Blood & Rain Article 1

Waging the Culture War on the Micro Scale. Finding Bedrock on the Macro Scale.

Hello all,

I hope this finds you well.

After all this time, a question I’ve been asked time and time again is the simplest one.

What is “Blood and Rain?”

To put it simply, Blood and Rain is a poem and a personal struggle that became a way of life.

In March of 2017, I began inquiring about Holy Orthodoxy and becoming a part of the Church body.

This was a shift towards a life that had remained dormant in my mind and heart for over three years after first witnessing the reverence of a monk from Mount Athos while sitting in a small Orthodox Church during a Greek Festival in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Suddenly, after coming to the Church on my own after much deliberation, the road in front of me began to narrow significantly, as life itself began to cut deeper in meaning with every word, deed, and thought.

It was in this time that I decided to leave a marketing role in a Silicon Valley startup company to pursue a path in martial arts particularly in Muay Thai while working seven days a week as a bouncer and barback in various bars throughout the Bay Area and cultivating an uncommon practice in Orthodoxy known as Green Martyrdom.

Green Martyrdom is a praxis of martyrdom originally practiced by Reprobus, a man of large stature who sought guidance in serving God from the desert fathers. Their advice in service came in the form of fasting and prayer, to which Reprobus responded, “but these are not my gifts.” The desert fathers adjusted to this correction with a prescription of physical service in the form of carrying people across a wide and violent river. One day, a child came to Reprobus and asked to be carried across like the others. This child began to increase in weight until Reprobus felt that he was no longer strong enough to carry him, resulting in his prayers to God to endure and keep this child from drowning. Upon reaching the other side, Reprobus exclaimed to the child that he had endangered both of them greatly, swearing he had never felt a heavier load on his back than him. The child revealed himself to be Christ and told Reprobus that he was carrying the weight of all of the world’s sins before suddenly vanishing in front of him. Reprobus was later named “Christopher,” or “Christ-Bearer,” becoming a Saint in the Orthodox Church.

This story of labor had deeply moved me in this time of my life when labor was in abundance. This adoration of the green martyrs was expressed to my then spiritual father, who encouraged this praxis in place of fasting due to the aforementioned physical demands of my life.

Throughout the summer of 2017, this praxis deepened my Faith and strengthened my mind and body, as my creative output as a writer began to increase.

I found myself in the bar industry, surrounded by people who lived lives of completely different values that typically pointed downwards, as I had to continually navigate myself through a path that steered clear of substance-abuse and fornication to keep the Orthodox Faith and the praxis of green martyrdom.

Being surrounded by the polar opposite of my path strengthened my resolve, and I had clear intentions of maintaining this way of life until death, envisioning a path of a fighting career followed by Orthodox monasticism ahead of me.

In the Autumn of 2017, I met a man in a coffee shop across the street from my Muay Thai gym who at forty-two years of age had left his career as an investment banker to find his true path.

This man positively reinforced my chosen way of labor, chastity, martial arts, and writing and asked me what my personal philosophy was.

I explained that I was an Orthodox inquirer, to which he responded, “yes, but every man must have his own philosophy.”

I told him that a poem had been emerging in my mind through every kick thrown, every weight lifted, and every human consoled.  I told him that this poem had a rhythm I could feel and a title that was clear, yet the poem hadn’t fully revealed itself.

This poem was titled “Blood & Rain.”

When it came time for my first Orthodox Easter, or “Pascha,” as we call it, I was prepared for a service that was truly all-encompassing.

Walking around the church with candle in hand before the stroke of midnight and the victorious cries of “Christ is Risen” not only flooded my mind with thoughts of immense joy about Christ’s resurrection, but a lifting of any blockages preventing this poem from being written.

Three days later, “Blood and Rain,” fully emerged on paper with ease.

“Blood & Rain”

I didn't stand in line at the pharmacy for my daily dose.

Nor did I purchase a ticket for a cruise to retirement.

Dreaming American is a coffin.

Slave to living a worker bee in a box of indifference.

Not a loose grip on given circumstances, but pure, unbridled indifference.

Cross the pond to dust off the life of leisure, siestas, and Mediterranean sun in abundance.

Or the indoor treat of a downward spiral dressed in pretty lights and flowers.

To be a master of none, dipping a timid toe on the edge of deep, dark waters.

Briefly fascinated by the war below, but numbed by the haze above.

There are honest men who work, whose wars are true and simple.

