Of Monks and Men: A New Kind of American Toughness
By Ryan Croken
Super-monks Thomas Merton and HH the Dalai LamaReflecting upon the interdependent nature of human relations, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote:
If a cruel and violent person disembowels you, you can smile and look at him with love. It is his upbringing, his situation, and his ignorance that cause him to act so mindlessly. Look at him—the one who is bent on your destruction and heaps injustice upon you—with eyes of love and compassion.As I read this remarkable passage, I am struck by two incongruous observations: 1.) the notion that hatred and blame are logical fallacies is one of the most sensible and reassuring metaphysical prescriptions I have ever encountered. 2.) If any American politician, male or female, were ever to endorse this philosophy, it would be career suicide.
The incompatibility of spiritual intelligence with political viability is a curious phenomenon. To probe the root causes behind the separation of enlightenment and state, imagine (for a moment) an impossible yet illuminating hypothetical: Thich Nhat Hanh is running for president against, say, George W. Bush. This historic campaign would undoubtedly give rise to many important, superficial issues, but perhaps one question above all others would seize the electoral imagination: is Hanh “tough” enough for the job?
The standard metrics would be employed. Does he eat the flesh of dead animals? Has he recently threatened or condemned a Third World nation? Does he enjoy sports in which strong, sweaty men frequently smash into one another? As soon as the American public learns that Thich Nhat Hanh’s favorite pastimes include sitting quietly, smiling, breathing, and drinking tea, Hanh ’09, “The Right Man for the Present Moment,” would be done for. The gentle monk would be branded a sissy and sent back to his commune in France.
The fearless Zen master may have the courage to set himself on fire to put an end to war; but for this very reason he would be considered weaker than George W. Bush, a man who has earned his masculine credentials through his resolute yearning to send other people to war.
This backwards way of measuring “manliness” and defining “toughness” is as dangerous as it is absurd. There is nothing “tough” about starting a war. Starting a war is stupid and easy. Similarly, being “manly” in America today is just as easy and unthinking and unsatisfying as ordering a Budweiser at a bar. Yet the equation of toughness with violence (and violence with viability) has driven some of our political leaders (male and female alike) into such a femiphobic paroxysm that the coveted commodity of “manliness” has become an impediment not only to saintliness, but also to sanity.
Progressives Take the Bait, Act Tough
Along the way, the collective valorization of a phony phallus has demeaned much of the progressive agenda by associating it with the sappy murk of estrogen. Environmentalism is mocked as tree-hugging, opposition to the death penalty signals a maternal leniency, peace is for pussies, and gay rights are, well, gay. With this gendered hierarchy of virtues in place, how can progressives legitimate their platform in the Viagra-addled frat house that calls itself our government?
One way would be to embrace the pre-packaged trappings of “manliness,” but to direct their aggressive energies in a more Democratic direction. Grab a megaphone, for example, and scream “World Peace or die, motherfuckers!” Gnaw on a bloody steak and shoot a hunting rifle up in the air while pronouncing your support for animal rights and a ban on assault weapons. If you oppose one war, try to find another war to support. Insult people, personally. Become sanctimoniously irritable. Invoke Theodore Roosevelt a lot, and do not communicate a single idea without the assistance of a sports metaphor. Convince people that, even though your opponents may call you “soft,” you still have hatred and violence in your heart. Avoid saying the word “heart.” Pound your fist on the table, demanding something, anything, because, look out, goddamn it, you mean business! As a general rule of thumb, be a huge asshole. Better yet, be a huge dick.
This may work. Keith Olbermann, for example, with his pseudo-chivalric jousting (“you, sir, this; you, sir, that”), has not been ineffective in picking apart Republican propaganda. But looking beyond short-term tactics and marketing strategies, all of this testicular pageantry reveals a progressive movement that appears to be fundamentally ashamed of some of its core principles. Whatever immediate political success it may bring about in the polls, practicing a martial outrage in the name of peace is worse than mere hypocrisy; it is, at heart, a form of spiritual triangulation. It accepts, without challenge, the false premise that in order to be “right” about something, you have to be “tough,” and in order to be “tough,” you have to be militant, one way or another.
The Courage to be Girls
The fact that so many intelligent, well-intentioned people feel compelled to abide by the dictates of this awkward, ill-conceived paradigm has nothing to do with the biological constitution of men, and everything to do with a deeply-rooted social paranoia of being perceived as “unmanly.” Boys will be boys, it’s true; but largely because they are horrified of being girls. What we need right now, in the face of this self-destructive sexism, is precisely the courage to be “girls,” and to reject “tough” policies forged in the semi-conscious cellars of gender neurosis.
What we need is the courage to embrace a form of American masculinity that is inclusive of a global humanity, and does not flee from the words “peace,” “empathy,” and “love.” What we need, in short, is the courage to reconceptualize our understanding of courage, and to rid ourselves of the lie that tells us that compassion is weak.
“When I speak of love,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.” With these words, King was attempting to liberate the redemptive power of love from the gendered stigma of cowardice, because love, in his opinion, had become “an absolute necessity for the survival of man.” At this critical juncture in our planet’s history, instead of paying sentimental tribute to King’s icon, I suggest we listen to his message.
But is America ready for this type of listening? Are we capable of bringing about the revolution of values and perception that King was advocating? Smiling with eyes of love and compassion during disembowelment, à la Thich Nhat Hanh, is probably off the table at the moment. But deep down in the recesses of America’s metaphorical soul, I sense a powerful and courageous softness brewing. In our art, our prayers, our songs, and other forums where, for some reason, men are socially permitted to express their deepest longings and highest aspirations, there is an abundance of tenderness—a seemingly infinite reserve of exceptional weakness and emotionality.
