I’ll be honest. Up until a day or so ago, I really hadn’t been paying close attention to the Penn State story. As an adult survivor of childhood abuse, I’m living and dealing with my own story every day. I don’t have to look to media for more.

I’ll be honest about something else, too. Just 24 hours ago, I’d never heard of Jon Ritchie. Then, yesterday afternoon, I happened to be channel flipping and ran across his conversation above with Bob Ley on the ESPN show Outside the Lines. Now Jon Ritchie is one of my favorite men. If you watch the video above, I think you’ll see why.

Jon speaks of his long history with Jerry Sandusky, a man he regarded as a role model, friend, and mentor from the time of their first meeting when Ritchie was 14 and Sandusky was recruiting him for the Penn State football program. Speaking about Sandusky, Jon says:

“I just felt like this man was so selfless, and so egoless, that he was what I aspired to be someday. And now, that foundation of what I thought was credible, and what I thought was important, and what I thought was good has crumbled. It’s decimated and it’s caused me to just reevaluate everything around me.”

A bit later, he says, “My whole lens has cracked.”

I understand exactly what Jon is saying because I’ve had a similar experience. Several years ago, I learned that an older man I’d known and admired my entire life, someone I’d loved and respected, someone with whom I’d spent countless hours as a child, had systematically sexually abused at least a dozen children over a period of around 25 years.

I was completely blindsided. I felt as if my entire world had been turned upside down. I’d never had any indication, not as a child and not as an adult, that anything so hideous was going on. He was, in my perception, one of the safest adults I knew as a child. I’d never received any inappropriate attention from him or heard of anyone else who had.

Shock is far, far too mild a word for what I felt and experienced in response to these revelations. As Jon says in the video, what I’d learned caused me to reevaluate everything. Not just my relationship with this man I’d trusted so much, my memories of my time with him, and my feelings about him, but everything. My sense of what I thought I knew and who I thought I could trust was ruptured down to the very root.

I was horribly disoriented for weeks, and it took a long time for me to come to terms with what I’d learned and to right myself again. Furthermore, I was unprepared to find that someone else I’d known and trusted all my life would do anything to protect this serial abuser’s reputation as a “great man”, to deny, to cover up, and to press his victims to keep the secret. This, to me, has been as appalling as the abuse itself, and has poisoned my relationship with that person as well.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so impressed with Jon Ritchie today. He could’ve taken the route of protecting, denying, and rationalizing on behalf of his long-time hero, or he could’ve simply stayed out of sight and kept quiet until things settled down. Instead he’s chosen to take the path of honor and integrity, to allow others to witness his walk through the flames.

I can see the deep pain in his eyes as he speaks, and I know it all too well. He’s obviously been shaken to the core. It’s not easy to accept that someone so close and so admired has done such awful things, much less to speak publicly about it so soon after finding out. Jon is sharing what is surely one of the most devastating experiences of his life in real time and in an incredibly transparent way.

The children who were molested and assaulted are the primary victims here, and that is where, as Jon says, the focus belongs. But Jon and others like him, who were close with Jerry Sandusky and saw him as a mentor, a hero, a role model, and a good man, are part of the collateral damage, secondary victims who’ve been deeply wounded by a horrific betrayal of trust and confidence that cuts to the bone and warps one’s sense of reality.

These men are in crisis, too. They’re feeling crazy, wondering how they could’ve been so thoroughly fooled for so long, and worrying that they somehow failed to pay sufficient attention to realize what was going on and stop it. They’re searching their own memories, wondering if maybe something happened to them as well, something they’ve somehow blocked out or rationalized away. Some are thinking they’re damn lucky it wasn’t them, and feeling guilty about the relief that comes with that. They’ve all been damaged and injured, too, certainly not in the same ways or to the same degree as the children who were molested and assaulted, but in ways that still matter deeply, and they’re going to need compassion, understanding, and time to heal as well.

If I could thank Jon in person for this brave, honest, articulate, and very moving interview, I would. I hope it’s widely seen and discussed. It’s an incredibly helpful, vital part of the conversation for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that, even in what must be one of the darkest moments of his life, Jon Ritchie is still showing us what it means to be a good man.

This post originally appeared on 11/12/11 on the Good Men Project website.

In a chapter called “Being Your Own Man” from his previous book, Matters for Men: Staying Healthy and Keeping Life on Track, Dr. Ashfield wrote:

Father and son relationships are often fraught with tension and conflict, because of a failure to understand that a son must chart his own course, and must best his father in some way, in order to become a self-respecting equal with him in the world of men. Sons must not only be snatched away from mother’s apron strings, but must also decisively cease their dependence on or acquiescence to father. Many men, even in middle age, experience the continuing inertia of unrealized manhood because they are still preoccupied – often unknowingly, with lamenting an absent (or less than ideal) father, or living in their father’s shadow. There may be no simple formula for success in life, but there is a simple formula for failure: to betray and abandon the person we could become, and the life that we could have, in order to placate and please other people.

The decision to be ourselves and to be responsible for ourselves – to shape our own destiny, rather than living on the leftovers of someone else’s, is no small matter. It can be a frightening thing to take the first few steps into a future governed by our own volition and choices. But no other option can give us the dignity or manliness of a life that is, for better or for worse, uniquely and satisfyingly ours and ours alone.

Dr. Ashfield’s comments remind me of one of my favorite quotes, attibuted to Rudyard Kipling:

To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

I’ve found, as Dr. Ashfield has written, that separating from my father, from both the man he was and the man I needed him to be, has been crucial to my coming into my own life as a mature man. It’s been a long process, a “hard business” as Kipling put it. It’s also been both necessary and well worth the time and the effort. I know there’s more work to do (there will always be more), but nearly 35 years after taking my first conscious steps out of my father’s life and into my own, I’m finally beginning to feel, in ways I never have before, that I am becoming a man at last.

Still I am, as Kipling said, “lonely often, and sometimes frightened,” frequently more so than I would prefer or care to admit, but I also have a tolerance and an acceptance of both of these states that I didn’t have even a few years ago. I understand now that standing up as a man in this world doesn’t guarantee me anything – not love, not success, not companionship, not fidelity, not health, not safety – and this understanding has liberated me, not from wanting all of those things, but from expecting them as some sort of reward for doing what I believe is right.

It is only by standing firm in my own authenticity and integrity that I can truly be fully present in this world and in my own life, with all of the inevitable pain, confusion, and disappointment that come to each one of us who lives. This is a lesson my father could not teach me, having never learned it himself, and I could only learn it by stepping out from the long, angry shadow he cast over my life as a child, a shadow that covered me like a second skin and nearly obliterated my life as a man.

my dreams float
just below the surface of consciousness
like ice floes
drifting out to sea.

invisible as gravity
insatiable as imagination
they are the wings that hold me to this earth
they can take me anywhere
but they always bring me home.

I’ve written previously about the essential part that dreams and dreamwork played in the genesis and development of my first book, Iron Man Family Outing. Dreams are such a rich source of information. They often express and correspond to major awakenings in our lives. Today I’d like to share some of the basic ideas and strategies I’ve learned in working with my dreams over the last twenty years.

Recall and Record
The first step in working with any dream is to remember it. One of the best ways to encourage and improve your dream recall is to make a habit of recording whatever you remember from your dreams in whatever way is best for you, whether it’s writing, making a voice recording, or doing some artwork. Your record of the dream doesn’t have to be polished and perfect; the point is to capture the important elements and flow of the dream, as well as your own experience as the dreamer, as best you can.

Some folks have a hard time remembering their dreams. They may say “I never have any dreams” or “I have dreams but I can’t remember anything.” But in my experience, there’s always something you can use as a starting point, even when you’re certain there isn’t. You may wake up with a feeling, an impression, or an image in your mind. You may awaken with a vague recollection of a person, a place, or just a word that came to you while you slept. That is your starting point for working with your dreams. Record it somehow. If you do just that much, consistently, you’ll notice that your dream recall begins to improve and you’ll find that you can remember much more than you thought you could.

It’s best if you can record something from your dreams, even if it’s just a few words or sentences, as soon as possible after waking up, while the information is still fresh and easily accessible to your waking mind. For many of us, finding that kind of time in the morning is a real challenge. But even a few minutes of recording basic information, if practiced consistently, can improve your dream recall significantly and put you in a position to return to the dream later in the day if you choose.

Deepen your understanding
Here are two suggestions, based on my experience working with my own dreams, that may help bring you closer to your dreams and deepen your understanding of them:

1. Give each dream a title. This will be, in essence, its name. Naming things is important. Can you imagine a child, or a pet, or a movie without a name?

2. If you’re making a verbal record your dreams (either written or audio), do so in the present tense. This is a good technique for keeping your dream alive. It draws you back into the experience and activates your memory of additional details, both as you’re writing/recording it and later on when you read/hear it.

Every element (person, place, and thing) in every dream is alive and has knowledge and a point of view. Some elements are more articulate, are more complex in nature, and have more to say than others. But nothing in any dream is merely an object without consciousness. One way to gain a better understanding of a dream is record the dream from the perspective of one of the other players in the dream, i.e., someone or something other than yourself.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’ve just had a scary nightmare about being chased through the forest by a wolf. You’ve written out a recap of the dream but you’re still freaked out and having difficulty understanding what it’s all about. You could try re-recording the dream from the perspective of the wolf. Write in present tense and give that version of the dream its own title. You can do the same thing from the perspective of anything in the dream: the trees, the sky, the other animals in the forest, etc. If you let these elements of your dream speak for themselves, you will gain new insights you never expected.

I purposefully chose a scary dream scenario with a threatening character for this example because I’ve learned that the things that seem the scariest, the most threatening, and the most negative in my dreams often actually carry, contain, or embody useful information that I very much need. So there may be times when it is useful, before chasing that monster away, to ask it, “Who are you? Why are you here?” It may have a story to tell you that you never expected to hear, and a gift for you that you never expected to receive and didn’t even know you needed.

Learn your own language
I don’t trust dream dictionaries and have not found them helpful. They tend to be too general, too specific to someone else’s experience, or both. They also tend to take you out of the moment and cause you to doubt your own experience as the dreamer.

