Heroic Path: In Search of the Masculine Heart

by John Sowers

I think my fear was more about inadequacy.

Most of the time, I just felt like Murdock. The comic-relief guy. The cop-out. Goofy. Life was much easier as Murdock, because expectations were lower. You didn’t have to be charming, strong, or leaderly. You could just be, well… weird. Manhood still feels weird.

The man-skills we are expected to have—fixing a leaky faucet, wielding steel, changing the oil, chopping down trees, hooking up the TV, punching a wolf in the face—in these things, I feel woefully inadequate. If manhood is connected to the stereotypical man-skills, I’m a goner. And in our post–industrial revolution world, there are rare few sacred man spaces left.

Sometimes it feels like I smile and nod my way through life. I violate most of the unspoken rules of manhood: • I ask for driving directions. • I get lost in Home Depot. • I need help fixing stuff.

Unlike our forefathers, we are indoors. We live crammed into claustrophobic airplane seats and soulless cubicles. We are tucked away in hipster coffee shops. Or gathered around the plastic-veneered conference room table. We work in climate-controlled air, with moisturized and manicured hands, typing on our MacBooks and iPads. We have nothing to hunt or gather. No one to fight. And we haven’t grown up in the company of men. We have limited exposure, especially to the men in our own homes—our fathers. Jay Z puts words to our story:

I was drawn to him. I don’t know what it was, he just emitted the secret man-vibe. I felt calmer around him. Protected. I felt temporary acceptance, like I was a visitor to his man-fraternity. And hopefully, someday, I’d be invited to join.

The man-soul has weight, gravity.

In that water, I knew I could do anything. These moments fuel possibility and awaken imagination. Awaken me to the wildness of the masculine soul. These moments call me to something more.

The great stories are other-centered. They fly in the face of self-absorption. They stand in opposition to the enticing lures of self-love. Cowardice is, after all, heightened self-interest. Soldiers don’t flee with the intention of hurting others. In fact, they’re not thinking of others at all. They’re just trying to save themselves.

Since the first man, Adam, we have struggled with fidelity. We want to dump the weight. And many do. Men are wilting, leaving. Bailing out on life, spouses, and families. The evening news is littered with the wreckage. Other men never bail, but never fully engage either. They never pick up the weight. They just go limp, passive. They isolate themselves.

No one can carry our weight for us. It is ours alone to carry. Our legacy is made or marred by how we carry it.

I think being a man is making the stubborn, daily choice to carry our own weight, even when all hell breaks loose around us.

Love fuels our courage.

Courage can come as a whisper—a quiet act of selflessness. Forgiving a friend. Giving blood or an anonymous gift. Writing that letter to your dad, the one you should have written a long time ago. Sometimes courage is just moving in the right direction. Mary Anne Radmacher wrote, “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’

The one time I tried to ski, I wound up drinking the lake.

when you love someone, you figure it out.

We disengage from life, simply because we are afraid to fail. Men leave jobs, families, and responsibilities. Or we live hidden away from life, in basements or bars, drinking our lives away. Over time, we become wraiths, shadow-men living apart from reality and destiny.

We live in resignation and accept a lesser destiny. This is our real tragedy. When we give up and beat ourselves. It happens when we get lonely, worn-out, or desperate. Or when we forget who we are. Or when we lose our sense of place. Life did not turn out how we imagined, so we lower our hopes. Once upon a time, our heart was wild and young. Now it feels old and tired. We don’t want to fail again, and this fear makes us live defensively. When our hope leaves and heads south for the winter, our life grows dull. We may embrace the sadness and grow depressed. Life becomes less about celebrating, and more about tolerating. The fire in the belly dies.

We are a generation of men without place. We haven’t grown up in the company of fathers or other men. We have no man-instruction, lessons, or schooling. We have no models or heroes. We’re trying to figure out manhood. We’re trying to find place. We don’t know the basic stuff or have confidence in our man-skills. We live in fear and inadequacy.

To relieve ourselves of the fear, we prefail.

Mom is loyal unto death.