If we can pray for love, and sing about love, why is it so uncool, impractical, and unmanly to vote for it? If all you need is love, and war is good for absolutely nothing, what is so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
The irony of it all, I suppose, is worth a laugh. Masculine “practicality” (still the predominant discourse in American political life) is destroying common sense; and while a few notable public figures are willing to declare that “toughness” is not, in fact, tough, the vast majority our political leaders, when it comes to taking a stand on this issue, remain insufferably flaccid.
Thich Nhat Hanh, alas, will never be president of the United States. But the failure of his imaginary campaign—and the specifically gendered reasons behind that failure—leave us with an ominous insight.
If we were to apply Nhat Hanh’s effeminate notion of interdependence and “I”/ “Other” unity on a global level, we would find ourselves trapped in a troubling (and not entirely unrealistic) dilemma: the United States is currently threatened with disembowelment, and the United States is the one holding the knife to its stomach. What do we do? Do we take manly action against our aggressor? Or do we waver, do we dither, do we pause and reflect like little babies? This abstract question has some very visceral consequences, for if we cannot find the cowardice within us to give peace a chance, if we decide to thrust and twist the knife into our own belly in the name of “toughness,” one thing is for sure: we won’t have the guts to be “tough” anymore, and we’ll all be left screaming for our mommies.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Ryan Croken - Of Monks and Men: A New Kind of American Toughness
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Looking at Suffering - Staying with the Soft Spot
But this has a serious downside. What we do not face and embrace, haunts us. If we cannot acknowledge and process our own suffering, we are not likely to be capable of dealing with anyone else's suffering. This is known as shadow work in psychology circles, and it's a crucial part of growing whole.
Here is what Gil Fronsdal says in today's daily dharma from Tricycle.
Learning to be nonreactive is the hard part, but the more sit with suffering, the more open we can become to seeing it rise and pass away, the less reactive we become.Looking at suffering
In Buddhist practice, we investigate the nature of suffering. One of the first things we may notice is our relationship to it. We may discover how we tolerate, avoid, or accept suffering in unhealthy ways. We may notice our aversion to suffering, which creates even more suffering.We may also notice how suffering functions in our lives. We might be using it as proof of or justification for inappropriate judgments about ourselves: e.g., that we are blameworthy, inadequate, or incapable. Identifying strongly with our suffering can become our orientation to the world. Occasionally people hang on to the identity “I’m a victim,” and want to be treated by others as a victim. We can use our suffering to get other people to respond to us in ways that may not be healthy.
However, being willing to investigate suffering and to look at it closely and nonreactively changes our relationship to it. We bring a healthy part of our psyche to the experience of suffering. Instead of being wrapped up in our suffering, lost in aversion to it, or shut off from it, we simply ask: “What is this?”
- Gil Fronsdal, Tricycle, Winter 2002
Read the full article:
Living Two Traditions
In this article from Pema Chodron, Stay with the Soft Spot, she talks about Shantideva's Path of the Bodhisattva, and how we learn to be with suffering, to stay with the soft spot of Bodhichitta in our lives - the flash of insight that shows us our suffering is little more than a passing storm, and that the skies will clear.
Bodhichitta—awakened heart or awakened mind—is something everyone has access to. It arises in everyone, and everyone has experienced it. The text says that it often appears like “a flash of lightning in the dark.” It’s like there’s an opening in the clouds. We sense that we're connected to something that wakes us up and makes our world feel bigger. It makes our heart and our whole being feel expansive; we feel confident and inspired. But, unfortunately, our habitual patterns are so strong that the opening usually closes again. We revert to our old ways of staying stuck in negative mind. We get hooked again in our old patterns.Later in the article, she expands on how we work with pain and suffering, offering the example of grief. When she talks about getting "hooked" what we are really talking about is possession by a subpersonality. We are no longer in control, our mind has been hijacked by some non-integrated part of the psyche.
Take grief, for instance. Grief is completely pregnant with bodhichitta—it’s full of heart, love and compassion. But we tend to freeze or harden against grief because it’s so painful. We bring in the clouds. In fact, we're good at bringing in the clouds and keeping them in place. We’re good at fixating on them.When we can stay with the soft spot, or more simply look at our suffering, it begins to lose the ability to hook us and we are more free and open. When we get hooked, the emotion owns us, but when we can stay with the soft spot, stay with our pain and suffering, we can learn from our emotion rather than be owned by it.
But when you practice the teachings that say, “Stay with the grief, see it as your link to all humanity,” you begin to understand that grief is a doorway to realizing that the sun is always shining. You begin to understand that the weather is transient like clouds in the sky. You begin to have more trust in the underlying goodness—the underlying “sun quality”—of your being.
In this way, any experiences you have, particularly very strong emotions, are doorways to bodhichitta. The trick is to stay with the soft spot—the bodhichitta—and not harden over it. That’s the basic bodhichitta instruction: stay with the soft spot.
How does this work? You’re going along, and your mind and heart are open. Then someone says something and you find yourself either frightened or starting to get angry. You feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, and something in you closes down. You’re on your way to becoming all worked up. At this point, you become unreasonable, and all your wisdom goes out the window. You’re hooked. This is what we work with as practitioners, as aspiring bodhisattvas: we have to be able to see where we get hooked like this. It’s easy to see. To interrupt the flow of it, though, is another matter.
In essence, we want to move from acting as the subject "being" the emotion, to become the self "seeing" the emotion as an object of our awareness. It seems like a subtle distinction, but it makes all the difference.
As men, this all can seem like a foreign language in a foreign land. Emotions and psychological pain are not things we are taught to know and deal with. Broken bones and skinned knees are fine, we know that stuff, but we are not so good with the inside.
This is why we meditate, or engage in centering prayer. Any method that asks us to be quiet and pay attention to what goes on inside of us is a good thing. We might also journal, make art, create music. All of these are ways to engage the inner world, to learn who we are, to see the dark corners of the heart that we all wish to avoid.
We are not merely bodies and minds, we are also hearts and souls. To be whole men, we need to know those parts of ourselves so many of us have been taught to avoid or ignore. When we can do so, we begin to develop what Chogyam Trungpa called the tender heart of the warrior.
