Badger

Families are strange things. United and yet diverse, a family connects by way of almost unseen undercurrents. It’s much too easy to see the branches of the tree, the bloodlines. And yet, the shared ground is there, somehow. Last time ours meet, branches were there. In the pauses between the gathering, eastern members ate together, by themselves. Just like the nearby-southerners at couple of tables elsewhere and the faraway-southerners, in another one. The lunch floor was a map, all together, not mixed.   

And yet, we are a family. 

Not that long ago, catfish went south. Recognizing the same rigors and pleasures of shared keiko is not an experience bounded to one’s family, but there was more to it. Brother Badger lead the training, and even when speaking in the mother tongue of catfish, the start was difficult to follow. Catfish had been living away for many years now, and the mores and the rhythms of the north have become his own. It took a while to understand the Japanese commands given in his own mother accent, not in the northern one that he had learn to deal with. Comebacks are awkward moments indeed. And then the rhythm. Father Snow Monkey, even when teaching with a smile, possessed a latent threat, an inner steel core that you might, just might, peer for a second. Brother Badger is a different kind of animal altogether. Robust of build, you would be tricked to think in an armored tank, in one of those slow moving castles. You would be very wrong indeed. Brother Badger is a southerner, and it takes few minutes of seeing him to distinctly see the fire flowing. 

Catfish let himself go. Back home indeed, the euphoria of recognition. Being at the southern cousins, speeded fire seemed reachable in one kata, or the next. A turn, a slice, another turn… fast! To be suddenly reminded, with a stare of the dark eyes of Brother Badger, that Iai, after all, is about control. “Slow down” he said. Looking in his dark eyes, catfish saw indeed his family. There, in the controlled fire of brother Badger the southerner. Just as in Fenix sensei, committed to the fire of destruction, to raise above it unscathed.

Families are strange things indeed. Who would have thought that the flames of Fenix Sensei would live in Brother Badger?