In the meantime, if you’re a man* who feels called to a way of being that’s more about imagination than aggression, more interdependency than separatism, more shared responsibility than scapegoating, more creative sharing than selfish individualism, I want to invite you to gather with me and others for a deep dive into evolved exploration of who we are and can be. We call it the Storyfire retreat, and it takes place in just over six weeks (first weekend of October), near Asheville, NC; all the info is at www.storyfire.org.

And if you’re a woman or find yourself elsewhere in the gender kaleidoscope I’d really welcome your support in encouraging men you know to join us - and to share your perspective on what you want men to know.

Let me know if you want to attend by replying to this email - or just go ahead and register for the retreat. Here are some of the things we heard from guys who joined us at the first Storyfire retreat last year:

Men of all sorts – old and young, straight and gay, bisexual, and other expressions of sexuality, partnered and single, black and white and brown, etc. – coming together to practice and learn and support modes of intimacy and emotional health and well-being; this is how I would describe the weekend, and this is a practice in our community that is desperately needed. At this time in history, it may mean life or death.

This was one of the most meaningful men’s events I have ever been to and I’ve been doing men’s work for close to forty years.

The weekend created a strong sense of community, whereby intimacy was expressed and practiced, which was both encouraging, and also, as it cuts counter to our culture’s notion of masculinity. One of the things I experienced from the weekend was a sense of grief that this sort of intimacy and community and support is rare outside of the retreat setting.

Gender matters, but gender isn’t matter. It’s a story.

That story deserves strong and tender attention (if you want to know more of what I think about that, I’ve written more about it here) - the Storyfire retreat is a step in that direction.

*We welcome all men who are committed to a journey of integrity, creatively and non-violently building a safer and more compassionate world, and who have taken some steps on this journey already.

As good friends put it, we welcome men on all parts of the continuum of gender identity and expression, without prejudice about sexual orientation, living status, whether sexually active or celibate, and everyone for whom labels don’t apply. To you we say “welcome.”

All we ask is that you arrive committed to curiosity, to bringing your own gifts, and to caring with generous respect for the other participants. Minimum age to participate is eighteen years old, but there is no upper age limit.

JOIN THE STORYFIRE RETREAT HERE

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

The Marvel films are generally critic-proof, with rare exceptions; even so, the enormous box office success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, now one of the ten most financially lucrative films of all time, has exceeded expectations. Those statistics must be read through the lens of knowing that movie tickets are more expensive than they’ve ever been, so the top ten films aren’t necessarily the ten that have been seen by the most people. And the near-limitless availability of content really does mean that it is difficult for a movie to be a cultural event: listening to the score for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial yesterday I was reminded that the impact of that film 44 years ago was rare for the time, and rarer now. Christopher Nolan makes films infrequently enough that they can reliably stir up a cultural discourse, and it’s a good thing that Oppenheimerand The Odyssey have made such an impact - companion pieces as they are in an exploration of the philosophy of manhood, aggression, integrity, and war. It would be good if Brand New Day could do the same, because it’s not only one of the most entertaining comic book films, but a genuine step forward in the representation of what it means to be a hero. (Other worthy choices are Iron Man 2, Wonder Woman 1984, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Hulk, Black Panther, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the 1978 Superman, and Joker: Folie à Deux; if you want to go beyond DC and Marvel then we should include the glorious camp of Flash Gordon and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, and the genuine social commentary of RoboCop.)

We pick up Peter Parker (Tom Holland, who I think feels utterly at home in the role) having finally learned how to manage the burden of his gift. Having antennae that pick up any nearby crimes-in-progress can be a huge interruption; but he is mightily helped by developing an app and a police partner (played by the wonderful Liza Colón-Zayas from The Bear, whose busy kitchen and psychological terrain seems a far more stressful working environment than New York law enforcement). Peter still saves the day, but now apparently only once a day; he’s grieving his Aunt May (thankfully Marisa Tomei shows up in dream sequences to reassure him - and us), and he’s trying to navigate a way toward reminding his true love MJ (Zendaya, whose every career choice continues to prove herself to be the actor of her generation) that he exists. Such is the professional risk of being a world-moving hero, for sometimes spells must be cast to make everyone forget who you are; or at least that’s what happened at the end of the last Spider-Man film, No Way Home, which itself was a remarkable reimagining of the myth of redemptive violence, a rare film that asked what villains might actually want after they’ve gotten what they think they needed.