The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart's blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you will hit him back. However, we are not talking about that street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others. (Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, p. 46)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
ATOMIC DOG - The 7 Cowboy Values
ATOMIC DOG
The 7 Cowboy Values
by TCHowdy.
A lot of you don't know this, but this website thing? It's not my real job.
Shucks no, my real job is helluva' lot more harrowin', excitin', and downright romantic than writin' down words and such.
Truth is, I'm a cowboy of sorts, only instead of roundin' up cattle I round up shopping carts.
Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them doggies rollin'That's right, I'm a cart wrangler at Costco. When you're done loading your 50-packs of tighty-whitey Hanes underwear, 10-pound cans of olives, and 2-gallon tubs of hemorrhoid cream into your Ford Explorer, I retrieve the cart, or as we boys in the business like to refer to them, the iron horses. We don't try to understand 'em, we just push and shove and roll 'em.
Yep, we're your huckleberries. We're the last American cowboys.
And when nighttime comes, we make ragin' campfires out of discarded Sanyo plasma TV boxes. We cook up some of those big Costco cans of Van Camp Pork 'n Beans and we stare up at the light from the faraway Toyota dealership. We listen to the mournful yelps of the feral poodles, that're no doubt lamentin' their tattered ribbons and their overgrown pom-poms and the regrettable fact that they have to steal water and kibble out of the bowls of indoor dogs that are labeled "Duke" or "Spot" instead of "Fi-Fi."
And we sing songs, too — all the cowboy favorites like Home on the Range, The Yellow Rose of Texas, and Don't Phunk With my Heart.
It's a tough life, a lonely life, but a man like me wouldn't have it any other way.
Why am I tellin' y'all this after so many years? Well, it's kinda germane to my story, you see.
Last week, after a particularly rough day when we herded in over 6,000 carts, I was rummagin' through the remaindered Costco books, lookin' for something that would nourish a cowboy soul, when butter my butt and call me a biscuit, I stumbled on a book full of purty pictures called Cowboy Values written by some ol' sod horse by the name of James P. Owens.
Cowboy Up or Go Sit in the Truck
Owens was a stockbroker for 35 years, but as the years piled on and his portfolios grew and shrank, he became disenchanted with his profession and disenchanted with America. He saw that where America once evaluated a man's character by his actions and accomplishments, it now evaluated a man by what kind of car he drives and the size of his portfolio.
Owens then realized that his lifetime fascination with the Old West might provide some guidance. He started thinking about all the Westerns he'd enjoyed throughout the years and all the books he'd read on the era and inspiration struck him in the face like a bag of oats thrown off a wagon.
Cowboys weren't just matinee idols; whether in the movies or real life, they stood for something. They had character and they had a clear, unshakeable —albeit unwritten — set of beliefs they lived by each day.
So after a year of studying the subject, he wrote a book called Cowboy Ethics that he hoped would serve as an inspiration to Wall Street.
You don't need me to tell you that Wall Street hasn't paid much heed, but Owens hasn't given up. He's since written a follow-up book that I mentioned earlier, Cowboy Values, and while he still manages a hedge fund, he travels around the country preaching the ways of the cowboy to any group or company that'll listen.
The book, as well as its predecessor, is simple and straightforward, but complexity isn't the cowboy way. After digesting innumerable movies, textbooks, and first-person accounts, Owens distilled the cowboy way into 7 core values that not only define the cowboy, but America, too.
1. Courage
Of course he's willing to die. You think we do this kind of work because we're scared to die?
— Virgil Cole, Appaloosa
Talk to any psychologist worth his id-odized salt and he'll tell you that most people are driven by fear. Hell, Americans seem to be afraid of lots of things, mostly the wrong things. They're afraid of two-bit terrorists, terrorists who've lately taken to hiding explosive devices hidden up their ass.
That's right, hidden up their ass. You know, if you're a terrorist who's gone to the excruciating trouble of shoving an IED up your ass, feel free to blow me up; I'll just spend eternity pointing a finger at you and laughing at how I imagine your face looked while you corkscrewed a pound of plastic explosive, some copper wire, and the guts of a cell phone up your ass.
Americans, along the same lines, are afraid of two-bit ideologues half-way across the world who might, without interference, eventually acquire the technology to hit the Virgin Islands with a nuclear missile that wobbles like one of Tim Tebow's passes after he got his melon knocked. Ho-hum. Trust me, if anyone ever gets close to that, we'll light them up like the bonfire after the last Sadie Hawkins dance.
Don't get me wrong, it's potentially a serious problem, but there are thousands of nuclear bombs on the planet and few people seem to worry about them. Worrying about Iran or Korea getting a couple without the means to deploy them efficiently or accurately seems a little disproportionate.
The Justice Department just came out with a report the other day that says half of American's children were assaulted in some way last year. Half! That seems to be worth worrying about a little more than a couple of pathetic ideologues.
And we seem to always be afraid of losing things, of people or the Government taking things away from us. We're like little kids worried that some bully is going to take away our tutti-frutti ice cream cone.
If and when it happens is one thing, but paranoia about things that probably won't happen seems to be sapping our collective spirit.
None of this was necessarily the kind of fear Owens was writing about, but nevertheless, he believes, rightly so, that fear is constrictive.
He believes we ought to acknowledge fear and then confront it, that we should accept risk, change, and failure as a way of life, the way the cowboys did. If you accept that some bad shit, along with the good shit, is going to happen, you castrate fear and put a brand on its quivering ass.
Along the same lines, we need to endure hardship and adversity without complaint. That doesn't mean we shouldn't stand up for what we believe in and make tough choices. Quite the contrary. But the cowboy doesn't spend precious time worrying about intangibles, things that he can't see. He's worried about the herd he's responsible for. He worries about his land, his family, and his neighbors.