Many men are still tied to Mom. As long as we are tied to Mom, we’re drawing from her feminine energy, learning how to listen and feel and respond and be sensitive. Some of this energy may serve us well in later relationships. But inwardly, we’re out of sync.

So we repress it. Stay careful and cautious, like Mom says. Avoid conflict. Play on the safe grass. We do exactly as we’re told. But we live in tension, in growing frustration—something inside us wants out. It wants to be unleashed; we keep building the fence higher. We avoid the inner conflict and grind our teeth, or sweat through our sheets. We live with displaced anger and confusion. We are not who we were born to be. Inside, we feel soft. Passive. We live under Mom’s control instead of our wildness.

Nothing in creation is as alluring as the feminine body. No art, design, or form compares with her beauty. She is unrivaled in purity, shrouded in mystery, born in the Dawn of time. She was created in the Eternal Garden, a daughter of Eve, matching those around her, a blossoming, eternal flower of attraction and life and light.

She is the bright star on the brow of humanity. Unlike man, she is not utilitarian. She is no workhorse or knotted old tree stump. She was not created as a block of muscle and bone. She has form and delicate shape. She is curves and hips, soft skin and bright lips. Even more than her body, her soul is beauty. The lights in her eyes dazzle when she smiles. And the world stops to notice.

Others try to marry Mom. We’re attracted to strong women. We’re at home in that narrative. We are used to being led, we grew up with that Mom story, and it’s comforting. Comfort may even look like a bossy or overly controlling woman.

We give control to her. She may take the rope, and even enjoy the control for a while. But ultimately she does not want to be our captain, or to be our mom. Our wives, initially attracted to our receptiveness, now feel duped. They wanted us and now have us, but we have no virility. We have no danger. No claws or fangs. We can feel her disappointment, so we try harder, giving her everything we can: obedience, loyalty, boyishness, humor, and playful affection. But since we’ve never found the wild masculine, we don’t have it to offer.

Double frustration. She is frustrated and we are lost, incapable of bringing her what she needs. Instead we remain passive, receptive followers. Dormant. We were drawn into her positive energy, her life. But now, we are feeders.

But I still had an unanswered question, like a Black Mesa thorn, jammed deep in my soul—am I a man?

This question left me wearing blinders, unable to see how my doubts and insecurity dominated our conversations and marriage. I loved and served her relentlessly. Did thousands of dishes. Went on a thousand spontaneous dates. Bought her hand-made dresses. Surprised her with cards, flowers, and original art. I lavished her with gifts and worked hard to please her. But I still missed it. I still missed her, at the deep soul level. I was unable to give her everything. My soul was unable to get past the questions that haunted me. Am I a man? Am I competent? Do I please you? What do you think of me? I never heard the answer and now I was desperately trying to get it from my wife. At the same time, she was tired.

Our wife cannot call us into manhood, or lead us outside the beauty of the Garden. She can indirectly call us to manhood. She can listen to us as we dream about it. She can cheer for us as we awaken to it. She can stand with us on the edge of the Garden as we walk toward it—but she cannot take our steps—the steps assigned only to us.

Listen: A woman is magical but she is not your salvation. Until we bring her true wildness—a masculine soul born outside of the Garden—both parties remain discontent. We are frustrated and our wives are unfulfilled. She’s insecure, unsure about how we feel about her, how we can ever provide emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Robert Bly adds:

Our journey starts with defiance.

It’s easy to confuse the two. After all, the Hairy Man has the same wild look in his eyes. His hands are leathery. He smells like raw earth. He has a dangerous, even terrible, burning look. He cannot be controlled, coaxed, or manipulated. He simmers with the white-hot fires of quiet intensity; he radiates a pulsing and living strength. The Hairy Man is no mindless savage or barbarian. He’s not Vlad the Impaler. Far from it. He is—in the words of Mr. Beaver—“not a tame lion. But he is good.” The Hairy Man represents our strength. Our sexuality.

