2021-008 | RITE OF PASSAGE

WISDOM TRAILS: There was a time when a knife was given as a gift. It was the happiest moment in a boy’s life, for, in his eyes, he is accepted as an adult. It happened because the giver knows the recipient is ripe enough how to use, keep and care of the knife. It is a rite of passage. It is not anymore. We live in a different world with changing values. The old ways are discarded for something politically correct, metrosexual and superficial

You simply cannot earn your first knife if your hands are soft and lazy. A child must be taught how to use the knife as a tool and he practices it on his spare time until such time his confidence would increase his level of skill. In much the same way, a child skilled in making a fire prepares himself or herself to the business of simple life skills of cooking and eating. The child becomes self-reliant and how self-reliance is now a rare commodity, is it not?

First seen in Facebook

January 1, 2018

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POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, MOST of the time, turn a harmless thing, gesture or ritual, into something offensive and harmful. The more people becoming very sophisticated in their lifestyles and in their living environment, the more they distanced themselves from their past or their origins. Comfort almost always discards the archaic models of living a life. Protectiveness is an instinct but, now, it is magnified as opportunities of economic gains, like a lawsuit.

 

In my time, I bruised and bloodied both hands and lower legs for tasks like splitting the firewood. I used many bolos, a cleaver, an axe and wood wedges to accomplish my work when I became nine years old up to the time that I became 25. Wood splinters would be found under my skin; small pieces of wood bounced at me, hitting my shins, knees, face and arms; blades would separate from handles and became missiles that rebound back at you when it hit a concrete wall. 

If some parent today would have their kid do the tasks that I did, that father or mother would surely be summoned to appear in a police station to answer for a complaint of cruelty to children or child labour. Am I right? Yes, Virginia. You can even broadcast it in Facebook Live and tag all the police stations that is in your friends list. Today’s society is an effeminate society. I watch it with contempt and I disdained to walk in its superficial ground.

 

Did you not know that handling edged tools early in my life have developed my earliest appreciation of the blade? It made my upper body strong and calloused the hands that gripped with sureness which helped me to go on a private pilgrimage of adventure and discovery. Most of all, it became the seed of what becomes now as the Knife Carry Rights and Ethics, which I taught in my bushcraft camp seminars and which I talked in speaking engagements. 

I earned my first knife when I was 15. My grandfather allowed me the use of his two OKAPI hunting knives which I carried everyday to school and home. When I was 21, my father gave me his own-made knife which I brought in my island-to-island tramping in a tugboat. Believe this or not, I owned my first Swiss Army Knife when I was already 49. You should be happy you have one while you are still young.

 

I grew up in a community where people used knives in their work and I get to know the many ways how they used it. All were responsible in their demeanors, even while drunk. Sure there were scruples and misunderstandings but, in spite of that edged environment, nobody died.  

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WARRIOR PILGRIMAGE BLOG, personified by this writer, is synonymous with the Outdoors, since Bushcraft and Survival is its niche. Safety and Security are its bedrock when it ventured into organizing outdoor events that involved people as in adventure/pilgrimage guideships and seminars; and explorations and expeditions.

Through tutorship, experience, folk knowledge and good old common sense, this writer was able to collect useful information which he is currently documenting in a book titled, ETHICAL BUSHCRAFT. He shares some of this information and knowledge in his training sessions; in his social-media account; and in this blog.