The language of your dreams is unique to you, but it has basic features that are common for all of us. Each dream is composed of numerous elements (people, places, things), and each element is composed of one or more (often all) of the following aspects:

* universal (shared) aspects, which are often referred to as archetypal
* cultural aspects (also shared), which are specific to a group time and place
* personal aspects, which are yours and yours alone
* contextual aspects, which are the product of a specific time and place in your life

At best, a dream dictionary might provide some information about the universal aspect of a dream element, but no element in your dream, or anyone else’s, can be reduced to a single aspect without losing most of its meaning.

Dreams are so powerful, so rich, and so subtle, and they carry so many layers of meaning that they can be interpreted and understood in any number of ways. I don’t know if it’s possible to achieve a 100% understanding of any dream, and sometimes immediate understanding is not possible. I’ve learned that there are some dreams I just have to sit with for months or years before I understand what was being said to me. Some I never understand, regardless of how much time and effort I put into trying. I’ve come to the conclusion that some dreams are not meant to be understood, nor do they require it. They simply are.

Learn to listen
Dreamwork is about listening. It’s about forming a relationship with the sleeping part of yourself. When you listen consistently and honor what you are given, that relationship will deepen and you will be given more. And that sleeping part of you will begin to speak to you in your waking life more and more, and you will begin to know, more and more, who you really are.

Focus on what matters most
As your dream recall improves, you may begin to receive far more information than you feel capable of handling. You may find yourself having multiple dreams in one night, very long dreams, or dreams filled with an abundance of detail. You may even experience all of these scenarios in combination. This is a classic example of a good problem to have, but can also lead rather quickly to feelings of being overwhelmed, intimidated, and paralyzed by information overload.

If you find yourself in a too much information situation, you’ll have to make some choices. It’s a bit like fishing; you have to decide what to keep and what to let go. So how do you go about separating the big fish from the little fish in your dream life?

One of the most reliable indicators of a big fish is a recurring dream or a series of dreams with recurring themes, characters, locales, etc. A recurring dream scenario is a big bright flare being fired into the sky to get your attention, and certainly warrants high priority in your dreamwork.

Sizing the other fish is a bit more complicated and takes practice. Some dreams will simply feel more significant than others, but even in those cases, some editing may be required to avoid losing your focus in a maze of details and sidetracks, however intriguing they all may be. You may find it helpful to develop some dreamwork shorthand techniques, such as setting a limit on the length of your narrative for the dream (e.g., one paragraph, three sentences, etc.) as a way to contain the dream and keep your focus tight. Another approach worth exploring is the use of poetry and poetic language, which can be a very efficient way to capture the most significant narrative details as well as the deeper information (feelings, imaginative elements, etc.) present in a dream.

Still, no matter what approaches you use, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to let some of your dreams go, if only because of the ongoing demands of waking life. However, it’s been my experience that important information communicated to me by my dreams will be restated over and over, often in different ways, until I get it. So if you lose a big fish now and then, don’t worry. It’ll probably keep nibbling at your line until you reel it in.

Learn processes and techniques
Processes and techniques developed and documented by others can be a valuable source of assistance in your dreamwork practice. But bear in mind that not every process and technique works well (or at all) for every person. Your own experience will be the best measure of whether a given approach works well for you and is worth continuing, or not.

With that caveat in mind, here are a few reading suggestions that may help you progress in your dreamwork:

* Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson
* Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill: Using Dreams to Tap the Wisdom of the Unconscious by Jeremy Taylor
* Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams by Eugene Gendlin
* A Little Course in Dreams by Robert Bosnak

Work with others
One of the best ways to expand and enhance your experience and understanding of your dreams is to work with others. The assistance of a knowledgeable dreamwork guide can be a powerful catalyst in the development of your personal practice and help you reach new levels of understanding and appreciation of the information you’re receiving on a nightly basis.

Group dreamwork is another approach that can accelerate and deepen your insight into your dreams, as well as giving you the opportunity to help others improve their understanding of the dreams they share, and to learn from them.

Have fun and enjoy the ride
Dreams are a tremendous source of wonder, inspiration, and insight. They provide us with a nightly connection to the ongoing, transcendent mystery of life and being that is at the core of every human experience. Whether we’re aware of our dreams or not, they’re always with us, every day and every night, giving us hints into the underlying truths that lie just below the surface of our everyday existence. They can take us anywhere, but they always bring us home. So when you’re working with your dreams, however you choose to go about it, don’t forget to have fun and enjoy the ride.

I’ve managed, during the course of my life, to get some of the mentoring I needed from older males in bits and pieces, here and there. I had two or three good male teachers in grade school and high school. There were uncles who helped me out at a few very critical points during my childhood and teen years. My father and his father taught me about building and fixing things and going to work every day. That was better than nothing. But there’s a lot more to being a man than that.

The majority of the mentoring I’ve received in my life came from an older male therapist I saw for several years who helped me learn to work with my dreams. I suppose I could say that I’ve also received some virtual mentoring from older males, mostly authors and musicians, whose work I’ve followed, appreciated, and admired without ever meeting them in person, and whose examples have inspired, taught, or initiated me in some fashion. Robert Bly spoke about this sort of mentoring in absentia (in his case it was Yeats) in the Gathering of Men program with Bill Moyers twenty years ago.

Of course, mentoring for hire and virtual mentoring are not the same, not by a long shot, as what I needed and ideally would have received from a community of elder men who knew me, cared about me, encouraged my development, and spent time with me in person on a regular basis.

I don’t know how that experience can be replaced or recovered once those men are gone, if they were ever there. I think several generations of men are trying to figure that out right now. I also think that a recognition of what we needed and didn’t get, and a coming to terms with the powerful feelings of anger, grief, loneliness, disorientation, and disappointment that may accompany that awareness, is a good place to start.

I’ve come to feel that part of that process of healing and restoration, at least for me, has to do with finding ways to give younger males whatever mentoring, encouragement, and assistance I can. I’ve recently begun to realize that, in spite of the fact that I still feel incomplete, confused, and inadequate at age 52, I actually have something of value to offer younger men, and furthermore, that they see me as having something of value to offer them.

This came as a bit of a shock to me at first, but as I’ve begun to realize the truth of it and operate more out of that place, I’ve also begun to see that offering younger men what I did not receive myself, as contradictory as it may sound, is another way for me to address that hole in myself that I referenced above.

The generation of men that preceded mine failed me and the men of my generation in many ways, as they themselves were failed by the generation that preceded them, and so on back through the decades. Maybe those of us who have felt those failures so acutely, and suffered for them as a result, can find some ways to bridge the gap between the men who preceded us and those who follow, and thereby receive some portion of what we were not given by giving it to others.

I’ve also decided that it’s time to wind down my efforts to promote Iron Man Family Outing. As I wrote in a previous post, “Twenty years is a long time to stick with anything.” I decided three years ago that I was going to do whatever it took to get the unused copies of the book out to people who would find it personally meaningful, and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of it. Most of those copies are out there in the world now. Based on some of the feedback I’ve received over the last three years, quite a few of them have done or are still doing some good.

The amount of time and effort I’ve put into Iron Man Family Outing over the past 38 months has been staggering and would probably shock me if I’d actually kept track of it. I have kept track of the amount of money I’ve spent and it’s been substantial. Shipping free books all over the United States and internationally has not been cheap. I have a deep commitment to the work I do, but I also have to acknowledge that there are some very real limits to how much of myself I can give to an extremely demanding form of work that provides me with no material support whatsoever. My friend David Jewell likes to say, “Crime doesn’t pay and neither does poetry,” but personally I think that most criminals make a much better living than most poets do.

This brings me to the subject and the status of my second, still unpublished book, Scapegoat’s Cross, which has been essentially dead in the water for over a year now since I completed the final manuscript in September 2009. I’ve had no success finding an artist to work with me on illustrations and graphic design, which is something I know I can’t do on my own. I don’t have a publisher either, and don’t even have any leads on getting one. I’ve known all along that the chances of finding someone who’d publish the book were slim, and I’ve been willing for some time now to publish it myself and give the work away (again) for the sake of getting it out there, but without the artwork I can’t even do that.

Lately I’ve been wondering if maybe I shouldn’t publish it at all. Maybe all the blocks and difficulties I’ve encountered since completing the manuscript (breaking my wrist and shoulder, leaving my job and losing my income, being unable to find an artist) are signs that I shouldn’t go forward with it, that I’m not meant to do that. I just don’t know anymore.

I had similar struggles and doubts during the process that ultimately led to the publication of Iron Man Family Outing, so I know that none of this sturm und drang necessarily means that Scapegoat’s Cross shouldn’t or won’t see the light of day. But I also know that there are certain doors that have to open in order for me to move forward with it, and they’re just not opening.

Doubts and concerns notwithstanding, I was very naive and idealistic when I was working to get Iron Man Family Outing published. I didn’t realize what the experience was going to cost me personally or understand the seismic effect it was going to have on my life and my relationships, and I certainly didn’t anticipate that I was committing myself to a project that would consume a twenty-year chunk of my life. I’m not saying that I regret doing it. I don’t. I honestly can’t imagine myself having gone any other way. Telling the truth, in the way I told it, was a matter of life and death for me. But I know now that there’s a price to be paid for taking that path, and I wonder if I’m up to it a second time.

Perhaps more than anything, I wonder if there’s really any substantial interest in what I have to say. As was the case with Iron Man Family Outing, the work I’ve done with Scapegoat’s Cross doesn’t seem to fit with anything else I see anywhere. It’s out of step with a good deal of what I see going on these days in the arena of what is commonly characterized as men’s work (too much of which seems, to my eyes, obsessed with a bizarrely adolescent fixation on getting chicks and getting laid, as if that’s the highest life purpose to which a man can aspire). Nor is Scapegoat’s Cross like anything I’ve seen in the adult survivor literature or the self-help / personal growth genre, and I’ve learned the hard way over the years that the work I’m doing is seen as some sort of strange, illegitimate aberration (at best) in the MFA-strangled universe of contemporary American poetry.

It’s been said that Iron Man Family Outing was ahead of its time, and there might be something to that. It’s certainly been far better received in the last three years than it was when it was published in 1990, although there are still some rather high-profile gatekeepers of the men’s movement (whatever that term even means now) on the web who continue to exclude it from their lists of books for men and poetry for men, and not for any lack of effort on my part to make them aware of it. I guess, for these guys anyway, if it ain’t Bly, it don’t fly.

