Langenzersdorf

I paid Vienna a visit this weekend and went to the medieval craft fair in Langenzersdorf. It was a really nice event - no fee and very much focused on education and passing on information on all sorts of stuff from the Middle Ages. I loved how open and friendly everyone was, ready to explain everything and talk about anything, especially the guys from the Wiener Wache/Dreynschlag. Markus and me spent a long time talking to them about their group, fighting styles and training. Very, very informative and interesting (of course, I couldn't stop finding comparisions to Kendo).
Just a pity that the weather wasn't all that good. That night there had been a storm, and the people sleeping in tents had a quite eventful "rest".
Also talked a bit with Viatores Vitiosus about leatherwork, since I'm really intrigued by it and would like to start it myself. It looks like that will be a bigger (ahem, financial and temporal) investment, so I need to think about it some more.

Photos:


Pretty armor


Arduinnas Gefährten showing their skills with a bow (later they shot with their feet - yes, really)


Music, my favourite part of these markets


The highlight of the day - two trebuchets. One big, one smaller, shooting 150m into a field. In the evening, they shot fireballs :->

Sunday was Kendo training in Vienna. It amused me to see how everything is connected. One day I talk with Dreynschlag about footwork in historical fencing, the next day we practice ashi sabaki. Everything's connected, and the more you learn, the more connections you find.

An Ode to Humanity

From my research:

The folk tale is not afraid of greatness. It believes that humanity is not a drab collection of mediocrities, but that nearly everybody has some poetry in him, and that it can flower at times into something which leaves the earth altogether and strikes the stars. Because it believed in human nature it believed that human nature could transcend itself [...]
- John Buchan, The Novel and the Fairy Tale

We're living in a time that likes to emphasise the wounds that mankind deals to nature. Many people feel they have an easier time dealing with inanimate matter than with other people; - which makes this almost a century old sentiment nicely refreshing. It's good to be reminded every now and then that everybody is special in their own way, and you only need to take the time to discover their singularity (the "greatness of little things in others", as the Book of Tea says). I like to lament the self-destructive way of mankind myself quite often, but if All of Humanity was really that bad, I think we wouldn't be here anymore. Most of the people we encounter are inherently good.
The quote also reminded me of one of my teachers in my first year of uni, who made us learn a poem by heart. He said that in several years' time we probably wouldn't remember the poem anymore (he was right), but that a small part of the poem would remain within us and make us more beautiful.

This also ties in with something that Takuan writes about education:

Menschenliebe ist die natürliche Gesinnung des Menschen. Pflicht ist der natürliche Weg des Menschen. Wie traurig ist es, wenn einer seinen Weg verlässt und nicht darauf wandelt, wenn einer sein Herz verloren gehen lässt und nicht weiß, wie er es wieder finden kann!
Wenn einem Menschen ein Huhn oder ein Hund verloren geht, so weiß er, wie er sie wieder finden kann; aber sein Herz geht ihm verloren, und er weiß nicht, wie suchen. Die Bildung dient uns zu nichts anderem als nur dazu, unser verlorengegangenes Herz zu suchen.
- Zen in der Kunst des kampflosen Kampfes

Which makes poetry one of the means to find our heart and the love within us, in order to transcend ourselves and reach the stars. People should read more.

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Last week I went to a cabaret. The media was there, so now here's a short video of the music that was played there with an interview of Leonding-based band Rhiannon.

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Tehehe :->



(Apologies for only posting these small, silly comic pictures recently. There's not much time to work on the big illustrations.)

Impressions

I love how life repeatedly shows me that it is to a great degree fate-based. Things you do show their after-effects almost a decade later (e.g. if I hadn't played a certain MMORPG in 2001, I wouldn't be doing Kendo now). Sometimes it seems that most of the good stuff in life is based on coincidences. Maybe karma has its part, too. Whatever it is, I like it.

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Small stuff that found its basis in the Kendo training of the last few days.

From the weekend:



And from Monday's training:



(Uh, I should stop mixing languages in pictures...)