That's the cowboy way.
2. Optimism
Vin: Reminds me of that fellow back home that fell off a ten-story building.
Chris: What about him?
Vin: Well, as he was falling people on each floor kept hearing him say, "So far, so good...so far, so good!— The Magnificent Seven
America, lately, seems to be programmed to avoid negatives instead of embracing positives. Look at the scoundrels on cable news (on both sides of the political aisle) decrying the impending falling sky. As a writer, I know instinctually that adversity and conflict and blood make for a good story, but I'm talking about novels; you know, fiction.
Broadcasting the news shouldn't be based on the same formula as a best-selling novel. Of course, it shouldn't be based on optimism, either. Rather, it should be based on truth, which is always a blend of the good and the bad.
As individuals, Owens believes that the cowboys had a faith in the rightness of the natural order of things, and they chose to focus on the good in their lives and had a deep gratitude for any good fortune that came their way.
What's the purpose of this wished-for optimism? It's simple, really. Owens says that you need hope and confidence for anything good to occur. In cowboy terms, you won't drive any fence posts if you automatically assume the wood's infested with termites.
3. Self Reliance
No brag... just fact.
— Will Sonnett, The Guns of Will Sonnett
Owens writes about watching video of the aftermath of Katrina and seeing thousands of people standing around doing nothing to help themselves. He was freaked out that so very few seemed to take responsibility for their own well-being and instead chose to wait around for FEMA.
Regardless of how fair or unfair a point that is, it's worth thinking about.
It may be true, and if it is, it's more a reflection of what's happened to us as a society. How many Americans are trained to live without technology, or perhaps more importantly, have the skill or knowledge to find food, shelter, or improvise life-saving strategies in the event of a disaster?
What would you do if the power went out, went out for good? Would you know what to do, how to feed yourself, how to keep yourself warm?
Hell, we've outsourced just about everything. From what I've heard, it's hard to find even a piece of furniture that was entirely built in the U.S. On a more domestic level, how many can even cook a meal or fix a leaky water faucet?
That wouldn't have sat well with the cowboys. They valued competence over convenience and put in the time and effort required to learn a skill. In fact, they found satisfaction in every accomplishment. More importantly, they took responsibility for their own well-being.
4. Authenticity
If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.
— Cowboy saying
How many people do you know that aren't full of cow pie? Very few, I'll wager.
How many people really say what they mean? Say things without hypocrisy, pretense, or a self-serving agenda? How many people say things out of conviction rather than a fear of being rejected by the herd?
The cowboys took satisfaction in who they were, and their actions were guided by their coherent set of core beliefs. They recognized their strengths as well as their weaknesses.
Their identity came from personal values expressed not only in words, but deeds too, and not from what kind of car they drive, where they vacation, or their position in their company.
They believed that a rich man isn't the one who has the most, but the one who needs the least.
5. Honor
It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life.
— Ten Bears, The Outlaw Josey Wales
Cheating, unfortunately, has become an American way of life. The end almost always justifies the means, and too often the end is a bigger bank account.
We expect to be cheated. We expect to be lied to, and this perverse core belief leads to a kind of rudeness and acrimony that poisons the soul of America.
It's horribly sad, but we've all collectively brought it on ourselves, whether we're the soulless cheaters or the distrustful cheatees.
Not so with the cowboys. Owens writes that being worthy of trust means everything to a cowboy. If one of his cows strayed into another's herd, he fully expected to be compensated in full when the cow's new owner eventually sold him. It was part of the social structure of the West; without it, the entire system would have collapsed.
Cowboys told the truth and they acted with integrity, no matter what the cost. Furthermore, they knew that just because something was legal didn't make it right.
6. Duty
From now on I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it. So run you cur. And tell the other curs the law is coming. You tell 'em I'm coming! And Hell's coming with me, you hear! Hell's coming with me!
— Wyatt Earp, Tombstone
The cowboy felt that he had a responsibility to something bigger than himself. He was willing to sacrifice self-interest to protect his family, community, or country.
This kind of thinking was absolutely necessary, writes Owens, "as brave men were the only bulwark against the dangers and lawlessness of the frontier."
Owens believes that nowadays, the "drive for economic and social success have intensified to the point where there is no stigma in neglecting obligations to others; it's simply assumed that 'someone else' will take care of it."
Not so for the cowboy. They did what had to be done.
7. Heart
Well, he sure as hell wasn't one to complain. Woke with a smile, seemed like he could keep it there all day. Kind of a man that'd say 'good morning' and mean it, whether it was or not. Tell you the truth, Lord, if there was two gentler souls in this world, I never seen 'em. Seems like old Tig wouldn't even kill birds in the end. Well, you got yourself a good man and a good dog, and I'm inclined to agree with Boss here about holding a grudge against you for it. I guess that means Amen.
— Charley Waite, Open Range
We're turning into a nation of cold-hearted bastards. Sure, we'll pony up when we see a heart-rending video of some kid whose Christmas presents were burned up in a fire, but we'll turn a blind eye to the homeless and needy in our own neighborhoods.
Hell, why not? The latter aren't celebrities; no one will know if you help them. No one will know what a warm-hearted bastard you are if your charitable act isn't done publicly.
The cowboy found rewards in giving because he recognized our shared humanity. His charity wasn't determined by the bottom line, wasn't determined by matters of profit or convenience.
...consider the disgraceful aftermath of Hurricane Katrina...or the shameful treatment of our veterans...or our chronic failure to ease the plight of the homeless or the medically uninsured. It's hard not to believe that heart is a shrinking element of our national character.
Owens doesn't think America is resented just because it's the richest and most powerful country in the world, but because our national priorities are "out of whack." We act out of self-interest, misdirected ideology, and political party loyalty, not heart.