Maybe Scapegoat’s Cross is ahead of its time as well. I don’t know. I’m too close to it to say. But it sure is stuck, and it’s been that way for over a year, and I wonder if maybe that’s telling me something.

The larger question for me at this point is whether I should continue the work I’ve been doing as a writer at all. I often feel like I’m doing a ton of work in the dark here, the majority of which seems to go largely unseen by anyone but me. Maybe I’m not very good at promoting myself. Hell, I know I’m not. I don’t even like doing it, and my explorative forays into utilizing social media have been, quite frankly, a bust so far. On the other hand, maybe the work I’m doing is simply so far out on the edge that there’s not much interest to be had, whether I’m good at promoting it or not. Again, I’m too close to the situation to know.

What I do know is that one of the best aspects of the work I’ve done over the last three years has been making new friends and allies all around the world who are actively committed to helping men grow and heal. Becoming acquainted with these men and women has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement for me. There’s a lot of great work being done behind the scenes with and for men, and I’m honored to have been a part of it in whatever way I could.

Nevertheless, I feel like I’m at a sort of crossroads here. With my efforts on behalf of Iron Man Family Outing winding down and with Scapegoat’s Cross in hibernation or stasis or permanent sleep, whatever it is, I’m asking myself some serious questions about my next step, which has to include some way to make a living. Unfortunately, I only know one way to do that, and the prospect of committing myself to it yet again makes my guts shrivel and shrink. What do you do when doing what you love pays you nothing, and doing what pays you breaks you down?

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing for public consumption here on the blog in the near future. To be completely honest, I’ve been disappointed in the lack of response to what I think have been several pretty good posts published in the last month or so (here, here, here, and here), and another piece I submitted to one of the big men’s websites a couple of months ago has apparently been rejected. I say “apparently” because their stated editorial review period expired weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to the status of my submission since then.

I have one other post nearly completed, and I’ll probably publish it here in the next week or so, along with the one mentioned above that’s been in limbo for the last couple of months. After that … I dunno. Yet to be determined. Maybe it’ll be easier for me to think clearly if I stop banging my head against walls for a while. Or maybe I just can’t help myself, and the banging will continue.

Iron Man and I go way back. I think I can reasonably say that he actually saved my life, twice as a matter of fact: once when I was a child, and again when I was a man in my early thirties. More on that in a bit.

I still remember the first Iron Man comic I bought: Tales of Suspense #93, published in September 1967. This issue featured a battle between Iron Man and one of his chief nemeses at the time, a much larger armored counterpart from the Soviet Union named Titanium Man. The cover of the comic book showed Iron Man and Titanium Man facing off against one another inside a long, claustrophobic metal tunnel with the caption “POWER vs. POWER!” I was nine-going-on-ten and from the moment I saw that cover, Superman and Batman were old news to me. I was hooked on Iron Man.

One of my uncles, who was six or seven years older than me, had quite a comic book collection at that time and was more than happy to let me dig around in it, as he’d already moved on to James Bond movies, cars, and girls. He had a few of the older Iron Man comic books, not all of them, but enough for me to become even more intrigued as I saw the progression of the Iron Man armor from the original, which looked something like a gray cast-iron wood stove, to a slightly less clunky golden version, to the familiar red-and-gold armor I recognized. Along the way, his helmet and face mask also changed several times, as did his power source and the array of features and weaponry built into the armor.

I also learned about his other identity, Tony Stark: inventor, industrialist, arms merchant, millionaire, playboy. And I learned about why he built the Iron Man armor, why he needed to continue to wear it, how it changed him, what it gave him, and what it cost him. I identified with this man who was brilliant but deeply injured inside, who built layers of protection and defense around himself so that he could deal with external threats, and who hid his true face behind the frozen expression of a metal mask. Tony Stark’s heart was wounded and so was mine, his from the fragments of a bomb that nearly killed him and mine from an angry, abusive, emotionally distant father, a ferocious giant who was my own “Titanium Man.”

I was in desperate need of some sort of positive masculine figure, even a fictional one, to help me cope with the difficulties of my life, and Iron Man came along just in time. I read my Iron Man comics. I played and pretended and fantasized. I wanted to be Iron Man. I needed to be. He saved my life by showing me that I could use my own ingenuity to protect myself, to armor myself up (psychologically, emotionally, and physically), to hide my vulnerabilities, and to survive. In the process, I internalized Iron Man and his qualities in ways I couldn’t begin to understand at the time.

As I moved into my teens, I abandoned the comic books and moved on to other interests, much like my uncle before me. I gave my comics away to younger cousins and forgot about Iron Man. But my armor was still in place, and I continued to add new layers to it during my late teens and throughout my twenties as life brought more painful experiences, rejections, and disappointments that I lacked the skills to handle with any real effectiveness.

Just before my 29th birthday, a woman for whom I cared deeply betrayed my trust with another man and broke my heart worse than it had ever been broken before (which was quite an accomplishment for any woman, given my history up to that point). Nothing I knew how to do for myself could reduce, or even manage, the pain I felt. At that point, I decided to break one the biggest taboos in my family of origin: I decided to seek help.

Not long after making that decision, I found myself working with an innovative counselor who used some very dynamic emotional release techniques. As my work with him progressed, emotional and psychological pathways began to open in me that had been closed down for a long time. One result of this opening was that I started dreaming prolifically. That was unexpected, and what was even more unexpected was that I began to have recurring dreams involving the Iron Man character that I loved so much as a child.

Initially, as a man moving into his thirties, I felt more than a little silly dreaming about a comic book character from my youth. But the dreams continued anyway, regardless of how I felt about them, and as time went on, I was more and more urgently compelled to understand why Iron Man had reentered my life. I found a guide who could help me work with my Iron Man dreams, to help me try to understand what they were all about and what I was being told. The assistance I received was critically important in helping me improve my understanding, but I knew I needed to do more. I found myself drawn to go out and find the old comic books I had when I was a kid. I bought Iron Man action figures. I made Iron Man collages. I worked and (perhaps more importantly) played with the image and the mythology of the character in every way that I could.

The result of all this activity was another surprise: my first book, Iron Man Family Outing: Poems about Transition into a More Conscious Manhood, in which I wrote for the first time about the childhood experiences that originally drew me to Iron Man, the effects of those childhood experiences on my life as a young man, and my efforts to develop a greater understanding of myself and take a greater responsibility for my own life and my own healing. At the center of the book were a number of my Iron Man dreams, those initially inscrutable messages from deep within my psyche that had proven to be the keys to finding myself and saving my own life. For the second time, Iron Man had saved me.

At the time I did this work, there was no Iron Man movie. The character was very obscure and my relationship with him felt very personal, very special, and very intimate. I usually had to explain who Iron Man was when I spoke about my experience with him to anyone. Things have certainly changed. Just about everybody has at least some idea of who Iron Man is now.

I’m glad that I had Iron Man to myself, so to speak, when I was dreaming about him. I’m glad that I had to put some time and effort into finding those old comic books and, if I was very lucky, even the occasional action figure. My process and my relationship with Iron Man were driven completely from within, from within my own memories, my own body, my own history, and my own unconscious. There was almost no external source of information to mediate, influence, or alter what I was being given from those mysterious sources deep within me. It was a very pure experience in that respect, as I believe it needed to be.

Given my extensive history with Iron Man, the news that the long-rumored and perpetually-delayed movie based on the character was finally coming was a matter of great personal interest to me, not simply as an exercise in escapist fantasy and entertainment, but as a filmic actualization of internal mythology and personal archetype. I followed all the media updates, starting in summer 2007, and was understandably eager to see the movie when it arrived in theaters in May 2008.

For the most part, I was pleased. Although the timeframe of the origin story had been modified and several storylines had been compressed in order to work within the constraints of a two-hour movie, Iron Man was still a very faithful adaptation that retained all of the original archetypal elements that captivated my imagination as a youngster. Robert Downey, Jr. was the perfect choice to play Tony Stark, completely believable at every step of Stark’s transformation from a careless hedonist who takes nothing seriously to a man who finally understands his path and his purpose in life. Iron Man even battled a much larger armored counterpart in the finale, just as he did in the very first Iron Man comic I bought as a child.

Still, the Iron Man in the movie didn’t feel like my Iron Man, and of course, it wasn’t. I can’t say I was surprised by this. I’d spent an enormous amount of time with that character and the associated mythology over many years, gone very deep with it, and alchemized it into something that’s totally personal and unique to me. It would have been ridiculous for me to expect any movie, no matter how well done, to match that.

Nevertheless, taken on its own terms the Iron Man movie has plenty to offer those who are interested in how certain aspects of masculinity and the male experience are expressed and represented on film, and I hope my review at Masculinity-Movies.com provides readers with some useful insights about some of the deeper themes found in the movie.

Iron Man is no longer front and center in my life in the way he once was. He very seldom comes to me in my dreams now. The old comics, action figures, and collages from the time I spent with him in my early thirties are packed away in a box in my closet, keepsakes of another time in my life. I won’t be giving them away this time.

But the Iron Man who first came to me when I was an emotionally and psychologically wounded boy who needed a hero and a role model, and then reappeared twenty years later when I was a confused, distressed young man who’d forgotten who he was and could be, is still at work in my life and in the lives of others. He lives on in the book I was inspired to write by my dreams about him, and he comes to life in a new way in the mind and heart of every person who reads my story. Most of all, he lives on in me, because I wouldn’t be the person I am today without him.

Expectations of forgiveness are unreasonable when harm is ongoing
I think one of the worst double binds that abuse and trauma survivors face is the expectation that they should forgive someone, often a family member, who continues to treat them badly. Often the nature of the maltreatment has changed from childhood to adulthood. For example, someone who was physically abused as a child by a parent may instead be subjected to what often seem to be regarded as more civilized and acceptable forms of psychologically abusive behavior as an adult. But the original underlying pattern of disrespectful, abusive behavior has never stopped. It is still ongoing. How can anyone be expected to forgive hurtful behavior that is still ongoing? This is a common and very difficult problem for many adult survivors of childhood abuse. They feel forced to choose between looking after their own well-being and maintaining a relationship with one or more family members (oftentimes an entire family system) continuing to perpetuate the same sort of abusive, wounding treatment that hurt them as children.

