Meditations on God

Hello, my name is Robert Van Valkenburgh and I am the author of Holistic Budo: The Way of the Gentle Warrior.  

I was born in New Jersey, but moved to Maryland with my parents and brother when I was twelve. At nineteen, looking for a fresh start after a somewhat troubled adolescence, I moved away from the area where I grew up and relocated to the Annapolis area and have lived here for more than twenty years, now with a family of my own. Although I have traveled all over the world and throughout the United States, I still choose to call the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland my home. There is just something special about the Bay area that is difficult to describe. 

I am not exactly sure when I began writing as a form of creative self-expression, but I do know that I was not always a writer. In fact, when I dropped out of high school it was in part due to the fact that I was so far behind in my English class from a combination of absences and missed assignments that I despaired of ever catching up. After moving to Annapolis, however, I obtained my GED and eventually began taking classes at the local community college.

In spite of my less than stellar high school record, I tested into Honors English at the college level and had a pleasant, if challenging, experience with writing in that class. Our professor insisted that we write one-page papers for our assignments, no longer and no shorter, and when I asked him if this was to teach us to be more concise with our writing, he replied, “That is part of it, but why would I want to read long poorly written papers?” Intrigued and mildly insulted, I took this as both a challenge and an opportunity to grow as a writer. 

Along with Honors English, I also enrolled in several Philosophy courses with Philosophy eventually becoming the concentration of my studies. In these classes, I fell in love with ideas, both their study and discussion, and this, perhaps above all else, was where the writer’s seed was planted. Through philosophy, my writing started as and continues to be a way for me to think out loud, so to speak, and to both flesh out and express my thoughts, for myself and, through Holistic Budo, for anyone else who may find value in them. 

Although it took me many years of taking a few classes here and there while working full-time in the coffee and coffee machine repair industry, I graduated from University of Maryland with honors, with a Bachelor’s of the Arts in Humanities. While this degree did not directly relate to my vocation at the time, it was important for me, as a high school dropout, to receive my degree for several reasons, not the least of which was simply to finish what I started, but also to give my family the opportunity to watch me walk across the stage, an experience they were denied when I was a teenager. 

In college, I cannot honestly say that I enjoyed writing for writing’s sake, but I did enjoy being able to express my ideas more clearly and concisely than I was able to prior to entering academia. I have always been drawn to creative expression through art, music, poetry, design, etc. and my time in academia gave me a more formal foundation upon which to express myself. Additionally, my education has afforded me the opportunity to use what I have learned to help others, specifically my wife and her sister who are both from Cambodia, with English being their second language, are now graduates of University of Maryland as well. This ability to help others navigate our complex and often confusing language has been an unexpected and pleasant surprise that I could not have anticipated when registering for my first college course on a whim. 

I have since left the coffee industry to raise my daughter, focus on my writing, and run my martial art academy, Kogen Dojo where I teach Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and martial art event business, KD Events LLC where I run the Older Grappler Scrimmages and Liquid Swords NoGi Submission Only events, as well as to start my own apparel company NoGi For The Culture. 

This all brings us to Holistic Budo. What does it mean? How did it start? And why do I write?