But the crowd see these men as reflections, yet their mirrors are false and broken.

I saw their road before me and swore I wanted to scream.

At first in fear I walked it, just before the sleep.

The "guides" urged me to sleepwalk, into an empty ending.

But I stood so still bleeding the truth of hard worn trails.

And I rushed off the wide road, blocking out the "warnings." Of how every day I'd suffer, not knowing where I'd slumber.

Under sunshine tricking masses into warped concepts of peace.

Leisure bearing comfort, and regrets under its costumes.

“But of course it will be painful,” the masses echoed deep.

Yet I saw a beauty that will never fade, in dark waters where I could drown.

Of might, and will, and sacrifice that lead to a true faith.

Where convictions bring true actions, and existence carved from stone.

To drive others to fight for a world that only brings them joy.

Knowing they'll face the suffering and discomfort of the day.

But with this hopeful service, pious choices might be made.

And knowing this from dusk till dawn, I’ll endure the pain.

So keep your leisure and sunshine, and I’ll take Blood and Rain.”

From there, the path was briefly solidified, but shortly after these events, I was deceived and led astray for three years, ceasing this way of life and leaving the Orthodox Faith, thankfully while still a mere inquirer.

My time away from the Faith brought me to Brooklyn, New York where I sustained a lower back injury and a plunge into despondency and depression.

Returning to the Bay Area saw a rehabilitation process that was slow and without any assistance of a licensed physical therapist. Research was the driver of corrective practices, and self-discipline was its engine.

I had fallen prey to degenerative mindsets, as my path had been abandoned with my Faith in a dwindling state at best.

This time carried on until March of 2020, when Gavin Newsom shut down California’s restaurant and bar industry, leaving me with north of $3000 in overhead costs and no source of income.

Refusing to take the $3000 monthly Californian unemployment saw me take a job in overnight security two hours away from my place of residence with an eventual additional job as a brunch bartender in a more conservative part of the Bay Area. This continued for a year, bearing sleep-deprivation, malnourishment, poverty, and recurring injury.

Having to endure this crucible in my life, I found that I was forced into returning to that path called Blood & Rain, and I began writing on instagram in December of 2020 and podcasting in January of 2021.

The path I walked, wrote about, and spoke about was one that was intense, all-encompassing, and consistently seeking depth through trial and isolation.

However, this was a path that was born in Orthodox inquiring, and it is one that cannot be divorced from the Faith.

While attempting to live Blood & Rain without the Faith to dig myself out of my given circumstances, I was beginning to slowly return to its warmth.

Blood & Rain was always missing a balance that I could never find without it.

The extremes of the page and podcast were best received in the forms of anything having to do with living a martial lifestyle in strength, executing tasks in inhospitable circumstances, and martial arts themselves or in the original creative writing that would erratically emerge and exuded the essence of “Blood & Rain” itself.

Yet the content I was putting out was beginning to discuss a much wider range of essences and subjects than the extremes that were initially intended to exclusively make up Blood & Rain.

This was primarily due to a series of encounters and collaborations with predominantly like-minded individuals who had different focuses of interests ranging from regenerative farming, to testosterone optimization, to cryptocurrency, hidden history, post-liberal and reactionary politics, and the men’s movement itself.

The men’s movement or as my good friend Will Spencer would call it, “The Renaissance of Men,” is something that I never fully understood was necessary until learning how little masculinity was understood or even encountered by this era’s men of the Western world.

These varied kinds of content were beneficial to many and were enjoyable to write and speak about, however they didn’t necessarily fall in line with what I knew Blood & Rain to be until i returned to the Faith.

The content throughout 2021 was varied, and it lacked a true overarching mission.

In December of 2021, I returned to inquiring about the Orthodox Faith after repenting in the resting place of St. John Maximovitch, Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco.

This return and repentance triggered a series of events that saw a shift in my life and the meaning of Blood & Rain.

Suddenly, I was leaving the Bay Area for Texas and elsewhere after.

Suddenly, I felt I couldn’t write or speak anymore.

Suddenly, context began to form.

Every last bit of weakness came into focus leading up to my baptism into the Orthodox Faith on July 22 of this year, taking the name Constantine after my patron Saint.

Suddenly, months of contemplation and prayer put everything in my personal life and Blood & Rain into balance and perspective.

Writing, podcasting, reading, and rubbing shoulders with many content creators who are both in my immediate sphere and adjacent spheres have shifted my focus to be more concerned with the overarching “culture war,” that the world, particularly the West currently finds itself in.

