Alasdair Plambeck

Where are all the men?

Hello Wild One,

Alasdair here with something that's been on my mind.

The truth is I see very few mature men in our society.

What defines a mature man?

The easiest way is to look at what he serves.

Is he primarily in the business of serving his own ego? That is to say, his own security, status, desires and agendas?

Or does he serve something greater than himself? Has he been initiated into a loftier vision? Does he work for others, for Earth, for Spirit?

THERE ARE MANY GUISES FOR INTELLIGENCE”

ONE PART OF YOU IS GLIDING IN A HIGH WIND STREAM

WHILE YOUR MORE ORDINARY NOTIONS

“.TAKE LITTLE STEPS AND PECK AT THE GROUND.

-RUMI

Age does not a man make. We only have to take a look around at the state of our world to know that. Politics, business, academics, religion…

We all laugh at Michael Scott, the fool and immature boss of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in The Office, I suspect because he’s expressing a truth we experience everyday in our culture:

Immature adolescents recklessly pulling the levers of power with no grander inspiration than how they can serve themselves.

Adolescence, which has its own gifts, is a transitionary stage we are designed to grow beyond. When it becomes a destination (and in our culture, a celebrated one no less) that prevents us from seeing beyond the phantasmagoria of our own egos it threatens the integrity of the entire community. Earth-based cultures and communities everywhere know this.

Our modern industrial consumer-conformist society isn’t interested in making mature adults. Why would it be? Immaturity is wildly more lucrative and mature adults, being life-oriented, actively resist what is destructive to their communities and ecosystems.

Instead, our overculture retards men and glamorizes and celebrates our stunted growth as the height of success—feeding us scraps so we’ll keep pecking at the ground and never look up to realize we belong to the sky.

“EXCESS AIN’T REBELLION

YOU DRINKIN’ WHAT THEY’RE SELLIN’

YOUR SELF-DESTRUCTION DOESN’T HURT THEM

YOUR CHAOS WON’T CONVERT THEM

THEY’RE SO HAPPY TO REBUILD IT

YOU’LL NEVER REALLY KILL IT

EXCESS AIN’T REBELLION

YOU DRINKIN’ WHAT THEY’RE SELLIN’?”

-CAKE, ROCK ‘N ROLL LIFESTYLE

What makes a man?

That is a question I have been asking myself a long time.

For all of my twenties and much of my early thirties I felt like a boy.

I felt insecure in my masculinity. Sometimes I felt this as a sort of unspeakable shame or embarrassment. Sometimes it manifested as confusion, resentment and purposelessness. Other times, as a sort of childish grandiosity and inflated self-importance.

But mainly it was a vague, hard-to-put-words-to sense in my chest, that despite my age, I wasn’t a man. And I had no idea how I might become one.

The boy knows nothing of the man.

The boy must die for the man to be born.

Death makes a man.

Like one kneeling before the axeman, the boy must find a way to let his old head be lopped off. Death is the way for us men. Death is the canal through which we are reborn into our true lives, into our true purpose. Oh how we long for our true purpose! And how terrified we are of it!

A life not about us, but about life itself! But first we must be freed of the shackles that keep us small and find the courage to be crucified by our deepest calling. To know—not believe, but to know deeply beyond a doubt—that our life was never about us.

“THERE ONCE WAS A BOY WHO WAS LOST AND AFRAID,

A DARKNESS HAD COME AND IT GREW EVERY DAY.

HE TRIED AND HE TRIED BUT HE WAS NEVER ENOUGH,

HE RAN AND HE RAN BUT HE COULD NEVER KEEP UP.

HE WAS ANXIOUS AND TIRED ALL OF THE TIME,

HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY HE NEVER FELT UP TO THE TASK,

‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME? WHY DON’T I FIT?’ HE WOULD ASK.

FIRST HE IGNORED THE QUESTION,

PREFERRING TO REMAIN IN A STASIS.

THEN HE PANICKED,

AND SEARCHED FOR ANSWERS IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES.

DO WHAT HE MIGHT THE DARKNESS KEPT KNOCKING,

HE WAS SCARED IT MIGHT SWALLOW HIM BODY AND ALL,

MORE TERRIFIED STILL WAS HE TO HEED HIS OWN CALL.”

