These days I am the old guy when it come to young men in their warrior stage, me heading into King energy with all the commitment I can muster.
When I see the disconnection in young men that have been beaten down by there fathers intellectually, emotionally and or physically, standing behind walls of silence/ anger and Rage, Robert Bly's poem always comes to mind.
My father shamed me in his silence. In his sighs. In his condemnation and contempt. When I became a teenager I used these on him, full of the rage that he repressed and my mother unleashed.
For most of the time though I had tried to hide it behind walls of being the good boy, until being good was to hard , unachievable.
The hopelessness in that was replaced by the anarchy of punk. You can't fail if you don't try, tune in - drop out, every generation had their sub-cultural way out. It was a beautiful relief while it worked, but only increased the isolation , disconnection and despair.
Bly gives vivid image to this. A boy will limp the wound of the father unexpressed. Eventually then the inevitable decline into shadow happens.
The last stanza has always left me mouth open, heart stopped. My house was a forrest and me and my father were Hunters. There was a time when it was unsafe to venture unarmed.
I cannot imagine this place now. The love I have been restored to in fellowship with other spiritual travellers who had the courage to talk about their "rough bark" to finally expose their limps.
God I have been grateful to be exposed to this acceptance, in particular the masculine love I have experienced by men who choose to walk from the Forrest hearts open .
I understand male teenage , midlife and end of life suicide. The forrest becomes lonely. When you are starving of compassion, forgiveness, direction, mentoring, guidance and the walls that protected you from your vulnerability become your prison, it is a hopelessness infused in Toxic Shame and an inability to resolve this core soul murder.
Ending it all seems the only compassionate thing to do when left to solve the dilemma with the same injury to heart/ brain and soul that got you there.
This morning and last night I felt their pain, I saw their loneliness , and I was grateful I had come out of the Forrest , but can still feel the soil in my toes, the twigs in my hair.
I am a man, a son, a father , a friend and a husband. I want my boys to live in a home with a warm hearth ( heart) to see nurturing come from the masculine as well as the beautiful majestic love from the feminine.
I am committed to this for the rest of my life.
I am committed to be a King.
My Father's Wedding
by Robert Bly
1924
Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle's old milk wagon.
Some men live with a limp they don't hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want…
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.
Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog's, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog's teeth say that.
But I grew up without dog's teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!
Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
On my father's wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.
He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.
He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy
he longed for, didn't need, and wouldn't accept.
So the Bible's
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.
After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.
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