Not so the cowboy. He lived by humanitarian ideals; he lived with heart, which Owens characterized in the following ways:
• Seeing the good in people
• Seeing the beauty in life
• Finding rewards in giving
• Recognizing our shared humanity
• Feeling at one with nature
• Kindness to all living creatures — including ourselves.Give Me a Stiff One, Barkeep.
Is all this cowboy stuff corny? Is it just sentimental pabulum, Pollyanna horseshit as anachronistic as the cowboy himself?
Part of me, the jaded part, wants to think so, but the better part of me really does believe in the values espoused, regardless of whether or not they were truly part of the lives of the real cowboys and not just the celluloid ones.
I've often written of rites of passage, advocated that young men, upon achieving adulthood, be given some rules to live by, some code of honor. The damn trouble is that it's hard to advocate the merits of such a code, especially when those who have no code sometimes seem to prosper.
But those of us who do have a code know that it helps us prosper in ways the jaded can't even comprehend. It helps us in forming meaningful and satisfying relationships and meaningful and satisfying friendships. It helps us live fulfilling lives, gives us peace of mind, and gives us, through our efforts, a better community, country, and world in which to live.
And living by such a code doesn't mean that we can't also prosper financially. I don't believe for a second that you have to be ruthless and self-serving to make money. Quite the contrary, I'm quite certain that a personal code like that espoused by Owens, along with a similar business code, will actually further one's chances of being prosperous financially, and of course, spiritually.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Art of Manliness - Getting in Touch with the Wilderness
Image from martigras
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Adam Cook. Mr. Cook is a passionate alpinist, mountaineer and all-around outdoorsman.
Content to be wrapped up in our blanket of technology and seemingly powerless against the pull of our cozy man chair, it’s easy to forget there are tons and tons of opportunities to get outside and into the wilderness. People are always wishing for a trip to some major foreign city to see the scenery and take in something different but often fail to realize just how awesome and unique their own countryside can be. By taking up an interest outdoors, you can turn nearly every weekend into a short vacation and save a lot of money in the process.
Being outdoors puts you in direct contact with this magnificent planet of ours. City wilderness often consists of artificially placed miniature trees, a few squirrels, and a pigeon. Any other wildlife you see will likely scurry away the moment it notices you. In the deep wild though, most animals have barely had any human contact and will not hesitate to walk straight up to you. It’s really an experience to see two big-horn sheep fight within 15 feet of you and not care that you’re sticking around.
As both a blessing and a curse, being outdoors will put you in touch with your own mortality. Being in a controlled environment for the majority of one’s life will lead to feelings of immortality or at least an inflated feeling of strength and worth. Having your tent ransacked by a grizzly at 3am or getting caught in a mountain squall can put you right back in your place and teach you a lot in the process. In fact, the reason most alpinists climb is just to revel in that feeling of exposure to danger. It lets you know you’re human.
With a little know how and a few supplies, you can start becoming an outdoorsman yourself. Here are 5 points to keep in mind as you make plans to get in touch with the wilderness.
1. Choose a hobby that puts you outdoors
This sounds obvious, but a lot of guys’ hobbies are what keep them locked up inside. An outdoor hobby can be very cheap, but it can also turn into a serious investment (see: alpine climbing). If you’re on a budget, choose outdoor activities like backpacking and general mountaineering that don’t require an abundance of expensive equipment. These pursuits give you a chance for adventure and travel without costing an arm and an leg. With a pack, clothes, tent, and a dehydrator, you can hike the entire Grand Canyon for the cost of gas and the time it takes to dehydrate a few foods from your own house. This equates to around 120 dollars for an entire week (if you live in Ohio like me). If you have a quick bivy shelter, you can take an airliner to the beaches of Thailand on a moment’s notice with nothing more than a few extra bucks and a backpack.
2. Find at least one person to share your experiences with
While solo hunting, fishing, packing, and biking may be fun, it’s often the other person that will keep you at it. It’s easy to say you don’t feel like waking up at 4am to set up your deer stand, but if you have a friend tagging along, that’s usually all the motivation you need. It also gives you something to talk about and really furthers a relationship, be it with a best friend or significant other.
3. Realize your mortality
I realize I mentioned this earlier, but it needs to be said again before you take off into the wilderness. There are plenty of things out there to teach this lesson to you, but it’s best you realize it yourself right now and prepare beforehand. Knowledge is your friend here. Know that a 50 dollar Wal-Mart tent can’t withstand the 80 mph winds of a mountain squall, and know that a grizzly can break through a car door to get to a Snickers. In fact, there are two rules to being outdoors. 1) Put yourself in a position to be lucky, and 2) Don’t put yourself in a position to rely on luck. Here’s a scenario: getting up before dawn to start a hike on a cloudy day puts you in a position for the weather to clear and the day to be nice. If you only have 2 days and you decide that first day to stay in the tent and wait, you’ve put yourself in a position to rely on luck for the second days’ weather.
4. Get supplies and know where to get them for cheap
Every outdoorsman needs a few basic supplies. This includes rain gear and/or bivy gear (this can be as simple as a large trash bag), a small first aid kit, a compact mountaineering stove with a few dehydrated meals, a compass, a headlamp, and a water purification device. It’s easy to fit all this into a backpack, and even on a challenging day hike it puts you in the position to be lucky if something should turn for the worse.
There are several sites I recommend when looking for outdoor gear at a bargain price. The Sierra Trading Post sells gear and clothing for 30%-70% off and often has very good deals on name brand stuff. But my favorite site is Steep and Cheap. They offer just one greatly discounted item at a time and sell it until it’s gone. Obviously with that kind of set up, you have to act fast to snatch up the stuff you want. But they offer a variety of alerts you can sign up for that will keep you abreast of what item is currently being sold.
