Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This is for stories.
I am the Poet in the Forest, a children's series that I pinned
out in the nineteen nineties. Now, none of it would be possible if
it wasn't for this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I
talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's time that you get to
know what has inspired me for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of
the conversation. Welcome back to the forest. This was a tough one right
here in the meadow between our home the creek the lake. Amazing tall grasses
survive. But I chose to study my martial arts inside this meadow, and
as I practiced my pumss, my forms, my kicks, my blocks,
you could always tell that there was something that was here. And as I
look at this lay of land right now, which is so smooth, with
this amazing green, you would never know that a third degree black belt put
his soul into this soil. It's very difficult because this was my place of
study, this was my place of receiving. And I know for a fact
that history will never ever see the black belt grew from this area, from
first black belt to second to third. We called them dons in taekwondo.
And yet, as I stand here in twenty twenty four and the long,
tall grasses are as smooth as waves on an ocean shore, somewhere out there
are my footprints, my kicks, my blocks, my forms. I remember
that I felt so bad that when I was doing it, that I was
destroying the life of a living thing, when especially our mantra was learning to
love all living things. And yet I chose, I chose to come out
here with my bare feet on this forest floor and do every single Pomsey,
every block, every kick, everything that was going to be tested on those
days. Now, as I look at it, I'm deeply saddened because what
I see today, all of the screen, doesn't represent the black belt path.
It represents what is in the moment of now. Nobody's going to remember
this, nobody, nobody, And yet I was here, and when I'm
gone, nobody nobody is going to know that this was my Dojon. You
have no idea how long it took me to learn every one of those moves,
to memorize them, to put them into play, to understand what they
meant and how they were to be used, and yet today there is nothing,
nothing here that says that a black belt path exists. Hey, thanks
for being a part of the conversation.