Forgiveness requires an end to the cycle of wounding
Sometimes the only viable path to forgiveness is to remove ourselves from those who continue to cause us harm despite our best efforts to communicate our needs clearly and maintain healthy boundaries. By taking care of ourselves and ending the cycle of wounding, we can establish a safe distance from those who have injured us, allowing ourselves to move through the old hurts and toward greater understanding and forgiveness without constantly being re-injured by new hurts that feel just like the old ones.

Forgiveness is an iterative process
In my experience, forgiveness, as it relates to healing the effects of abuse and trauma, is not a one-time event. It’s an iterative, multi-layered process that, with committed awareness of oneself and one’s history, unfolds over time. For many survivors, abuse and trauma were not experienced as a one-time event either, but iteratively, in layers, over time. In that context, it seems very unreasonable to me to expect that forgiveness will come as the result of simply deciding to “move on,” “turn the page,” “get over it,” or whatever other subtly coercive euphemism might be used to put pressure on someone who’s not healing fast enough to meet someone else’s requirements.

Forgiveness is an active process
Forgiveness of the sort of deep, longstanding wounds that result from abuse, neglect, and trauma is anything but a passive “love and light,” “warm and fuzzy,” “time heals all wounds” kind of process. Every wound has its own story and its own life, and many wounds are not healed simply by waiting and thinking happy thoughts. They have to be faced, entered, lived in, listened to, understood. They have to be cleansed with tears and shouting and shaking and all the other ways that the human body expresses and discharges the stored energies of fear and pain and grief. They have to be allowed to speak, to tell their stories in their own way and their own time. They have to be met and seen, acknowledged and accepted in all their painful glory as the wild, primal things they are.

Forgiveness is a sacred process
The place within us where we meet our wounds and do the work they call us to do is holy ground. It is ancient and eternal, beyond time, expectations, and schedules. It is the place where we keep our secrets, and where our secrets keep us. It is dark, messy, vital, and beautiful. It knows what we need to know, and it will tell us, if we’re brave enough to listen and to feel our way through to the light that knowledge carries for us. Battleground and sanctuary, it is that sacred space within each of us where we encounter grief, wisdom, and hope, and where, I believe, the path to true forgiveness begins.

“Don’t try.”

- inscription on Charles Bukowski’s gravestone

A couple of weeks ago, a day or so before I left my job, one of my coworkers asked me, “So, what are you gonna do now?” I replied, “I’m gonna do nothing until I get bored, then see what happens.”

But doing nothing is harder than it might sound.

I’m now deep into my second week of freedom, and it’s already feeling substantially less strange than it did at first. I’m trying to do nothing as often as I can … trying not to try. Some days I feel like I’ve forgotten more than I remember about myself, and I wonder just how long it’s going to take me to bring myself back. I feel horribly and profoundly scattered a lot of the time, like pieces of me are floating around my nucleus waiting to coalesce into some new whole that I can’t yet comprehend.

I still have moments of almost paralyzing anxiety about my financial situation. When I think about working again, I can’t imagine going back to living in a cubicle with a computer, but I can’t imagine going forward into something else either, ’cause I still don’t know how to make a living doing what moves me. I seem to be more prone to mental thrashing than I have been in a long time, although thankfully I have a lot of skills and strategies now that help me recognize when I’m doing it and ease myself out of that state.

A couple of friends I trust have told me I need to get outta town, and I think they’re right, but so far it’s been more important for me to settle into myself, slow down to my own pace again, and get back to some of the basics that keep me centered and grounded: eating well, resting as needed, coming back into my body, breathing. In short, caring for myself as if I cared about myself. When I’m not doing that, I know I’m in trouble. It’s my foundation, and my foundation had been crumbling. I had my home cleaned last week and that’s made an enormous difference in how I feel and in my ability to focus and rest. Next on my list is taking care of some long-deferred vehicle maintenance and getting my daily walks going again.

I’m very glad now that I didn’t try to rush myself out of town before I felt ready. I think a little trip could be great for me, but I’ve got to get all four wheels back on the pavement again first.

There was an enormous amount of disintegration going on in my life during the last 2-3 months, far more than I consciously realized. As my situation at work deteriorated, the rest of my life was following suit. I was too immersed in the day-to-day struggle to survive to notice all the details, but I could feel the slide, even if I couldn’t do much to stop it.

Now, as I’m beginning to separate energetically and psychically from a job and a work environment that had become increasingly toxic for me, I’m beginning to come back to myself, beginning to reset and recover. It’s also getting easier, day by day, for me to “do nothing,” to surrender to the moment, to my feelings and my body, and see what happens. I’m gradually moving from “trying not to try” to “not trying to try.” And that’s a good sign that I’m on the right track.

I’ve been struggling for some time now with the ongoing conflict between my need to make a living and my need to follow that which moves me most deeply. I’ve written about that struggle numerous times, in posts like “go crazy or starve” and in poems like “soul versus survival” and “rush to nowhere” and “dot” (as well as several others). It’s been a theme in my work going all the way back to Iron Man Family Outing, a tormenting puzzle that I’ve simply been unable to solve. In the last few years I’ve begun to wonder if it can be solved.

In any case, now I’m free again, for a while anyway, for the first time in almost six years, and it feels strange. I’m so used to running against the clock, so used to cramming all of my meaningful creative activity into a whatever time I had left on evenings and weekends, that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to slow down, to breathe, to be with my body and my feelings. It’s actually a bit intimidating. I’m surprised at how much anxiety and disorientation I’ve felt these last few days. I’m finding it a lot harder to settle down and trust this strange new freedom than I expected it would be.

Part of it, I’m sure, is that I’m pretty exhausted, both mentally and physically, from trying to survive in a work environment that had become increasingly oppressive and psychologically toxic. One of the reasons for my decision to leave was my realization that being in that environment was beginning to burn me down, and that I’d wind up in cinders if I tried to stay. But the damage had already begun, and now I have to deal with it.

I’m also finding myself feeling a lot more fear than I’d expected about having an interruption in income, and about how long that scenario might last. I’d become very accustomed to a certain level of financial stability and now I may have put it at risk. But the risks I was facing if I stayed put were worse, they were certain, and they’d already begun to transform from risks to realities to consequences for me. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating right, and I wasn’t taking proper care of myself, and previous experience tells me exactly where that path leads me. As I told one of my coworkers before I left, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me to destroy my health in order to keep my health insurance.

So here I am, free, tired, and a little (sometimes a lot) scared. I expect I’ll begin to settle down over the next week or so, but it’s going to take some more focused awareness and some better self-care than I’ve been giving myself for a while now. I have a strong sense of why I need this time (aside from punching out of a bad situation) and what I want to do with it. The Scapegoat’s Cross manuscript has been sitting almost completely idle since I broke my wrist and shoulder last October, waiting for me to get the artwork together and develop a scenario for publication. There’s still more to do with Iron Man Family Outing, too. I’ve got some other projects in mind as well, actually lots of them. But my first order of business is to settle down and allow myself to get back into my own rhythm.

Maybe then this new freedom won’t feel so strange anymore.

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

I’ve been following the Deepwater Horizon disaster with increasing feelings of dread, sadness, and horror as the oil continues to pour into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico with no viable plan on the part of BP, the US government, or any other party for stopping it. Even if the flow of oil was stopped today, the damage that’s already been done is incalculable, and I have yet to see any comprehensive plan from any party for dealing with that either. Every attempt by BP to address the blowout at the wellhead has failed miserably, and the US government is completely paralyzed from the top down at the worst possible time as the entire ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico, and all of the associated man-made systems that are directly reliant upon it, are put to their death before our very eyes. If the oil moves up the East Coast and into the North Atlantic, as some have predicted, or even more likely, if one or more severe hurricanes enter the Gulf this summer, the catastrophe could increase exponentially in scale as well as scope.

Those are some of the physical realities and consequences of the situation, but I also find myself compelled to consider the Deepwater disaster metaphorically, as a collective waking dream. In my interpretation of this group dream, the water of the Gulf represents the collective American unconscious, and the oil thousands of feet below the surface the collective American shadow. That shadow, which had previously been controlled and contained, is now gushing upward through the collective unconscious, permeating every level as it makes its way to the surface, to consciousness. This powerful mass of psychic energy, this collective shadow, can no longer be denied. It must be seen and addressed, in its purest and rawest form, and we must reevaluate our relationship with it, and deal with the consequences of our failure to do so properly in the past.

The corporate and political gods in America have been tapping and channeling our collective shadow for decades now, packaging it, marketing it, selling it, and using it to manipulate our deepest desires and our worst fears for their own gain, a process that has been greatly intensified in the nearly nine years since 9/11 allegedly “changed everything.” But playing with, and preying upon, the collective shadow of a people is a dangerous game. The line between controlling such a mass shadow for one’s own ends and turning it loose is fine indeed, and once it’s been turned loose, the illusion of controlling it is laid bare and the damage to the culture, its people, and all related systems (environmental, material, etc.) is inevitably and inexorably severe, as numerous examples throughout centuries of human history have amply demonstrated.

Every group of human beings, whether a family, a business, a political group, or an entire culture, has a shadow, just as every individual does. And just as in the case of an individual, the long-term health and viability of any group of human beings is largely dependent upon how it relates to its shadow, whether it represses it, manipulates it, or deals with it honestly and directly, and to what extent, and when. As Americans, we tend to want to look up rather than down, out rather than in, and forward rather than back. But moving in one direction to the exclusion of the other precludes balance, and always looking up, out, and forward leaves us vulnerable, as individuals and as a nation, to those parts of ourselves and energies within us that we barely know, if we are aware of them at all. Worse still, we may attempt to manipulate and control those unknown or barely known parts and energies, as if they were mere raw materials that are somehow separate from us, to be harvested and used until they burst forth into our lives and our consciousness with a force, and with consequences, we never saw coming.

Our shadow, whether individual or collective, is not evil and it is not our enemy. As psychologist Carolyn Kaufman has written, “Carl Jung believed that in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness – or perhaps because of this – the shadow is the seat of creativity.” Our shadow is a primal, elemental part of who we are, that part of our selves and our history, our very life and our very life force itself, that we have disowned and forgotten, for whatever reason. It is the part of us that remains unknown and unclaimed. We each need to know our shadow, to accept it, to honor it, and to accept the benefits and the consequences of its presence in our psyches and our lives in order to be fully conscious, fully integrated, and fully who we are, both as individuals and as a collective. I see the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster as yet one more very dramatic reminder that it is incumbent upon each and every one of us, as Americans and as individuals, to do our shadow work now, because I believe that to the extent we do not, what remains unresolved and unacknowledged in our inner world (individual and collective) will continue to find its way into our outer world in forms that are increasingly dangerous, damaging, and toxic to all.