5. Respect the wilderness
This should go without saying, but too many people thoughtlessly dump trash outside. Just the other day when bouldering in the local park, I found a white trash bag that had to be 10 minutes from the beaten path. I don’t know how it got there, but I grabbed it and packed it out myself. Respecting the wilderness means allowing it to have the same spirit-reviving effect on others as it has on you. When you leave behind your trash or in any other way mar the wilderness, you create an eyesore that will pull others out of the meditative experience they’re having and back into the ordinary, material world they were trying to escape. You’re gazing at a scene of mighty redwoods and feeling a stirring in your soul, and then-bam!-there’s a McDonald’s bag and the trance is broken. If you say you ‘need’ to leave something behind, it’s understandable, but only once in my life did leaving trash and food behind actually aid me in survival, and I still feel bad about it to this day.
So go out and gear up. Fall is in full swing and there’s no better time to get outside!
Monday, October 12, 2009
Deconstructing Jackson Katz’s “Tough Guise”
While as a Buddhist I reject violence, this is not necessarily a universal belief, even among Buddhists. Many hundreds of years have shown that Buddhists will take violent action in order to protect the weak and the dharma - the killing of a few to save the many has been the argument.
When the Chinese invaded Tibet, the few "soldiers" that existed tried in vain to fight off the invaders. This might be seen as the dark side of the complete opposition to violence and force. If they had taken seriously the realities of a world in which not everyone shares their values of peace and compassion, they might have been more prepared to defend those values by whatever means necessary.
Perhaps this is not good Buddhist doctrine. Or perhaps this is a more integral understanding of the need for right use of force. The "right use" part is crucial - I am not for the glorification of violence in film and TV. I do not think that boys should be taught that violence is how to resolve issues. I do not think that the military should be deployed unless our borders are threatened or unless we can protect the weak from genocide by the few who are ignorant and violent.
But I do know that we should be able to defend ourselves and those we love if there is no other option. Is there ever a time when there is no other option? I'm not sure.
Anyway, all of this is just to say that
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Spaced | Unspoken Telepathy | Channel 4
Tim and Mike demonstrate the 'biological connection between male psyches'... | Watch Spaced FREE on 4oD http://www.channel4.com/4odThey don't allow embedding, so go take a look.
Michael Chabon - Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide
In a controversial New York Times "Modern Love" column, Michael Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, confessed that she'd have a harder time losing her husband than one of their children. After reading Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, you'll understand why.
He emerges from these 39 beautifully written personal essays as a prince among men. Not only does he produce dazzling novels that have given genre fiction literary cachet — including The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001) — he also cooks, cleans, markets and gets his children to their appointments — and counts himself fortunate to be in a position to do so.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son
By Michael Chabon
Hardcover, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99
Read An ExcerptThere have been no shortage of books on motherhood, but daddy diaries are a growing phenomenon. Chabon raises the bar with his often poignant meditations on manhood, fatherhood and aspects of his own childhood. Most of these loosely connected essays, which add up to an episodic autobiography of sorts, first appeared in Details magazine. In addition to the gorgeous prose for which he is celebrated, several lovely qualities shine through.
For starters, Chabon clearly adores and respects his mother. After his parents divorced when he was 12, his mother got her law degree and a federal job in D.C. Chabon took over dinner preparations. Instead of feeling put-upon, he expresses gratitude at having grown up "during a time of dissolving boundaries," when it was all right for a boy to want to emulate his mother.
As for his wife, in an essay titled "Looking for Trouble," Chabon offers a tribute to "quick, mercurial, intemperate" Waldman. In marrying her, he says he "answered the call of adventure," and he's thankful he did. In another nod to Waldman, he notes the disparity between expectations for fathers and mothers: "The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low."
More than marriage or writing, these essays focus on the wonders of childhood and parenting. Chabon loves the intimacy of domesticity — though he is circumspect with private details. He writes movingly that in his four children he has found "a band of companions" with whom to share various enthusiasms, something he pointedly missed when his pediatrician father moved away after his parents' divorce.
Enlarge Vince Bucci/Getty ImagesMichael Chabon told the Weekly Reader that he knew he wanted to be a writer when his first short story, a class assignment, about Sherlock Holmes got an A. "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do. I can do this.' And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."
Chabon takes his kids to junky movies and erects elaborate Lego constructions with them, but he is concerned that today's kids, deprived of the open-ended play, unsupervised landscapes and vast stretches of free time that characterized his own childhood, have too little room for imagination. He worries that he is bringing up "free-range children" who, like chickens raised to near-maturity in a controlled environment, don't actually "range" much even when the doors of freedom are thrown open.
Although Chabon's subjects range from sex at 15 with a divorced friend of his mother's to pocketbooks for men, the thread that ties Manhood for Amateurs together isn't a purse string, but the idea that fandom — being an amateur "driven by passion and obsession" to "explore the imaginary world" — is what connects him not only to his children, but to his writing.
Excerpt: 'Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son'
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon
Paperback, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99The Hand on My Shoulder
I didn't play golf, and he had never smoked marijuana. I was a nail chewer, inclined to brood, and dubious of the motives of other people. He was big and placid, uniformly kind to strangers and friends, and never went anywhere without whistling a little song. I minored in philosophy. He fell asleep watching television. He fell asleep in movie theaters, too, and occasionally, I suspected, while driving. He had been in the navy during World War II, which taught him, he said, to sleep whenever he could. I, still troubled no doubt by perplexing questions of ontology and epistemology raised during my brief flirtation with logical positivism ten years earlier, was an insomniac. I was also a Jew, of a sort; he was, when required, an Episcopalian.
He was not a big man, but his voice boomed, and his hands were meaty, and in repose there was something august about his heavy midwestern features: pale blue eyes that, in the absence of hopefulness, might have looked severe; prominent, straight nose and heavy jowls that, in the absence of mirth, might have seemed imperious and disapproving. Mirth and hopefulness, however, were never absent from his face. Some people, one imagines, may be naturally dauntless and buoyant of heart, but with him, good spirits always seemed, far more admirably, to be the product of a strict program of self-improvement in his youth — he believed, like most truly modest men, in the absolute virtue of self-improvement — which had wrought deep, essential changes in a nature inclined by birth to the darker view and gloominess that cropped up elsewhere in the family tree. He didn't seem to be happy out of some secret knowledge of the essential goodness of the world, or from having fought his way through grief and adversity to a hard-won sense of his place in it; they were simple qualities, his good humor and his optimism, unexamined, automatic, stubborn. I never failed to take comfort in his presence.
