I'm alive. I'm awake. I'm up.

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Huh?  Yeah.  A bit confused, and still a bit sore and green about the gills, but awake, alive, and up. 

Sleep was good.  Waking was good.  Being awake is mostly good, just a few bodily grumps and complaints of the milder sort.  Today, even with the clouds, chill in the air, and the tender snow flakes, seems perfect.  When I can avoid it, even when I shouldn't be able to do so, I enjoy my little pained life.

I dreamed last night.  Something called me to do more.  And then called me to a specific teacher.  As it turns out, the man was a negro.  Not, up front, what I would have chosen, but my choice in things, real life or dream, is not always the way of things.  I have learned to accept many things.  He was a master of kung-fu.  Truly.  For some reason, I had decided to grow through this field, and a number of omens had lead me to this man, specifically.

I researched him as well as possible without contact before making contact.  Further, I interviewed him powerfully when I did make contact.  He explained that he had been dying.  A slow, miserable death.  Not from an illness, but from just having let go.  He knew, and hated, what seemed to be his fate.  Lost in that morass, he sought for and found an answer.  Martial arts, in particular kung-fu.  He found a master and became his soul-student.  Not in the typical lazy negro way, but in a true manner.  He did as his master suggested or commanded.  He learned he was the one he had to learn to defeat, not some theoretical opponent.  When he disagree with his master, he brought that to him directly, if humbly, and they worked those things out.  He learned to be a man, and a living man.  Through the art, he learned to live.  He learned to face truths, both internal and external, and what it means to be a man.  He learned to face his fears.  He learned his limits.  He became. 

I had questions for him.  Some he could answer, some he could not.  I was speaking to him, to his knowledge initially, not as a prospective student, but as a fellow philosopher.  I suggested that the way will only suffice to bolster one's efforts to be fully alive for a while, but that being a student of the way would become a burden, just as had the life before, unless something were to fill the ever expanding reason to continue.  He suggested that he found fitness for life and health.  Then, he learned how to continue that through teaching others.  The answers seemed correct, the way they were offered and the way he emoted in the discussion. 

I suggested that I had doubts about his integrity, due to him being black.  Initially this shocked him.  I could see where he was considering taking offense.  I left it open for him to make up his mind on this matter.  Or, that is how I saw it.  He, in the end, decided not to take offense.  To my mind, it was too close of a call.  He suggested, further, that he understood my misgivings.  From some other things he said, I wonder if I mistook his initial reaction.  Though, not completely.  I hold to gut feelings strongly.  I read winds well.

After hearing of his having gone from student, to master, to teacher, I suggested he needed, perhaps, to try something even more.  I asked if he had taught a child, or an infirm man, these skills.  He had not.  I suggested that this might be a way to go that one step further, but that it would require something new, and potentially dangerous, for him.  But that it might lend to his greater understanding and fulfilling his quest to becoming a final master.  By mastering his strength and skill in teaching one far weaker, while taming his intent to being a dark wolf.  The hunger for the weak, I clearly saw, was in this man.  He had merely been hiding from it.  I saw a lightbulb go off in his mind.  I knew I had him hooked.  It was at this time, that I requested becoming his student.  And so it was.

I believe I taught him, in the end, as much as he taught me.  I did not need combat training.  I am, actually, more lethal without it.  Training would merely allow options other than simply killing.  That part is true.  But I do need greater discipline, and I would rather have less lethal options.  In any case, that is how the dream went.  But it is based on how I think and function.  Strange but interesting dream.  I will be feasting on it for a few days.  More an abstract lesson about myself than anything, that dream.  Interesting.

Well... on to waking.  Later.