Addendum (06/19/10): I continue to be extremely irritated by the prevalent and ongoing use of the term “spill” to describe the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. This is not a spill. If I knock over a glass of water on the table in my home, I’d call it a spill. If a pipe bursts in my home and water is gushing out of it uncontrollably and spreading into the nearby houses for 45 days, I’d call it a flood.

A couple of months ago, I was real sick for about a week with some sort of horrible cold/flu/whatever. After a few days, I began to realize that being sick as a dog, while not pleasant, was giving me a much-needed opportunity to slow down so I could remember and relearn how to be with myself again. And that aspect of being sick, once the realization kicked in for me, was sweet. A big part of that sweetness was remembering and re-experiencing what it was like to be with my body, moment to moment, without any agenda or any schedule. I’d had a similar experience in the last few months of 2009 when I was in the acute stages of dealing with my broken wrist and shoulder, but the nature of that experience was different. It was extreme. What I rediscovered while I was sick for a week was more of an everyday mode, the mundane “being with myself” that is needed for common experiences, like a bad cold. Or a bad day.

I’m having a lot of bad days lately, and I’ve been struggling to come up with a good way to deal with that issue. While driving to the pizza place recently one night after work (pizza and a brownie being my most favored self-medication and after-work sedative for the past few years), I was thinking about what else I could do to numb the painful after effects of these meaningless, seemingly endless, unrelentingly dreadful days at work. And I realized almost immediately that no amount of pizza or sex or TV or porn or drinking or drugs or overeating, nothing I’ve ever done in the past or could ever do in the future to try to numb myself and escape, would make that awful pain I feel at the end of every wasted day go away, because what I’m feeling is the pain of another lost day in my unlived life.

That was, and is, a sobering realization, one that has left me with a problem that is not easy to solve and a question that is not easy to answer:

How do I live with my pain?

I know I’m not alone in wrestling with this issue. I know that a lot of folks feel stuck in lives they didn’t see coming. They begin each day filled with dread and end each day filled with regret. They want to change their circumstances, but can’t, for all kinds of reasons. When I was younger, I used to tell others, “If you don’t like your life, change it.” I believed that, and I lived by it. I’m not saying I don’t believe it now, but I can also see now that life isn’t always so simple, or the path to change so direct. Sometimes life just piles up on people and boxes them in, sometimes as a result of their own choices, sometimes as a result of the system and the times in which they live, and sometimes as a result of chance, or fate, or karma, or whatever term you prefer for the mysterious and often apparently random hand of cosmic force in our lives.

I am where I am in my life as a result of all of the factors and influences listed above. I feel trapped in a losing game, and every instinct I have tells me to free myself and run for the life I want. But the way to freedom remains unclear, and the gap between my inner vision and my material reality is the distance between the life I want and the life I seem able to have. So I string my meaningless workdays together like a set of bad pearls and hope I can use them to buy myself some time somewhere down the road. Good strategy going forward, perhaps, but it does almost nothing in the now to diminish the pain of losing another day, and another, and another …

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “The cure for pain is in the pain.” My experience tells me that this is true. I also know that embedded within every painful time and experience in my life has been the seed of great transformation and healing, not just of circumstances, but of self. And yet I resist. I want no more pain. I want to be done with it.

Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. I’ve written about this in the past (“falling through”). But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work, and if you don’t do your work when you’re called to do it, something bigger will come along and crack you wide open. None of us is immune to these processes.

I know, I can feel, that there is a lake of grief dammed up inside me now about the life I haven’t lived, and that I won’t be living tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. It frightens me, but I hope I can find a way to let it begin to move through me soon, because that’s the best way I know to be with, and live with, my pain.

As a man in his early 50s who’s been single for a long time, I’ve encountered an enormous number of women who are frustrated by their lack of success in finding a “good man.” I’ve also found that many of these women (and I’m talking about women who are independent, intelligent, and capable) have ridiculous expectations that many men simply cannot satisfy.

Women who are 5’2″ are “looking for a good man” who’s at least 5’10″. Women who make 50K a year are “looking for a good man” who makes at least 75K. Women who make 75K a year are “looking for a good man” who makes at least 100K. And so on.

Many of the single women I’ve met who are “looking for a good man” have also demonstrated an almost pathological degree of self-centered behavior. I recently had a 45 minute phone conversation with a woman I met through a dating website. It was our very first call. She talked about herself the entire time and never asked even a single question about me. When I ended the conversation, she wanted to know if I was going to call her again. When I said no, she sounded disappointed and confused.

I wish I could say that the experience was unusual, but it wasn’t. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times in the last ten years that I’ve had a prolonged “conversation” with a single woman who talked non-stop about herself the entire time, without missing a beat and without showing even a flicker of interest in me beyond my role as a receiver for her egocentric broadcast.

I’ve also noticed that many of the women I’ve met who just can’t find a “good man” are quite comfortable going on about what rotten, useless idiots men are. One single woman I know would positively light up with enthusiasm, bordering on joy, when telling me about getting together with her female friends (married and single) to laugh about the moronic antics of their clownish, clueless husbands and boyfriends. I cannot recall, nor can I imagine, ever getting together with any of my male friends to laugh it up about how stupid and deficient the women in our lives are. Nor would I want to.

This same woman plowed through bodice-ripper romance novels as fast as she could turn the pages and once asked me if I thought she should get back together with an ex who’d previously cheated on her twice. She considered me boring and once told me I was “abnormally sensitive” (not a compliment). She also told me I was obviously unable to commit to a relationship because I didn’t have any plants or pets in my home at the time, one of many “facts” about men that she frequently cited from the “Venus and Mars” school of self-help books she regularly read along with the romance novels.

I agree, and always have agreed, with what Kellen said in her post:

A good man needs a good woman to stand beside and work with him to build their life together.

What I want, what I’ve always wanted, is a partner and a peer. Two equals who work together, as individuals and as a couple, for the betterment of both. And I’ve always assumed that women wanted the same thing. However, I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion, based on my inherently limited experience as one person, that there are an awful lot of women out there who believe a man’s function in a relationship is to take care of and entertain them.

The profiles I see on dating websites consistently emphasize three qualities that women in their 40s and early 50s are seeking in men: security, excitement, and fun. You must be successful. You must love your job. You must be financially secure. You must be in great shape and a good dancer. You must wine and dine. You must be well-traveled and available for frequent vacation trips to multiple destinations, domestic and international. You must be sensitive when she needs you to be and “manly” the rest of the time. You must defer when she feels like making decisions and “take charge” when she doesn’t. And of course, you must be at least 5’10″ to satisfy the requirements of even the most diminutive heightists. (The average height for an adult male in the United States is 5’9″. I’m 5’8″.)

In the real world, many good men are not 5’10″. In the real world, many good men demonstrate their capacity for commitment every day by doing jobs they don’t like because they don’t have, or don’t know, another way to make a living. They’re not in great shape and they’re trying to do something about it, but it’s not as easy as it used to be. They live quiet lives and they can’t dance worth a lick. They’d love to enjoy expensive meals, expensive clothes, expensive concerts, and expensive trips here and there, but they’re trying to live within their means and save some money for a retirement that may never come.

In the real world, good men have financial issues, health issues, family issues, emotional issues, you name it … just like women do. They’re pressed for time. They’re stressed at work. They’re doing their best just to hang in there sometimes. They want to do better, to be better, and they’re trying. They’re works in progress … just like women are.

For those of us who are unable to make ourselves taller, richer, more “successful” or more “interesting/exciting” the prospects can appear rather dim. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of “good men” are simply taking themselves out of the game these days for that very reason. I know I have. I’ve been trying to get back in there again, but it sure hasn’t been going very well so far.

Do I sound frustrated? I am. I know there must be single, attractive, available, self-aware, self-possessed women out there, maybe lots of them, who don’t fit the profile I’ve been describing in this post, but for whatever reason, I’m not meeting them. I’m still hoping to find one, but optimism is wearing thin as the years (and the one-sided conversations) wear on.

Addendum: Shortly after I wrote this post, a trusted female friend advised me that I should list my height as at least 5’9″ on dating websites because all of the single women she knows assume that men are lying about their heights in their profiles. Therefore, listing my true height (5’8″) would lead these women to believe that I’m actually shorter than I am.

So in order to appear attractive, I have to lie, because the women looking at my profile will assume I’m lying. I wonder if women assume men are lying about their incomes as well. And who knows what else.

This is insane. Is this really how men and women want to interact with one another?

Thanks to my friend Jack Kammer for encouraging me to publish this post.

We think there is a soul
We don’t know
That soul is hard to find …

- Joe Strummer, “Johnny Appleseed”

In the course of my lifetime, I’ve yet to encounter any external definition of spirituality that is adequate to encompass the depth and breadth, the totality, of my own personal experience. I was raised Catholic, but even as a child, much of what I was being taught conflicted with my own inner sense of what was truly spiritual, ethical, and rational (see “god at eleven” and “standing in line for confession”) and by age fourteen I knew I was done with it.

During my 20s and early 30s, my search for a personal spiritual path led me to read and learn about Zen Buddhism. I gained a lot from exploring and considering that perspective, and in some ways it seemed to suit me, but there was also a certain coldness about it that kept me from moving farther in that direction. It does, however, continue to influence both my thinking and my writing (“arrow”).

During my mid 30s to mid 40s, I explored several aspects of what is commonly referred to as New Age thought, philosophy, and practice. As before, I gained a lot of useful knowledge and experience, but once again it was a period of transition in my thinking rather than a destination. In many ways, my experience with New Age thought and teachings was ultimately very similar to my experience with Catholicism as a child, because once again I found myself expected to accept and believe all sorts of things as a matter of faith that were not consistent with my own sense and personal experience. (An article by Cat Saunders entitled “New Age Fundamentalism” provides an excellent summary of some of the issues I found the most personally problematic.)

Probably my greatest gains from my New Age period resulted from a twice-daily meditation practice that I maintained for over five years. Learning to meditate, the essence of which was learning to be with and observe myself, really elevated my ability to deal with all kinds of difficult feelings and situations, and my meditation experience continues to provide benefits to me daily even though I haven’t meditated regularly for many years.

