I knew very little about my father’s father. I did know my mother’s father, so it was he who I looked to as a living ancestor. He always had an ancestral feel about him. As a house painter in the 1930s he used to walk 20 to 40 miles per day, just to get back and forth to his work sites. Now when an American man does that it is a tragedy, it is international news! He taught me the value of walking, of separating from our means of transportation and seeing the world in a more intimate way. He was also quiet, reserved and measured, never ranting and raving like his wife, and never vexed by her antics.

My three strongest memories of Grandpa Kern are:

1. His talking to my brother and I about not enlisting for military service, that it was a devil’s bargain that served some little understood and possibly unjust purpose.

2. His dropping me off 8 miles from the city line when I moved to Baltimore and telling me to walk down town and not turn back until I found a job.

3. Watching video of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat being killed at a parade review, and seeing the slow motion shot of a loyal officer running an assassin through with his ceremonial sword. Grandpa smiled and grinned at me, speaking approvingly of one man’s ability to employ his character to take out a much better armed man, “That is the way. I bet he felt that!”

After Grandpa passed I thought he had just instructed me on ‘keeping cool’ as part of the process of dominating the women and networking with the men in your life without a fuss, and of the importance of hard work and independence; of knowing you can get to your job even if the busses are not running or your car is broken down. But I have come to realize what he was really teaching was an active Western way of meditation.

Since my teens I have had to listen to practitioners of Asian-based martial arts extol the virtues of everything Asian and the weakness of everything Western: such as boxers being unable to punch, wrestlers being unable to fight, and of any 80 year old 100 pound karate master being able to disarm burly gunmen at will. Much of this has been said to stem from the meditative arts, to come from the strong spirit developed sitting in peaceful mind-emptying repose.

The truth is boxers mediate when they shadowbox, wrestlers when they roll by themselves. The ancients regarded war dancing—solo war dancing—as very important to the development of a warrior.

In martial arts ‘boxing’ is practiced primarily by hitting mitts with a sympathetic partner. In contrast at boxing gyms the art is practiced by hitting air and bags while imagining an antagonist in front of you.

Currently, in America, most stick-fighting and blade-fighting is Asian-based, with the focus either on preset sequences utilizing an artificially compliant ‘partner’, or [less in-authentically] via ‘feeder drills’ in which partners practice sequential and sympathetic drills with the focus on the weapon. This process is one of artifice, of being mired in the object, the material, and is counter to the meditative process.

However, the stick-fighter who practices solo hitting air and bags in an antagonistic mediation on fluidity in combat—he usually murders the stick-tappers when they meet in combat, because he has developed his combat serenity holistically, not separately from his skill set, sitting among wind chimes and wafting incense.

Some of us seek out places ‘where life is scarce’ as my otherwise unwise friend Bano used to say. When this deranged war-scarred killer and I met he told me that he respected me for being quiet, cool and ‘for living in your own mind.’

When asked how I cultivated this habit I admitted that it was from walking at night, in extreme heat and cold, during storms, in back alleys, and in dangerous and deserted places; always seeking the least-traveled path to my destination. When called to explain myself I had to admit that this method of developing a serene demeanor was purely an accident, a byproduct of an alienated state. As a boy without friends I had sought lonely places as there I felt less alone. Then, upon moving to Baltimore city as it imploded in the early 1980s I found myself in a congested living space many miles from any remote area such as the woods I loved in Western Pennsylvania. I had not made a correlation until now, but it was at age 19, in the year of my grandfather’s death, that I began walking the streets during nighttime thunderstorms, taking alleys, vacant lots and footpaths instead of sidewalks and streets.

Extreme weather is a gift of nature for the city dweller. I normally take the bus with 25 people at night. When the temperature dips below 10 it is me and two older men. My roommate was perplexed when I walked to work in 2 degrees the other night when he would have given me a ride. He does have a clue, as indicated by his comment, “I suppose pain and suffering is something you enjoy.”

It is usually not suffering. But a taste of the pain that once motivated our ancestors to drive beasts from caves, to capture fire, to wear animal hides, to invent the sewing needle, and otherwise assert themselves against nature is a healthy reminder of what we are, of what our masters no longer wish us to be.

This morning, as I went out for a stroll in zero degrees along the icy lanes of a city that has shut down, whose students do not go to school, whose TV news oracles declare the deadliness of the environment, mere miles from a county where it is against the law for a teenager to walk more than a mile to school, I have my best chance to get in touch with Grandpa Kern and his ancestors. Not only do I get to see the futility of Man’s promise to himself to dominate nature in the form of broken water pipes and closed businesses and schools, but I get to enjoy the solitude of the primitive man who lived much of his life in silence except for the moans of the world. To my right, as I walked out into the middle of the dark street I could hear my American wind chimes, the painted sheet metal panels of a 100 year old barn being slowly torn apart by the undying world over which it once served as a symbol of domestication.

One walks by such a rotting edifice with hope, for since the patiently and soft-spoken wind is slowly but surely tearing down a long dead farmer’s edifice of power, so might men—if they remain men—erode the equally rotten edifice of power once raised by shrill womanly men chanting their ideologies at the point of another man’s gun.

The story of Western Man—right up until our fall into domestication—was one of defiance and conquest. Why, when we mediate, must we seek some Alien artifice, some phony Japanese or Tibetan dream space, when we can listen to the same music that our grandfathers and their grandfathers listened to all the way back into the dawn of our kind?

What is better than listening to the world moan?