The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems — at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington — to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.
When I look back — always an unreliable procedure, I know — it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. I met him, his wife, and their yellow beach house all on the same day. It was a square-pillared bungalow, clapboard and shake, the color of yellow gingham, with a steep pitched roof and a porch that looked out over a frigid but tranquil bay of brackish water. His wife, like him in the last years of a vigorous middle age, had been coming to this stretch of beach since early in her girlhood, and for both her and her daughter, whom I was shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories, associations, artifacts, and stories than any place any member of my own family had lived since we had left Europe seventy years before. Everything about this family was like that. My future mother-in-law lived in the house in Seattle where she had been born. My father-in-law had grown up down the road in Portland. They had met at the University of Washington. Everyone they knew, they had known for longer than I'd been alive. All the restaurants they favored had been in business for years, they were charter members of their country club, and in some cases they did business with the sons of tradesmen they had dealt with in the early days of their marriage. A journey through the drawers, closets, and cabinets of their house in town yielded a virtual commercial and social history of Seattle, in the form of old matchboxes, rulers, pens, memo pads, napkins, shot glasses, candy tins, golf tees, coat hangers; years and years' worth of lagniappes, giveaways, souvenirs, and mementos bearing the names, in typefaces of four decades, of plumbing supply companies, fuel oil dealers, newlyweds, dry cleaners, men and women celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.
God, it was a seductive thing to a deracinated, assimilated, uncertain, wandering young Jew whose own parents had not been married for years and no longer lived anywhere near the house in Maryland where, for want of a truer candidate, he had more or less grown up. They were in many ways classic WASPs, to be sure, golfing, khaki-wearing, gin-drinking WASPs. The appeal of such people and their kind of world to a young man such as I was has been well-documented in film and literature; perhaps enough to seem by now a bit outdated. But it wasn't, finally, a matter of class or style, though they had both. I fell in love with their rootedness, with the visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle, with their ability to bring a box of photographs taken thirty summers earlier and show me the room I was sitting in before it was painted white, the madrone trees that screened the porch before two fell over, the woman I was going to marry digging for geoduck clams on the beach where she had just lain sunbathing.
Of course, they were more than a kind of attractive gift wrap for their photographs, houses, and the historical contents of their drawers. They were ordinary, problematical people, my in-laws, forty years into a complicated marriage, and over the course of my own brief marriage to their daughter, I came to love and appreciate them both as individuals, on their merits and, as my marriage began so quickly to sour, for the endurance of their partnership. They had that blind, towering doggedness of the World War II generation. I suppose it's possible that with two daughters, they'd always wanted a son, my father-in-law especially; I do know for certain that I have never been one to refuse the opportunity to add another father to my collection.
He offered himself completely, without reservation, though in his own particular, not to say limited, way (it is this inherent limited quality of fathers and their love that motivates collectors like me to try to amass a complete set). He took me down to Nordstrom, the original store in downtown Seattle, and introduced me to the man who sold him his suits. I bought myself a few good square-cut, sober-colored numbers in a style that would not have drawn a second glance on Yesler Way in 1954. He introduced me to the woman from whom he bought jewelry for his wife, to the man who took care of his car, to all of the golf buddies and cronies whose sons he had been admiring from afar for the last thirty years. He was a bit barrel chested anyway, but whenever we went anywhere together and, as was all but inevitable, ran into someone he knew, his breast, introducing me, seemed to grow an inch broader, the hand on my shoulder would administer a little fighttrainer massage, and I would feel him — as first the wedding and, later, the putative grandchildren drew nearer — placing, for that moment, all his hopes in me. He took me to football games, basketball games, baseball games. He let me drive his Cadillac; naturally, he never drove anything else. Most of all, however — most important to both of us — he let me hang out in his den.
As the child of divorced parents, myself divorced, and a writer trained by five hundred years of European and American literary history always to search out the worm in the bud, I have, of necessity, become a close observer of other people's marriages. I have noticed that in nearly all the longest-lived ones, if there is space enough in the house, each partner will have a room to flee to. If, however, there is only one room to spare, it will always be the husband's. My in-laws had plenty of room, but while she had her office just off the bedroom (where I would sometimes see her sitting at a Chinese desk, writing a letter or searching for an article clipped from Town & Country about flavoring ice creams with edible flowers), my mother-in-law's appeared to serve a largely ceremonial function.
My father-in-law, on the other hand, sometimes seemed to live down in the basement. His office, like him, was mostly about golf. The carpet was Bermuda-grass green, the walls were hung with maps of St. Andrews and framed New Yorker covers of duffers, and the various hats, ashtrays, hassocks, cigarette lighters, plaques, novelty telephones, and trophies around the room were shaped like golf balls, tees, mashies, mulligans, and I don't know what. In the midst of all this sat an enormous black Robber Baron desk with matching black Captain Nemo chair; an old, vaguely Japanese-looking coffee table on its last tour of duty in the house; a cyclopean television; and a reclining armchair and sofa, both covered in wool patterned with the tartan of some unknown but no doubt staunch, whiskey-drinking, golf-wild highland clan.
It is for just such circumstances, in which two men with little in common may find themselves thrown together with no other recourse than to make friends, that sports were invented. When my wife and I visited I went downstairs, flopped on the sofa, and watched a game with my father-in-law. He made himself a C.C. and soda, and sometimes, to complete the picture, I let him mix one for me. Like many men of my generation, I found solace when unhappy in placing quotation marks around myself and everything I did. There was I, an "unhappy husband," drinking a "cocktail" and "watching the game." This was the only room in the house where I was permitted to smoke — I have long since quit — and I made the most of it (a man's den often serves the same desublimating function in the household as Mardi Gras or Las Vegas in the world; a different law obtains there). We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whiskey and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came home to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I've ever found.