At this point in my life, I no longer expect to find an externally defined spiritual model that suits my needs, and I’m no longer looking for one, nor do I feel I need one. I have no belief in any deity or deities, and haven’t for a long time, but I’ve always believed and still believe that there is a transcendent aspect (some would call it divinity) in all life. If I believe in anything now, it’s that life is fundamentally mysterious, that the true nature of the human experience is ultimately and innately unknowable, and that any supposedly all-encompassing explanation for it that anyone can offer is bound to come up short.

I continue to have plenty of deep personal spiritual experiences that I think it would be fair to describe as mystical but I tend to approach them on their own terms rather than trying to apply an explanation of someone else’s experience to them. My spirituality may be a “spirituality without gods” but it’s also as deeply authentic and as vibrant as it’s ever been.

However, having said all of that, I do think that there’s a great deal of potential consciousness-transforming power available to us in universal spiritual archetypes; whether one believes in their literal existence or not, these patterns embody and express energies and forces that are ancient and deeply authentic in the human psyche. I would also say that, regardless of our spiritual belief systems as adults, it’s still important to explore and come to terms with whatever religious model(s) we experienced as a child, because the associated symbols and conditioning are such a foundational aspect of the vocabulary and landscape of our psyche. I still have a crucifix on the wall of my bedroom for reasons that have nothing to do with Catholicism at this point in my life and everything to do with remembering and acknowledging various aspects of my personal history as a child. That same symbolism has also expressed itself in the title of my recently-completed second book, Scapegoat’s Cross, which again is not an expression of theology but of metaphor, personal experience, and universal archetype.

Much of my own motivation for developing an approach to spirituality that is true and authentic for me has been rooted in my need to come to terms with the events and environment of my childhood, and how those factors and issues have affected and directed my life as an adult. I think that, in so many ways, healing from abuse and trauma, whatever its source, is about searching for and finding one’s own soul, that psychospiritual whole that is somehow greater than the sum of all of its parts, that mysterious, uniquely personal link to eternity and to our individual and shared humanity.

Finding one’s soul is, in my experience, not a singular, discrete event, but a long process of many iterations that takes place over time. It requires one to learn new skills and to re-examine beliefs, conditioning, and perceptions. It is a process of collecting fragments of the self that were broken off and expelled here and there along the path of years, people, and places, a process of retrieving the lost and unclaimed pieces of who one is, and used to be, that may have become hidden and nearly invisible in the terrain change that comes with time. Finding the soul is about finding and embracing the gain that comes with every loss.

I’ve been helped the most in my own process of finding the soul by therapists and counselors who encouraged and facilitated my innate (but forgotten) ability to access, express, and own my emotional energy, which I learned to control, dismiss, and repress as a child for survival purposes. I’ve attended several men’s therapy groups over the years and grown enormously as a result, not only in terms of my relationship with myself, but also in the depth of my understanding of others. I’ve consciously cultivated a relationship with my inner self by working with my dreams, journaling, giving myself outlets for creative expression, and as I said earlier, learning to meditate.

I’ve also found it extremely important to reconnect and re-establish an ongoing relationship with my own body, which is such a valuable source of information about my feelings, my history, and my present. Bodywork (various forms of therapeutic massage) has been a critical aspect of that process for many years now. I’ve written previously about the importance and the process of listening to and working with the body in a piece called “the body is the gateway”.

I’ve been on this soul finding journey for over twenty years now and I know that I’ve experienced tremendous growth, healing, and regeneration within myself. But I still sometimes feel like a hamster on a wheel because, for reasons I have yet to understand fully, the external circumstances of my life have so far not reflected these very positive inner changes. I still sit in a little gray cubicle five days a week “doing someone else’s work … living someone else’s life” just as I was doing 21 years ago when I first wrote those words. And I still spend most of my days and my hours alone.

This is not what I expected when I began. I really believed that by doing my work, by confronting my past and my issues and becoming a more complete human being, I would transform my life. And it’s true, beyond any doubt, that I’ve transformed my inner life and my relationship with myself in ways too various and profound to describe in a few words. Yet my outer life, the life in which I spend most of my waking hours, remains just as dull, cold, gray, and unfulfilling as it was when I began.

I’m still glad I made the decision to do the work and make healing a priority in my life. I can’t imagine living any other way. But it remains frustrating and incomprehensible to me that I could work through so many of the issues and wounds that seemed to be blocking my progress in life and still see the most significant outer circumstances of my life unchanged. And I wonder, especially now as I’m getting older and facing all the hard realities that come with aging, if my inner and outer realities will remain forever out of sync.

Drinking the Dragon features several pages of excerpts and discussion of material from my book, Iron Man Family Outing. I’m pleased and honored by Dr. Ariadne’s inclusion of this material, and impressed with her presentation of the excerpts she chose and her integration of the excerpted material into the larger themes and narrative of her book. Seeing my words and my story re-expressed and recast in this new context is an encouraging affirmation of the value of my work.

As Dr. Ariadne says in her introduction to Drinking the Dragon, “a dark night can appear more than once in a lifetime.” The arrival of her book could hardly be more timely for me, as I’ve found myself on the path of the dark night experience once again.

Four months ago, I was sailing along. I’d completed the manuscript for my second book, Scapegoat’s Cross, a few weeks earlier and had just done my very first internet interview for Iron Man Family Outing. I was excited about moving forward with both books and full of ideas for doing so. After twenty years of struggles, disappointments, and false starts, I felt that my work had finally begun to gain some momentum. Then I took a bad fall in a parking lot, breaking multiple bones in my right wrist and right shoulder. I’m right-handed. Instant dark night.

A complex 3 1/2 hour surgical procedure to repair my injuries was successful, and after four months of physical therapy several hours a day, my right arm is now about 85% functional. I’m once again able to drive and take care of my own shopping, laundry, and other basics (which is a tremendous relief), and I went back to work recently for the first time since getting hurt after being out for over three months. So the physical part of my recovery is going well, and I’m grateful.

The psychological part is … complicated. The nature of the injuries (losing the use of my writing arm) was bad enough, but the timing seemed especially cruel given where I was with my two books, how long I’d waited to get there, and where I thought I was going. As I said, I’m doing well now physically and I’m very grateful, particularly given the severity of my injuries, but I still feel like I have a long way to go in terms of understanding, accepting, and integrating what I’ve experienced and how it’s affected, and continues to affect, my life.

I’m also suffering with a monster writer’s block that’s about as bad as any I’ve ever experienced. It takes a ridiculous application of time and effort on my part just to write a coherent sentence these days. A friend has suggested that this may be an aftereffect of the physical trauma from the fall. I think he’s probably right, but my experience so far tells me that the psychological trauma, which was and has been significant, is a factor as well. Of course, as I’ve previously written, the psychological is often packaged and carried in the physical, waiting for us to give it access and expression.

I continue to work through my experience with the fall, the injuries, the aftermath, and the effects on my life. My sense right now is that the whole thing is just too big for me to process at this point, and it’s too early for me to know what it might mean to me. I’ve learned that these processes have their own life and yield their rewards in their own time. It’s been very hard for me to accept such a severe and dramatic derailment of my hopes, dreams, and plans, but Dr. Ariadne’s book is a great reminder to be patient with the process, to trust it, and to allow it to play out to its full fruition.

I’ll be spending more time with Drinking the Dragon in the coming months, as I continue to make my way through my own (latest) dark night. I believe that Dr. Ariadne has written a book that is very timely for all of us, both as individuals and as a culture, and I hope she is very successful in reaching the broadest possible audience of readers.

For additional information about Dr. Ariadne and Drinking the Dragon, please visit her website at http://www.drariadne.com.

Initially, I was reluctant to call what I was writing “poetry” at all. The use of that word struck me as a bit … I dunno … conceited? Self-important? Pretentious? Preposterous? I wasn’t even sure I knew what poetry was. It seemed to be a lot of things, according to who was writing it and who was reading it, and it struck me as one of those words that’s somehow developed so many different meanings and connotations that it barely means anything at all anymore, like “love” or “god.”

I was also concerned that, for a lot of folks, the word “poetry” can be roughly translated into “something I’m not gonna want to read.”

Ultimately, I set all of those concerns aside because I knew that what I was writing certainly wasn’t prose, and I needed to use some sort of recognizable terminology to describe it. So it’s poetry … okay. What kind of poetry?

Every one of the labels I listed above (poetry for men, survivor poetry, etc.) expresses one very specific aspect of my writing while excluding many others. It reduces the work, in some substantial way, to something far less than what it actually is. There are also connotations and assumptions associated with each of these labels that may or may not be accurate and appropriate in the case of my writing. And that’s something I’d prefer to avoid if I can.

If, for example, I describe Iron Man Family Outing as “poetry for men” then I feel like I’m basically telling women, “This book is not for you.” But that’s not the message I want to send, and it’s not true. About half of my readers are women, and they relate to the material just as strongly as the men do. If I characterize Scapegoat’s Cross as “poetry for adult survivors of childhood abuse” then those who would not describe themselves in that way might think, “There’s nothing in this book that will speak to me.” But that’s not true either, and it’s not the impression I want anyone to have. While the adult survivor theme is central and very critical to the structure of Scapegoat’s Cross, the scope of the book is much broader, and much more universal, than that.

How do I accurately communicate, with a non-ambiguous label consisting of two or three words, the depth and the breadth, the variety and the richness, the individuality and the universality of the transformational processes I’m attempting to illuminate and share in my writing? I still don’t have an answer. To borrow from Zen, words are “but a finger pointing to the moon.” I guess I’ll just keep trying out all of my fingers until I find the ones that point the best.

My first response to my situation, once I was home from the hospital and coherent and functional enough to formulate a response, was shock, disappointment, and despair (“fallen again”). The accident, the injuries, the devastating effect on my life, everything about the situation in which I found myself seemed so cruel, so random, so meaningless. But the words I’d written earlier this year, my own words, kept coming back to me: bad luck is the language of the unconscious. And they challenged me to find some meaning, something useful, in what I was experiencing.

Prior to breaking my wrist and shoulder eight weeks ago, I’d only broken a bone at one other time in my life. I was very young, just learning to walk, and one of my lower legs was broken somehow while I was outside in the yard with my dad one evening. I’m not sure which leg. I think it was the left.

