how long it took
me to learn every one of those moves,

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to memorize them, to put them
into play, to understand what they

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meant and how they were to be
used, and yet today there is nothing,

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nothing here that says that a black
belt path exists. Hey, thanks

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for being a part of the conversation.