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“Budo as a garden”

So I’m sure many of you are wondering why I’m posting so many pictures of plants. Tbh, because the dojo is closed, I don’t have anyone to nurture except for my plants. I also am very limited with what I can do in my house during the stay-at-home order, so yes, plants seem to be the only thing fulfilling my life right now instead of budo, shopping, and nice cafes to work LOL.

However, during my time away from the dojo, I have been able to notice some similarities between plants and #budo (more specifically in regards to #teaching); each plant has its own medium, watering, sunlight, and nutrient requirements in order to thrive well, just like how each individual student has their unique requirements for nurturing, teaching explanations, etc.. in order to perform well. Some plants require more sunlight to grow, some burn, just like how some students need more attention from the teacher, while others need more independence and space because too much individualized attention can make them stressed out. Some plants are naturally more finicky than others, just like how some students are harder to get your point across to than others. Some plant species are easy to grow for some growers, while for some others, it’s considered temperamental and not easy to care for—it honestly sounds just like different teachers exchanging information about their experiences about one particular student at the #dojo . Most importantly, you cannot assume that one type of medium will work for ALL plants; I do not use #leca for my phalaenopsis orchids nor my succulents, however, I use them for my aroids. The equivalent in teaching is to NOT use the SAME explanation of a #waza or concept and expect all students to get it. That’s not how it works. Some students may also need more repetitions than others in order to master a technique, while others, using only your explanation and method, may need less to get it.

I honestly felt like smacking myself in the head that it took me until NOW to fully sink in what #Kliebard (1972) said about the curriculum metaphor, “Curriculum as a Garden.” Kliebard said that when you are developing a curriculum for students, you want to envision a garden where many different species of plants, each with their own specific needs and attributes, and provide a unique, nurturing environment for each plant. No two plants are alike, so with this care, you are able to grow each individual plant to its full potential. This is how students should be viewed when you are teaching. Kliebard also mentioned how gardens can be fun for everyone as well. I can now see his metaphor and also realized how difficult it is for people in competitive #martialarts to be able to nurture others. You definitely cannot be successful without the ability to nurture.

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Well, I spoke too soon.

Well, I guess in the plant world, instead of ‘ego’ being the deadly sin within the community, it’s greed.

People are so selfish and immature. I honestly strongly and wholeheartedly disagree with not sharing the name of a seller of a plant. Isn’t the point of plants is to share? Also, I’ve never heard of a single seller who didn’t want their name to go out and get more business…

You post up pictures of your collector’s plant to show off, but then when people ask you for cuttings, you refuse (which is understandable if the plant is too young), but then if they ask for a seller for them to purchase their own stock, you refuse to give the name out?

Sounds like hypocrisy to me.

And that crosses the line for me.

My first thought with this is always, “Didn’t you learn how to share in pre-school?…”

I’ve never heard of anything about how not sharing resources is beneficial to society…

The most bizzare thing is seeing how the Indonesian plant sellers are on Fb; they ‘spy’ on the U.S. market prices and then mark up their plants to the same amount, despite it being dirt cheap over there. I understand the demand, but it sounds greedy to me tbh.

When I was starting to observe this, I began to think about all those dojos that are “recreational” and not about competition as much, and how those dojos attract more of the ‘budo hobbyists’ instead of the serious competitors. It’s interesting, and I guess I see the parallels in THAT aspect.

Perhaps a lot of people who join naginata are kind of like how I am in the plant world, where I’m doing this as a recreational hobby but not making a career out of it. I just am able to stay away from the politics because it’s big enough and I’ve chosen to just keep myself as just, “an individual with plants.” They want to use budo as a getaway from their daily lives–a place to relax.

However, there are some good people and great people you meet (just like in budo).

Hilariously enough, for some reason, fate and karma made me end up in Japan, AGAIN, for plants…

I ended up buying my variegated adansonii from Kunzo

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こんなの手に入れたけど… #自然と顔がほころんでしまう… . これは @tstropicals #滝沢先生より届いた貢物？ アノヒトガオレニミツイデモイミナイヤロ……… . ちゃうちゃう 贈り物？ 超貴重な#エンコリリューム！ 一株だけ今度のドリームガーデンに出すけど 誰も買えない値段をつけとく……… あはは じゃあ出すなって？ いや ちょっとだけええかっこしたいだけ… 俺にもそんな時がちょこちょこっと必要なの……… そういう年頃になりました……… . #encholiriumpedicellatum . #滝沢先生に感謝！ #花宇宙 #ドリームガーデン .