I’m also not completely sure of precisely how it happened. In the poem “dad I got” from Iron Man Family Outing, I wrote:

he leaves me behind
I try to catch him I break my leg …

That’s how I’ve always remembered the event: being left behind by my dad, trying to catch him, slipping on a wet sidewalk, falling and breaking my leg. And one other thing: his anger. He didn’t want me with him that evening, he didn’t want to have to deal with me, and he was angry about it. That was why he was walking away from me. This was the scenario I played out with him throughout my entire childhood. I needed him and needed to be with him, but he didn’t want me around, and he made no bones about it … so to speak.

About fifteen years ago, I told the story of my broken leg to my physician. His reaction stunned me. He said that if a parent came to him with a toddler with a broken leg and told him a story like mine, he’d find that explanation very hard to believe. He said that a fall on a sidewalk wouldn’t be nearly severe enough, in the typical case, to fracture the leg of a child that age. He also told me that hearing a story like that, in those circumstances, would make him wonder what really happened.

I was pretty shaken up to hear this. I knew what my father was capable of doing when he was angry at me. I wondered for a long time after that conversation if what I thought I’d remembered for all those years about the event was something I’d constructed on my own, or a story my mom had told me to protect my dad, or a story he’d told her to protect himself, or some combination of all of these. Or maybe, regardless of my physician’s skepticism, the story I’d remembered all along, even if it was a story someone else had told me, was basically correct.

I wanted more information, anything that would help me get to the truth. Conversations with both of my parents yielded nothing new. I tried to get my medical records from my childhood doctor, but he’d been retired for years and all of his patient records were long gone. So I was left with only mystery, possibility, and a story that may or may not be completely true, a story with which I’d been living for most of my life. And that was the best I could do with the information available to me at the time.

My current research strongly suggests that I may have suffered a toddler’s fracture, which is described as follows:

A toddler (one to three years of age) can fracture the shinbone when he or she trips over a toy or falls down a stair while learning to walk.

Another source says:

Toddler’s fractures can also be known as spiral fractures. The mechanism of the injury is usually trivial (i.e. tripping or twisting the ankle) and usually involves a twisting or rotational injury … Some of the older literature suggests that a spiral fracture is always due to child abuse. This is not correct. Spiral fractures may be caused by an abusive incident, but they also may result from accidental trauma.

This is hardly a definitive explanation, in terms of answering all of my questions and addressing all of my doubts with complete certainty, but it does seem to lead me full circle back to my original recollection of the event and how it happened.

The one thing I know for sure is that I was with my father when I broke my leg, and that regardless of how it happened, that experience formed a point of deep connection with him, a connection around physical pain. I wrote about this connection, and its origins in the broken leg story (as best I knew it at the time), in the following poem from Iron Man Family Outing:

charley horse

leg hurting tonight reminds me of how my dad + I used to
run across each other in the dark
when I was little + my leg would hurt.

he had a lot of leg cramps at night
he called that a goddam charley horse
I used to wake up with intense pain in my leg
the leg I broke
trying to catch up with him
when I was first learning to walk.

sometimes we’d both wake up at the same time
on the same night
I liked this because I got to spend some quiet time
alone with him.

I never wanted to go back to bed on those nights
we’d sit in the living room or the kitchen
in the dark or with a dim light on
he seemed more open in those moments
I didn’t feel like he hated me then
maybe it was because he was sleepy
or in pain.

those were special occasions for me
nothing to accomplish or be judged on
we each had our own pain
similar but not the same
he was empathetic
I felt connected to him.

in those brief moments
I always felt that I was just like him
just like I always wanted to be.

My father and the men of his generation were masters at controlling and denying the pain in their bodies. In many ways, this was a necessity. He worked in a factory (the “the new moon werewolf factory” as I put it in “dynamite dick”), in brutal, exhausting, dangerous physical conditions. He had a family to support, and he didn’t make that much money. He couldn’t afford the luxury of surrendering to aches and pains, or even injuries. He had to work, and he had to sacrifice his body to do it.

A few years before he retired, I asked my father to take me inside the factory where he’d worked and spent most of his adult years, a complex of connected windowless buildings I’d only seen previously from the outside at the employee’s entrance, where every eight hours, the men walked in big and walked out small. In the following excerpt from a poem called “the father I knew” from Scapegoat’s Cross, I described what it was like on the inside:

I was in the belly of that steel and concrete monster
that eater of men
of lives and bodies and families and marriages and dreams
where he spent most of his life
it felt like the heaviest place on earth
no windows no sun no plants no sky no trees no animals
just steel and concrete and oil and chemicals and fire and smoke
and a big machine that swallowed his left arm
all the way up to the shoulder …

The “big machine that swallowed his left arm” is another major element in my father mythology and the mythology of my childhood. The story I was always told, by my mom, was that my dad’s left arm was sucked into the huge steel rollers of a machine at work while he was cleaning it with a rag. She said the doctor told him the damage was so severe that he’d never have the use of his left arm again, which was especially devastating given that he was left-handed. My dad’s response: “Like hell I won’t.” He then went home and built some sort of device with pulleys and weights, set it up on the front porch, used it to rehab his arm on his own, and recovered the use of that arm completely.

That’s the story I was told anyway. Is it absolutely true? Again, I have no way to know for sure. But I saw that big machine for myself, and my father showed me the dents that were still there, almost thirty years later, in the steel rollers where the bones in his arm were squeezed through the metal. So I know something major happened. I know he got hurt pretty badly. I know he recovered, and I don’t doubt that it was largely through his own determination and efforts, given that there probably wasn’t a lot of help, in terms of skilled physical therapy, available to him at the time.

So now, I find myself connected to my father once again through injury, pain, and the struggle to heal. Bad luck, the language of the unconscious, has spoken, giving me yet another opportunity to explore the depths and the subtleties of the father wound, and to revisit that mysterious empathetic connection through common physical pain that I felt so strongly with him as a child.

He was left-handed and lost the use of his left arm for a time due to injury. I’m right-handed and now I’ve lost the use of my right arm for a time due to injury. He must have struggled to recover, whatever the actual scenario may have been, just as I have. But he also had the additional pressure of a family to support. And he didn’t have the benefit of the excellent medical care and physical therapy I’ve had the good fortune to receive.

Frankly, I don’t know how he did it. And I don’t know how I would have done it had I been in his shoes at the time he did it.

My father turns 75 today. He was not a good father to me in many ways. He was distant, demeaning, neglectful, abusive, threatening, angry, and violent. He did a tremendous amount of damage to me emotionally and psychologically as a child, and his mistreatment continued into my adulthood. But as the years have passed and I’ve gained in life experience, I’ve found it easier to see him, not just as the father I knew and not just as the father I needed and didn’t have, but as a more complete human being who had his own struggles, strengths, and burdens, as we all do.

I haven’t seen my father in ten years. Haven’t spoken to him in five. I believe this is for the best. He hasn’t been able to hurt me physically for a long time now, but he was never going to stop hurting me emotionally and psychologically, no matter what I did or how hard I tried. The moment when I finally realized that fact, in a flood of tears and pain and anger and grief, was the moment when I finally knew for sure, once and for all, that it was hopeless for me to keep trying to reach out to him.

But his life continues to influence mine, even across the distance of time and space, in ways both obvious and mysterious, as I continue to work toward resolution and completion of my relationship with him, that distant point on the inner horizon of my psyche toward which I am always aiming and always moving, but may never reach.

Robert Bly was not well-known among the general public at the time I saw him, but was highly regarded within the ranks of what was then being called the men’s movement. A little more than a year later, he would burst into the mainstream American consciousness with the broadcast of A Gathering of Men and the publication of his most popular book, Iron John: A Book About Men.

The timing of my attendance at the 1989 conference was auspicious, to say the least. I’d been working actively on family of origin and childhood issues for a couple of years, with a particular focus on my relationship with my father. I’d recently walked away from a job that was making me crazy and killing my spirit, and in the aftermath had found myself quite suddenly, spontaneously, and unexpectedly producing a series of poems that I’d entitled Iron Man Family Outing after a phrase that had come to me in one of my very first Iron Man dreams. So I was already deep into one of the most significant psychospiritual and emotional openings in my life when I saw Robert Bly speak that day.

I had virtually no familiarity with Robert Bly or his work prior to the event. He spent a good deal of time that day working his way through the story of Iron John, material which, for whatever reason, has never resonated much with me (then or now). I did, however, find it surprising and rather odd to discover that someone else was exploring another, completely different “iron man” mythology at the same time I was independently so immersed in exploring my own.

But what really moved me that day, and left an imprint on my psyche that has remained ever since, was Bly’s reading of his translation of the following poem by Spanish poet Antonio Machado (this version is transcribed from A Gathering of Men; Bly’s original translation can be found in Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado):

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

And the wind said:
“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

I said:
“I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.”

And the wind said:
“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves.”

And the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

I was devastated by what I heard. I felt as if my heart had been sliced wide open. “I have no roses; all the flowers in my garden are dead.” No one had ever reflected the state of my inner world back to me in such a profound and specific way. I can see it in my face when the camera shows me in the audience at the conclusion of the poem. I was changed forever.

Since that day, I’ve often been reminded, and haunted, by the question that ends the poem: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” And I still feel, so much of the time, disappointed, discouraged, and devastated in response. But although much of the emotional energy is similar to what I felt when I first heard the poem in 1989, the context now, twenty years later, is very different.

In 1989, at age 31 (and feeling so much older than my years), my response to the poem, and to the question it posed, was to commit myself to living nothing short of a totally authentic life. I was inspired and energized. And I believed it was possible to do it, to live my life in such a way that I’d never again feel so empty and so riddled with feelings of regret, despair, and self-betrayal in response to that simple question: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

Now, as a 51-year-old man with twenty more years of wasted time, lost opportunities, failures in life and love, and a chain of compromises for the sake of survival that stretches into the past and future as far as my mind can see, I sit here with a broken right wrist and shoulder, unable to work or even drive, struggling to type with my left hand, and I wonder: Is it still possible for me to live an authentic life? Is it even reasonable to hope for that anymore?

And yet … I cannot help but try.