My ex-wife and I — I won't go into the details — had good times and bad times, fought and were silent, tried and gave up and tried some more before finally throwing in the towel, focused, with the special self-absorption of the miserable, on our minute drama and its reverberations in our own chests. All the while, the people who loved us were not sitting there whispering behind their hands like spectators at a chess match. They were putting our photographs in frames on their walls. They were uniting our names over and over on the outsides of envelopes that bore anniversary wishes and recipes clipped from newspapers. They were putting our birthdays in their address books, knitting us socks, studying the fluctuating fortunes of our own favorite hitters every morning in the box scores. They were working us into the fabric of their lives. When at last we broke all those promises that we thought we had made only to each other, in an act of faithlessness whose mutuality appeared somehow to make it all right, we tore that fabric, not irrecoverably but deeply. We had no idea how quickly two families can work to weave themselves together. When I saw him sometime later at his mother's funeral in Portland, my father-in-law told me that the day my divorce from his daughter came through was the saddest one in his life. Maybe that was when I started to understand what had happened.
What was I now to him? How can it have felt to have been divorced by someone he treated like a son? These are not considerations that comfort me or make me especially proud. I try to remind myself that in the long course of his life, I occupied only a tiny span of years toward the end, when everything gleams with an unconvincing luster, moving too quickly to be real. And I try to forget that for a short while I formed a layer, however thin, in the deep stratigraphy of his family, so that some later explorer, rummaging through the drawers of his big old desk, might brush aside a scorecard from the 1967 PGA Pacific Northwest Open signed by Arnold Palmer, or an old pencil-style typewriter eraser with a stiff brush on one end, stamped queen city ribbon co., and turn up a faded photograph of me, in my sober blue suit, flower in my lapel, looking as if I knew what I was doing.
From Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2009 by Michael Chabon. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Conscious Dating And Relationships Teleseminar
Conscious Dating And Relationships Teleseminar
One of the biggest complaints men have at some point in their life involves relationships and women. Finding “the one” can be a huge pain point for many men. Dating can be an arduous process for many men. Marriage can be strenuous. Long term commitments can be both profound and deadening.
So, what should you do about your dating and relationship challenges?
For starters sign up for my free teleseminar called Relationships with Heart: Dating for Evolving Men on October 20th at 430 PM MST.
I’m psyched once again to be teaching along side my good bro Tripp Lanier, host of the New Man Podcast. We have been invited to teach a teleseminar on dating and relationships with some big wigs in the personal development field.
You’ll get to hear about my own relationship challenges and how I broke through them.
Maestro Conference is a unique platform so you will be in small groups talking to other men from around the world rather than just sit and be a passive listener. It’s super interactive.
I’d recommend checking out their other presenters as well. They have some heavy hitters like Dan Milman, Deepak Chopra, T. Harv Ecker, Decker Cunov and so many other talented gurus. So many awesome calls–go check it out here.
To register for the free call click here.
If you are single, you’ll also want to check out Gaia Soulmates and set up a profile there. Word on the street is that the women far out number the men, so get your profile up and running.
TED Talks - Sam Martin on Manspaces
From TED.
Author Sam Martin shares photos of a quirky world hobby that's trending with the XY set: the "manspace." (They're custom-built hangouts where a man can claim a bit of his own territory to work, relax, be himself.) Grab a cold one and enjoy.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Andrew Parkes - Dear Men: I Struggle . . . with Male Friendships
[As a side note, Andrew and Tripp need to work out who gets to call their site the New Man - both are using the phrase, granted Tripp's is a podcast.]
Taking it all in...
Dear Men: I Struggle… with male friendships.
I struggle with making new friends - sometimes I judge potential friends incorrectly. Other times, I just don’t want to put myself out there - there is a part of me that is shy and withdrawn when meeting people for the first or second time.
I struggle with developing existing friendships – I never seem to get around to doing this despite my best intentions.
I struggle with being ‘inconvenienced’ by a friend or potential friend – if you call me right now to grab a coffee at Starbucks, I will probably say no because I didn’t plan for it in advance (I am working on being more spontaneous.)
I struggle with including friends in things happening in my life – I usually just do it and then think about including people afterwards.
I struggle with putting enough effort into friendships – I don’t seem to make time for friendships unless where we are meeting, when we are meeting, and what we are doing fits into my schedule, under my own terms.
I struggle with staying in touch enough or on a regular basis. I don’t know what a lot of my friends from high school and university are doing right now because I haven’t put in the effort to stay connected with them.
I struggle with friends that keep our relationship at a surface level.
I struggle with the question: ‘How many of my friends would I feel comfortable calling at 3 AM for support if I was in a crisis situation?’
I struggle with this question: ‘How many of my friends would call me at 3 AM?’
I struggle with wondering how many of my friends truly know me.
Above all, I know I need male friendships and that I can be a good friend. I am just not good at them.
Dear Men: I Struggle. And I know you do, too.
Check out his site for more good content, or to contact him for coaching.
I can relate all too well to much of this. I too am not spontaneous, and am more than a little shy (social anxiety kind of shy). So I feel him here.
But I also know that working on developing a friendship, even just one, over the last year has been very good for me. He and I met as trainer and client, but he lost his job at one point and since I liked him, I offered to work out with him from time to time. Now we work out several days a week.
I've seen him get married and have children. If I needed help moving, I could call him and he would do it, even if it sucked.
I don't know about the 3 am call, though - I don't know anyone other than my girlfriend that I would call in that situation. But that has more to do with who I am than with friendships.
But seriously - how do you make and maintain male friendships? Leave a note in the comments, please.
Thu, Oct 8, 2009