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LOL, he reminds me of that Pokemon Breeder from the Pokemon Day Care Center from Red/Blue 😂😂

He’s a master, well-known for that around the world, and doesn’t do it for the money.

I guess a sensei version of Kunzo is a good thing to look forward to becoming 🙂 I think he sets a good role model for the budo community in general.

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The Plant Community

Tbh, I didn’t see what the big deal with plants were–I just awlays liked beautiful, scented flowers, but that’s it. I just knew that they die quickly unless you were growing them in a garden.

But for some reason, I never had trouble with plants. I guess I just always went by that simple lesson being taught in my elementary school science class about how plants, “need water and sunlight.” Nothing else more complicated.

I remember getting my first plant (I think it was a begonia?) during undergrad because Mount Holyoke had this tradition of giving a free mini plant to their freshmen (and apparently there is an urban legend that if your plant dies, you won’t graduate!), and how I was like, “bleh, that’s it?…this is just…a leaf..” and I just left it by the Eastern-facing window and had it grow. Damn, that thing just kept growing, while my roommate’s plant died in a week. I just kept watering it and leaving it there. That’s it.

But I forgot what happened to it lol.

I then remember going to the Netherlands and seeing ppl just buy plants and orchids as if it’s no big deal. I loved the flowers, so I began to get addicted and bought a buttload of orchids from Home Depot and put them in my dorm room during my first year of grad school. Loved it, and was able to keep a consistent watering schedule (that’s the trick!)

I guess I just never grew plants growing up because I lived on a low-floor building in NYC (so all the sunlight would get blocked by the skyscrapers).

Then last year, I saw this ‘pink princess philodendron’ somewhere and I just got hooked. I saw some real cute houseplants in some Nordic interior decoration posts and just started to search there.

One plant led to another plant, which led me to see this whole new world: The Online Plant Community.

I remember when I would post some questions on some orchid forms, a while back, that the people were friendly and actually were nice enough to share info (this is totally the opposite of the budo community, where you have that whole ‘ego thing’ going on and also the tradition of ‘stealing the waza’). I also posted on this monstera albo Facebook group about my first albo that wasn’t getting a new leaf, and had so many nice, thorough responses that helped (I also met one of my albo dealers there, even though I was already following her Insta).

Corona has definitely made me pay more attention to the plants, since I don’t have my dojo and stuff to go to. Upon observing the posts from others and seeing their form of ‘drama,’ I cannot help but to think about how different it is from the budo world.

Mind you, I may have these opinions now because I am still pretty new to it (so everything is still in that lally dally phase), but I did notice a few things:

The plant community doesn’t seem to be competitive in the same way as the budo world, and I think it’s due to the nature of the activity; martial artists are historically always fighting and competing, resulting in having different types of human relations skills, while plant people are used to minding their own activity in nature, and really just quietly introverted.

In the budo world, if you want to learn something, a lot of times you would need to be fake and suck up to the higher-ups, because a lot of people are so egotistical. Unfortunately, it is very common for a lot of backlashing at other teachers about their methods, their students’ faulty techniques, as well as a lot of people happily wanting to teach their, ‘RIGHT WAY AND THE ONLY WAY’ to people because they equate it to them feeding their ego.

I haven’t seen this in the plant world. There are different methods to growing plants, but people are not aggressively pushing their opinions onto others about what the best method is.

Because the supply and demand are always disproportionate, you do not have people aggressively trying to steal customers from some sellers, and they don’t do the same aggressive smacktalking in the same way I see higher up budo ppl do, where they are always trying to poach new talent to add a good rep to their school etc etc…

Now, I’m not saying that all budo people are like this, but unfortunately, there are so many of them that I’m starting think that it’s turned into the mere expectation, which really makes you search hard and treasure those people who actually are good-natured and about the art (those are the people I tend to get along with and the only ppl who tend to like me anyway).