But I think seeking him was about me inviting the wildness. Standing up to it, without fear, and in some way, bringing it back within me. I searched because I never felt a sense of masculine initiation. I never felt fully like a man. Now I was hunting for the Kodiak bear, and for peace with a man I wanted to know better, my father. I wasn’t sure how to hunt for either. Or what I was supposed to do once I found them. I do know the wild masculine doesn’t live at home, inside stainless steel kitchen appliances or behind white picket fences. He’s not sleeping on my couch, putting his feet on my coffee table, watching Hulu. The Hairy Man doesn’t live inside with Mom. He’s somewhere else. Far from home and familiarity—he’s outside. Whatever I’m looking for is lurking in the deep woods.

When Death smiles at you and you smile back, something changes. This is an explosive moment. A threshold moment. This moment can anchor your soul when the locusts come, or when the plague claims your livestock. It will tether you to the masts, bracing you against the sirens. For the rest of your life, you will draw water from the well of this moment. Once you face death, other problems don’t matter as much. The cold rain no longer affects you—now you welcome the weather on your face. Everything else in your life feels smaller.

“To me, being a man means being kind, generous, and a good provider. The most important part of being a man is being strong. Having the self-confidence to handle any situation you face, whether you live in the city and face traffic, congestion, and crowds, or you live in remote areas with wild animals and inclement weather. And it’s a quiet self-confidence. A strong, self-confident man doesn’t announce his strength to the world. He leads by example. He’s the guy who steps up and takes charge when a challenge is faced, and then quietly fades into the background when the issue is resolved.”

You relax and ease into quiet confidence.

You are changed. Your knuckles are hardened. A quiet fire burns somewhere deep within—an inner ferocity waiting, ready to rise up against the dark things. You are calmer now, but more dangerous. Grim, but with a greater capacity for joy.

“Wildness,” according to Martin Shaw, “is a form of sophistication, because it carries a true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civilization, but prowls through it. It knows when to attend to the needs of the committee, and when to drink from the moonlit lake. It wears a suit when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. It is not afraid of emotion, of grief forests and triumphant returns.”

We grow when we face ourselves. When we confront Something Awful. When we summon the courage to take on the impossible, venture into the haunted woods and step into the nourishing dark.

I know that I love the day, The sun on the mountain, the Pacific Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers, But I know I live half alive in the world, Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.4

Many have never tasted this tonic. We have no draughts of wildness to press against our lips. No wells, springs, or rivers to drink from with cupped hands. Young men are usually invited to drink by an elder. But we have no elders. No initiation rites. No place. We have no clear road or definition of manhood. We don’t even have language for it. We look to Mom, but she is busy warning us about the woods. “You’ll put your eye out,” she scolds. We look to pop culture, and find exaggerations or ridicules of masculinity. Without a lantern, the wild places feel forbidden. Dangerous. We may summon the courage to wander out into the woods, but we have no road markers. No sense of direction. No map. We wonder: “Am I a man?” But the answer is a moving target. Even at thirty or forty or fifty, we may feel and act boyish. Our friends tell us we become a man when we lose our virginity. Have our first fistfight. Make a million dollars. Mom says we become men when we graduate college, get a job, and settle down. Culture says manhood is not trustworthy or is irrelevant. Gender is a choice—men may become women and vice versa, based on whim or feeling. Children take hormone therapy if they feel like a “boy” or a “girl” trapped inside. We are tragically lost.

Myth exists in this very moment, all around us, in the 360-degree circle surrounding our lives. Myth is something told with words and song, but myth is also something we carry, something we create.

Our way to the wild masculine follows the one true Myth.

Most young men don’t recognize this mythic stirring, but we feel it. Red aggression. Sexual urges. Growing strength. Our bodies want to move.

Elders show us the next mythic step, which is always confrontation.

Their confrontation begins with building healthy walls and standing upright.

If we survive our mythic confrontation, there is transformation.

The men who live through confrontations exude quiet strength. They don’t have to prove it on Twitter or Facebook, or by being the guy who “one-ups” everyone else at parties. When you’re around them, they feel less like a pro-wrestler wannabe and more like Mike, my Kodiak guide. There is something settling, something calming about him.