Many of the most interesting content creators across multiple platforms are concerned with tracking cultural changes on the macro scale, often times as if they’re occurring on accident.

People are looking for both a “Caesarian” solution of a great man seizing control and setting things straight while also emptily criticizing the institutions that currently stand.

When observing the state of the Western World in particular, questions are constantly asked regarding when and why the leadership began to grow neglectful.

People point to the hostile takeover of Western institutions by the hands of those whose ideology inherently promotes decay.

A more important question to ask is why the common man allowed this to happen.

The answer more often than not is ignorance, if not sloth.

It takes mass-compliance in order for corrupted institutions to remain controlled by corrupted entities.

And while I am not calling for violence, I am calling for the common man to cultivate capabilities of sovereignty for the sake of de-centralization and potential re-centralization, building upon values that are a true bed rock.

This begins however, with the fact that we as a people have allowed institutions to be corrupted by forces that seek to erode the pillars of society, the family, and the individual.

The common man believes that what he sees in the leadership is completely out of his hands in the day to day. Any semblance of believing he can make an impact on the trajectory of his nation is deferred to a vote cast every four years.

But this is only an act of political obligation.

The tide for a vote begins in every word, deed, and thought of a man. Political smoke and mirrors coming in the form of flowery rhetoric and empty calls to arms towards invisible enemies can only do so much against individuals who are making tangible choices in their every day lives that make a direct impact in the world around them.

Culture and politics have an ongoing struggle with each other, the results of which dictate the overarching landscape and zeitgeist of our day to day lives.

As a general rule, politics comes from the top down, whereas culture comes from the bottom up. For someone to say that culture is superior to and upstream from politics is misunderstanding that this relationship is inherently bidirectional.

Policy-makers and all wings of the government can influence culture through decisions that heavily impact the day-to-day lives of its citizens in a truly direct fashion. When these decisions are well received by the general public, a culture based on the newfound time of prosperity can begin. This period is usually conducive towards growth and further building upon a new wave of establishment based on a new zeitgeist in that given era.

However, when these decisions from policy-makers are not well received, a culture of resistance is created. This culture of resistance is hell-bent on doing everything that it possibly can to destroy the authority of the establishment whether by organized orchestration of a man with powerful resources and charisma or through the organic hive mind of what Gustav Le Bon would call “the crowd” to destroy the current establishment set in the most recent zeitgeist.

Culture can then either reinforce politics or destroy the political norms in that given era. To say one is more important than the other, of course is then truly nonsensical. To further understand these shifts in cultural and political dynamics, one can be best educated in this phenomenon by Jacques Derrida’s essay, “An Event, Perhaps.”

With this world we find ourselves in, we can see that if the common man was both consistently concerned with what is happening on the macro scale and what is happening on the micro scale, this shift in institutions could have been prevented.

To understand what is happening on the macro scale is to understand how politics is shifting and is potentially dictating the day to day lives of the people on the micro scale.

To understand what is happening on the micro scale is to understand the culture surrounding one’s day to day life.

These are directly linked, and for one to shift culture on a macro scale, one must find a way to shift culture on the micro scale in such a way that reaches a critical mass in partnership with many other micro scale efforts to shift the culture of the macro scale.

This was not understood in the era of erosion we’ve seen in the past 70, if not, 100 years.

Much of the self-improvement world is hellbent on the cultivation of habits that promote self-actualization, and these efforts often stop with the self.

For this reason, self-improvement has been recently demonized. This of course is also nonsensical.

But for self-improvement to stop with the self is a waste of potential improvement upon the common good.

Much of today’s societal makeup is comprised of social “activists” who scream in protest for the macro level to change but present no tangible steps for the common man to do their part in causing their desired changes.

Another mass of societal makeup is those who do not concern themselves with the events occurring on the macro level and keep their head down to grow prosperous on the micro level, never allowing their improvements on the micro to connect to potentially change the macro. These are the people who just want to be left alone. This is the “silent majority.” However, a “silent majority” is useless.

The group mentioned in the former understands potential changes that need to made for the greater good but does not know how to create a path for those changes to occur. The group mentioned in the latter understands how to make tangible day to day changes but does not understand that these kinds of tangible changes are needed in order to change the overarching world they’ve felt the need to opt out of.