I guess with plants, you’re not fighting—you also are not pushy because you know that you cannot control how the plant grows (lol reminds me of that Kung Fu Panda quote), so ppl who take on that hobby for the long-term tend to fit in that personality profile.

A lot of these thoughts and this current quarantine time-period where I’m spending more time with my plants, reminds me of that scene from Fearless, where Jet Li was out in the mountains and in nature as a way to reform himself:

It’s like being out of that competitive, egotistical environment, actually made him more powerful. As for why that is, I still have no idea 🙂 Maybe I’ll learn after our borders reopen.

I hope that the budo community can learn a lot of things from the online plant community. I hope that they can be friendly with sharing info and more open to making allies, rather than competing to be the best. After all, it’s just like that quote from Hanzawa Naoki,

“The world is made up of human relations”

You cannot get better without others.  Friendships and allies go a long way, so make sure you stay good natured and uncorrupted.

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Ip Man 4

Well, I just saw “Ip Man 4” starring Donnie Yen, and honestly, it was a fantastic movie–I really liked it.

The acting in the American scenes were over-dramatic, but the Chinese scenes were more realistic with subtle human emotion. I liked this movie better than the third one.

So yes, as you would all expect, the scene where the hapa girl gets unfairly bullied by that white teenage girl was definitely something I could relate to—being a minority made you a target of that, and you unfortunately were always in situations where you were an army of 1 versus an army of many. Then what made those times worse, was that the teachers back then were so passive and uninvolved with bullying, and they usually sided with the group of (white) mean girls because there were “more witnesses,” and I definitely felt as though there was always a subconscious racial bias. Unfortunately, being a school-teacher myself now, although there is definitely more awareness for bullying compared to the past, a lot of this non-objective behavior from ineffective authority figures still remain today…it irritates me and even today, I still try to find my way to fight back people like them. Honestly, I was really waiting for that hapa girl to fucken kick that girl’s ass!!! Ugh, Ip Man 4!! YOU ROBBED ME OF THE ULTIMATE REVENGE!!

Anyway, but in all seriousness, the scene that really caught my attention was the “Lazy Susan” scene where all the kung fu masters in the San Francisco area were meeting for tea at one of the sifu’s house. The scene was portrayed many times in other movies (I think “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” had this same scene), but in those other movies I just thought that it was boring and it didn’t get into much detail about the debate on whether or not to teach martial arts to non-Chinese. Ip Man 4, however, went more into it.

They touched on identity and issues of Chinese-Americans immigrating outside their motherland and how Asians who were born and raised in Asia are not empathetic of the struggles, since they are still the “power race” in their homeland. I was impressed with how they eloquently presented the issues from both perspectives.  But the debate that really struck me was the debate on teaching traditional martial arts to “外人.”

My mother always told me about how she hates budo because it’s, “fascist” and has, “the conservative of conservative” people leading it, and that it’s very ‘right wing-like.’ In some ways, I can see where she’s coming from (there’s a long history of that in martial arts anyway), and the other Chinese sifus in the movie had that ‘right wing’ mentality with keeping Chinese martial arts, “with Chinese and ONLY Chinese,” with only Ip Man being the “leftist” and trying to present a more progressive perspective of Bruce Lee’s intentions of spreading the art as a whole. Nevertheless, all the arguments from both sides made sense and it was interesting to hear it

…but what was eerie about it was that I actually..knew what they were talking about…

And that’s when I realized,

That this endless debate about opening classical traditional arts to outsides, still exists today.

…and this film was supposed to take place in the 60’s…

…and this debate still exists today.

…that’s very SAD.

It’s been practically over a half a decade, yet there are still a disproportionate amount of “martial rightists” compared to “leftists.”

And honestly, I do admit that things are a little better now and budo has spread out more than before, but those rightist masters honestly weren’t wrong with some of their arguments.

I guess in some ways, traditional martial arts still keeps this “tradition” alive of debating whether or not it should spread to others 😂 Oh dear, I think unfortunately, there still is no conclusive right answer…