Writing has always been one of my primary and most fundamental methods for clearing my thoughts, working out issues, and expressing my creative energy, as well as one of the pillars of my psychospiritual wellness practice. I feel very lost without it. Writing left-handed is not practical for anything very long or involved and it takes a long time (this little post has taken what feels like forever). I am, for the time being at least, a writer who cannot write.

Wish me well.

Hello,
I’m writing to offer you a complimentary copy of my book, Iron Man Family Outing. I believe this book may be of interest to you. I would be very happy to provide you with a copy at no cost to you, shipping and handling included.

There’s no catch here and no hidden agenda. The simple fact is that I printed more copies than I’ve been able to sell, and I don’t want the remaining copies to go to waste.

Over the years, I’ve received many positive, enthusiastic responses from folks who’ve read and enjoyed this book. I’ve also discovered just how difficult it is to promote and distribute work of this nature. My primary interest now is to get the remaining copies of my book to people who would find it personally meaningful.

I’m enclosing some introductory information about the book, including a brief excerpt. Please contact me if you would like to receive a copy or if you need any additional information.

Regards,

Rick Belden
Author, Iron Man Family Outing

With that, Iron Man Family Outing, published in the fall of 1990 and then forgotten and presumed dead for the next seventeen years, was reborn.

I didn’t have a website two years ago today. I didn’t have a blog. I didn’t have even one reader review for Iron Man Family Outing at Amazon, or anywhere else on the web for that matter. All I had was a closetful of unsold books and a renewed conviction that it was important that I get them out to people who could make use of them.

In the two years since that day, I’ve contacted over 1800 individuals and organizations around the world, and sent out nearly 900 copies of Iron Man Family Outing to recipients in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It’s now being used worldwide by therapists, counselors, men’s groups, and organizations that work with men as an aid in the exploration of masculine psychology and men’s issues, and as a resource for men who grew up in dysfunctional, abusive, or neglectful family systems. It’s been ranked in the top 20 poetry books and the top 35 books on father-son relationships at Amazon.com, based on reader reviews. I’ve made new friends and allies all around the world who are working to help men grow and heal. And I have the most unexpected result of all, the completed manuscript for a brand-new book: Scapegoat’s Cross, my first new work in nearly twenty years.

It’s clear to me now, in retrospect, that events in my life had been leading me back to my unfinished business with the Iron Man Family Outing project since 2004, but I didn’t know that two years ago today. All I knew was that I woke up on a Sunday morning with a letter in my mind and an undeniable imperative to finish what I’d started all those years ago, to see my original vision for the book through to its completion, even if I had to give away every copy I had to do it.

I don’t know where this process will lead me in the future. Two years ago, I never expected to be where I am with this work today. I hadn’t written a line of poetry in over fifteen years. I was haunted by my failure to find an audience for Iron Man Family Outing and considered myself dead as a writer. Fortunately, things have changed.

Well, not everything has changed. I’m still fighting the battle of “soul versus survival” daily. Some days are harder than others. As I wrote almost a year ago in a blog entry entitled “go crazy or starve”:

Every morning when I wake up and don’t have time to write because some meaningless job is demanding its daily pound of flesh in exchange for a little more survival time, I feel like I’m terminating a pregnancy. It’s absolutely wrenching. I start the day sad, furious, and hopeless.

It’s still happening. It happened yesterday. I could feel something coming and I made some notes, but there was no time to allow it to develop or complete. It may come back to me. It may not.

But I’m fighting to keep the channel open, even if it means suffering the pain of losing all those things I never get to finish, because the last two years have shown me that it matters that I keep trying and do what I can, and because two years ago today I began to remember, for the first time in over fifteen years, who I am and what my life is about.

A meaningless job is going to eat my morning again today, but I woke up about two hours ago at 4 AM, after a couple of hours of restless semi-sleep, and realized I couldn’t let this anniversary go by without observing it in some way. This is my life now. The work drives me, it nags at me, it makes me miserable and keeps me awake until I tend to it.

It’s hard, it’s demanding, it’s draining, it doesn’t leave me much time for anything else, and sometimes it feels like it’s just too much for me. It also keeps me alive. And I’m okay with that.

I encountered the seed of this process in a magazine article (now long lost) many years ago. I took what I saw and developed it into a practice that I used and found helpful for several years. My belief system has since shifted in such a way that this process no longer feels like a good fit for me, but there may be others who are in the right place to gain something from using it.

I’ll say up front that I have no belief in any deity or deities, and haven’t for a long time, but I’ve always believed and still believe that there is divinity in all things. This sort of thinking would probably attract scorn from theologians and atheologians alike. So it goes.

Given that context, I’ve always seen the process I’m about to describe more as a meditative exercise in building focus and awareness than as an appeal to any sort of supernatural force, although I can’t completely rule out the possibility of ripple effects in this big pool of energy in which we’re all swimming, or even the hidden hand of some bigger fish (do fish have hands?).

From my perspective, prayer works primarily as a meditative and psychological conditioning process. It can be used to explore existing patterns of thought and perception, as well as to reinforce, shift, or replace them. I don’t see anything inherently magical or supernatural about it. I also thought, and still think, that there’s a good deal of potential consciousness-transforming power available to us in universal spiritual archetypes; whether one believes in their literal existence or not, these patterns embody and express energies and forces that are ancient and deeply authentic in the human psyche.

I’m presenting this information informally, more or less as I wrote it up for a friend several years ago. This was the process I used; adapt as needed to make it yours. And remember: this is not magic, it’s not magical thinking, and it’s not that heinous mass marketing mindscrew known as “The Secret”. This process may help you get a result you want or need; it may not. But if you pay attention as the forty day cycle unfolds, you may find that getting what you thought you wanted or needed was never the real point anyway.

As with many meditation practices, the core of the Forty Day Prayer practice is very simple. But there are some things you’ll need to know in order to get it right. I’m also going to include some info from my personal experience that may be helpful. So here goes …

The basic template for the Forty Day Prayer, as I’ve practiced it, is:

“In the name of Jesus the Christ, thank you that ________________, if it be Thy will.”

The phrasing used has three important components and all must be present:

1) “In the name of Jesus the Christ, …”

This is your call to Spirit, higher forces (internal or external), what have you, in whatever form you find appropriate for yourself. I’ve used this phrasing, even though I’m not a Christian, with something along the lines of the ideal frequently labeled as Christ Consciousness in mind. I can imagine that other folks might invoke the Great Spirit, Higher Power, or some other beneficent spiritual entity if that is more suited to their beliefs.

2) “… thank you that ________________, …”

Fill in the blank with a core phrase that expresses what you hope to create, resolve, or receive in your life during the next forty days. It’s very important that you state it in the present tense, as if you already have it and are expressing your gratitude for having it. This helps condition your mind to receive it, and perhaps more importantly, activates your creative power to manifest it.

3) “… if it be Thy will.”

Not everything our conscious mind desires is in our best interest at the soul level. This last bit acknowledges that we are not always the best and final judges of what life should bring us. Sometimes there is something else at work in life that takes precedence over what appears to us to be our most obvious need at the time.

In order to begin the process, you first have to identify the core phrase that goes in the blank. For example, if you were having a problem with your stomach, you might use something like:

“In the name of Jesus the Christ, thank you that my stomach is healthy and clear of any dysfunction, if it be Thy will.”

Another more general possibility might be:

“In the name of Jesus the Christ, thank you that I have all the help I need to heal my stomach issues, if it be Thy will”

How you arrive at the core phrase you’re going to use is up to you. In my case, it often just comes to me while I’m walking. I typically don’t make changes to my core phrase once I’ve started the forty day cycle, unless something compelling comes up. Even then, it’s usually only the addition or the rearrangement of a word or two. Best to pick something concise that you’re comfortable saying, ’cause you’re going to say it 240 times over the next forty days: three times every morning and three times every night.

Once I have my prayer in mind, I write it down on a small piece of notebook paper that I can tuck under my pillow. Each morning when I wake up I say it three times before I get out of bed. Each evening I say it three times just before I go to sleep. I keep track by marking off the days (one through forty) on the back of the piece of paper that has the prayer written on it.

It’s probably best if you can focus on the words as you say them (visualize, etc.), but a lot of the time all I can manage to do is recite the words without a lot of thought behind it. This doesn’t seem to hurt the process, in my experience. To the contrary, I think this is part of the process. It’s a very interesting exercise in self-observation to notice, over the course of forty days and forty nights, the different mental states in which I find myself when I recite the prayer … at times feeling very connected to the words, at times not. Because the words don’t change, it tends to draw my attention to what does change from day to day: my emotional and mental states and how those states affect my relationship to the words.

All of this sounds easy, right? Well, here’s the only tricky part:

If you miss a morning or an evening, you have to start the whole cycle all over again, from day one.

This is why I put the piece of paper with the prayer on it under my pillow. I’m most likely to forget to do the prayer in the morning (and I have), but since I make my bed every morning, I always find the prayer right under my pillow when I make the bed if I’ve forgotten and I don’t miss a day.

You’ll have to find your own best way to remind yourself, but I suggest you choose a strategy up front, because I can almost guarantee that something (your mind or your life) will intrude at some point and make you forgetful. And who wants to start over on day 39? Not me!

Once you’ve begun the forty day cycle, try to observe things in kind of a neutral way as you go along and see if anything begins to change around the issue you’ve chosen. Things may improve or they may seem to get worse. Maybe it will appear that nothing at all is happening. But no matter what happens, finish the cycle. Keep your commitment to yourself, to the issue, and to the process. You may notice a real difference by the end of the cycle. Something surprising may have happened. Or it may appear that nothing has happened, and you may not realize the effects until you can look back on it later in a fuller context.

I believe this practice works. I was very skeptical at first (as I tend to be with most things of this nature) but my overall experience, having used this about two dozen times in the last 5-6 years, is that it works, in some cases quite dynamically and in others very subtly.

Here’s a quick review of the practice:

1) Design your prayer using the template, with all three parts as described above.
2) Develop a memory aid (such as putting the prayer under your pillow) to remind you if you forget to say your prayer.
3) Recite the prayer three times each morning before rising and three times each evening prior to sleep for forty days.
4) Observe any changes that might relate to the issue, but finish the whole forty day cycle, no matter what (even if the problem seems to be resolved).
5) If you miss a morning or an evening, start over from day one.

I hope I haven’t made this sound too complicated or like too much work, because it is neither, especially considering the potential benefits. But you do have to be consistent and pay attention if you want to get something out of it.