With the situation today, we face Institutions that promote erosion of the very things that make us human beings:

Faith

Family

Sovereignty

Upward-facing art

Discipline

To disempower these institutions calls for the opting out of their current policies that create the barren cultural landscape we find ourselves in today. But once again, opting out is not enough. Opting out for the sake of opting out does not re-establish these aforementioned values on the macro scale but simply allows one to remove outward resistance of practicing them by the hand of the current regime.

Opting out to then begin spreading cultural practices that reinforce these values presented in ways that are attractive to the common man is the only move in restoring a cultural norm of growth rather than self-destruction.

It is through creating sound individuals first however, that we may create a sound collective consciousness for the masses.

As the great samurai duelist, Miyamoto Musashi once said:

“To master the virtue of the long sword is to govern the world and oneself, thus the long sword is the basis of strategy. The principle is ‘strategy by means of the long sword.’ If he attains the virtue of the long sword, one man can beat ten men. Just as one man can beatten, so a hundred men can beat a thousand, and a thousand men can beat ten thousand. In my strategy, one man is the same as ten thousand, so this strategy is the complete warrior’s
craft.”

In waging this cultural war, one must first win the war in their day to day life, so he may teach those around them to win their respective wars. When those wars are won, they may band together to win the cultural war in their immediate community. This inevitably victorious community can then equip other communities to facilitate winning wars on the individual scale and then as an entire community on their own. Suddenly, there are thousands of local communities opting out of the current cultural norm, not for the sake of isolation, but for the sake of providing enough cultural force to abolish the norms on a national level and continental level in order to build new norms on a true bedrock.

Blood & Rain is a path for individuals that can now be guided in its context for doing a greater good on the micro level to eventually grow into a positive force on the macro level.

Blood & Rain professes the Nicene Creed first and foremost.

But after this, there is that essence itself that I’ve known in my heart but have often struggled to quantify:

A specific kind of masculinity that fosters the following:

Tireless Servanthood

Anti-Fragility

A Relentless Pursuit of Humility

An Assassin’s Mindset for Combat

A Duty to Build & Preserve

A Mastery of Rhetoric & Narrative

A Balance of Violence & Virtue

With these cultivated on the micro scale to near perfection, an individual can equip others to cultivate these as well for the sake of this aforementioned culture war that will never end.

The content you can expect from this platform is written to equip one with all of the qualities listed above and how to apply them.

Anti-Fragility in particular is something I’ll be writing and speaking about extensively, as it has become the central philosophy of my growing coaching practice, Anti-Fragile Fitness.

True fitness is fitness that doesn’t break in the face of adversity, pressure, and randomness but rather gets better with all of these presented qualities.

Anti-Fragility is a concept presented in the text by Lebanese author, Nassim Taleb stating that there is no true opposite to the word fragile in the English lexicon. Tough and robust are simply neutral states regarding these forces, so the only option left was to create a term: anti-fragile.

Anti-Fragility both inside and outside of the gym is vital for every man on the micro scale in order to adapt to any situation whether it be simply adjusting one’s fitness training to unforeseen given circumstances or being ready to respond with an anti-fragile mindset when faced with true adversity and randomness.

In addition to this, you can expect long form content written on the Faith itself.

After a long journey of finding Faith that took me through baptism as a Catholic, baptism as a Protestant, readings on the occult, and many other areas of research, my path to the church I know to be the church founded during the events of the Book of Acts was finally completed in being baptized in the Orthodox Church.

To build on true bedrock is to build on the Faith. This is true both for the micro and the macro.

These writings will only be regarding the Orthodox Christian Faith. Posts that have to do with this will be labeled “Orthodox,” so you may read them or skip them as you wish.

The Blood & Rain Podcast will return through this platform with most episodes being released here to eventually be released on mainstream podcasting platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Lastly, creative writing will be released through this platform, as this century is one that is starving for fiction that reflects the aforementioned values that are currently being demonized in today’s standards.

To subscribe to the premium version of Blood & Rain is to gain access to exclusive writings and podcast episodes on top of the weekly releases that will be available to the general public.

This has all been a long time coming.

As my good friend and Instagram content creator, thesolarsaxon has said to me, “Blood and Rain needed a face, as your personal struggle has always been at the center of it.”

The micro and macro dynamic had been staring at me in the face all along.

Every man needs a mission, and this is mine.

It will likely continue to evolve, as my Faith in God deepens.

For now and likely for a long time now, my mission will be assisting as many people as possible in waging the culture war on a micro scale.

So let us begin.

Goodnight.

Good Storms.

God Bless.

-Arthur Constantine

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