-EXCERPT FROM A POEM I WROTE IN 2018

But how does one die?

I unconsciously grappled with this question for all of my twenties—it haunted me as I tried to lose myself through drugs, alcohol, money, work, sex, and high-risk sports.

I sought danger and death, I sought the edges of my existence and the boundaries that might hold me in my desire for a metamorphosis I didn’t know how to bring about.

And through it all, I held tightly to my fantasy that I could do it myself.

“ADOLESCENCE IS THE TIME OF RISK FOR BOYS, AND THAT RISK-TAKING IS ALSO A YEARNING FOR INITIATION.”

-ROBERT BLY

Do you remember how Jon Krakauer captured the attention of a nation when he documented the true story of Chris McCandless in his book Into the Wild?

You know, the boy who burned all his money and set out to the most remote Alaskan wilderness he could reach only to become lost, stranded and sick before dying alone in an abandoned school bus?

I didn’t know in my twenties what I know now: I needed help.

Like blades, men are forged and sharpened by challenge and ordeal, yes, but it is the initiated men who know the ways to guide and quicken that process when the heat of life has melted a boy’s early form into the malleable, raw material that yearns for the skillful shaping of the blacksmith’s hammer.

Men make a man.

It is the community of initiated men who don monstrous masks in the middle of the night and drag the boys away from their wailing mothers and deep into another world entirely—the world of men.

It is the community of initiated men who kill the boy and give birth to the man through ritual, ordeal and often, a symbolic wounding.

It is the community of initiated men, beneath the stars, faces painted and illumined by fire, who teach the newly initiated of their own fire and utter the stories of old that speak of the unspeakable.

In Iron John: A Book About Men, Robert Bly shares a beautiful story of how the Kikuyu men initiate their boys in Africa. The boy is taken away from his mother and is forced to fast for three days. Hungry, thirsty and terrified, he sits in a circle with the men when one of the older men brandishes a knife and opens up his own arm and collects his warm blood in a gourd. The knife and gourd is passed to each man in the circle and they each give their blood. When the bowl arrives arrives at the young man, he is invited to drink it.

In this way, says Bly, the boy learns that nourishment does not only come from his mother, but also from men. And he learns that the knife can be used for many purposes other than violence.

But in our contemporary culture we have lost any such initiations we may have once had. Boys are left to seek it out for ourselves or not at all. And how many other McCandlesses never found it?

Initiation takes trust. Oh, does it take trust! And who would blame our youth for lacking that?

And It takes a certain sort of submission that our uninitiated, adolescent culture resists and admonishes. How I know it! How long I’ve spent fooling myself that I didn’t need anyone else!

And what a fall it took! For me to realize that this false machismo, this stony independence, this hollow strength, that it was just a facade and the honest, plain and simple truth was that like a boy being taken from his mother I was scared!

Scared to reveal myself to another man. Scared to trust another man. Scared to be loved by another man. Scared to love my fellow men. How could I be a man while these fears still ruled me?

Why do indigenous cultures everywhere initiate their boys?

Because an uninitiated man is dangerous and an alienated and disillusioned boy with no options is lethal. We only have to pick up today’s newspaper to know that to be true.

When we look around and see boys with no vision, who cannot imagine anything greater than themselves, we know the men in their lives were absent.

The crisis young males across our country are experiencing so acutely—anger, addiction, nihilism, depression, violence, suicide—it is our crisis too. The tears we never learned to shed. The sirens on the streets. The raping of our Earth. Collectively we cry out for the return of the father.

"WHEN A FATHER AND A SON DO SPEND LONG HOURS TOGETHER…[THE SON’S] CELLS RECEIVE SOME KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT AN ADULT MASCULINE BODY IS. THE YOUNGER BODY LEARNS AT WHAT FREQUENCY THE MASCULINE BODY VIBRATES. IT BEGINS TO GRASP THE SONG THAT ADULT MALE CELLS SING”

-ROBERT BLY

The initiated man has died so that he may truly live. He knows where he belongs. He serves life.