At any rate, the world was saved, but the cost was high: Peter has lost his love and his best friend Ned (Hawaiian actor Jacob Batalon, who plays best friend so well that you might like him to be yours). Hoping that some spark of reminiscence might emerge doesn’t work, and observing MJ with a new boyfriend is salt in the wound. Poor Peter - though this is where the genuine heart and substance of Brand New Day takes flight. Peter’s vulnerability has always been easy to identify with, but it’s often resolved by overcoming it: he saves MJ’s life, they kiss, and all is well. What’s more interesting, because life’s happy endings are usually accompanied by uncertainties or sometimes even catastrophes, is when Uncle Ben dies and Peter blames himself - the microcosm of a heroic calling: to save one person might mean to lose another.

Co-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (with additional input from Justin Kuritzkes) have an ear for the questions young people are facing today; and especially the way in which the dehumanizing manosphere is obsessed with getting rich and ripped. Holland’s Peter is fit enough to be a Men’s Health cover model, but he’s by no means egotistical about it; the movie doesn’t make an alienating distance out of the hero’s physique. Ned is adorably chubby but we’re not asked to laugh at him; Zendaya is positioned by the ridiculous image-making industrial complex as one of the most beautiful women in the world, but in both the scripts she chooses and the things she says in real life I get the sense that she doesn’t care much about superficial notions of the good and the worthwhile. And it’s pretty clear that both Holland and Zendaya (now married in real life, but by no means turning their relationship into clickbait) had a hand in shaping the psychological terrain of the script. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, whose Short Term 12 is one of the best independent films of the century, and one of the best per se about the emotional landscape of teenage and young adulthood, is not only adept at bringing that kind of real-world sensitivity into a story about a guy who can suspend helicopters in mid-air with an organic substance secreted in his arms, but his respect for a higher form of cinematic cadence makes Brand New Day a much more artful, and much less frantic film than most of its kind. Indeed that “of its kind” may be off-base, because I’m not sure the most relevant analog is other comic book hero films, and certainly not Marvel ones. Brand New Day more than most lycra-clad extravaganzas is really a film about being a person. Unlike Bruce Wayne - whose billions give Batman an agency that none of us can emulate; unlike Kal-El/Clark Kent - whose superhuman abilities make him not human enough to learn from (or at least reduces the location of our potential learning to what Superman has to do on those occasions when he must give up his magical powers); unlike Diana, Princess of Themyscira, whose near-immortality means that Wonder Woman can evolve over a much longer period than the rest of us (although then must also lose more than we do), Peter Parker must live in a body and a social context where his web-ility doesn’t help him with the titanic struggles of finding community, overcoming self-doubt, and being loved. Brand New Day gives him two father figures - a sadly underused Bruce Banner/The Hulk along with Frank Castle, also known as The Punisher, driven by vengeance to take down bad guys; Peter/Spider-Man are a brilliant foil to Frank’s aggression - and while (spoiler alert) I wished for a more radical ending, in which Frank accidentally kills Spider-Man, and discovers that the end of violence, uninterrupted by creativity, is always despair. A Marvel film that had the courage to let its protagonist die and have him be replaced by a repentant character now committed to non-lethal heroism would be a Marvel film with the kind of courage that Peter Parker embodies.

I should say also that Brand New Day is one of the great New York films, the first one, really, of the Mamdani era - a city full of color, light, and people bumping into each other without stepping on each other’s toes. Strangely enough, one of the films it makes me think of is Midnight Cowboy, because the central friendship in that New York film aches with need, and Peter and Ned’s relationship is a beautiful evolution in mutual support. The whole point of Brand New Day is for Peter to realize that it is entirely possible to be physically courageous without being belligerent, open-hearted without being naive. It upends the hypermasculinity so loudly proclaimed in the current moment by presenting Peter as exactly the kind of man worth championing. For one breathtaking moment it looks like Peter is going to give flowers to a male friend, a wonderful grace note amidst the wider concern to show that love and power coexist, gender is a story, and being a “real man” is about how to use the power and lack you’ve been given to weave your particular beauty, imagination and daring into a tapestry in which success is measured by acts of service and how much room you make for the legitimate needs of others.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE STORYFIRE RETREAT

An old priest once said to me that his only hope was a return to what he called the hard gospel. To my mind, raised in a culture in which religious fundamentalism often overshadowed the golden, life-giving and revelatory nature of authentic spirituality, his seemed like an unfortunate turn of phrase; so I asked him what he meant.

It’s not that you don’t say fuck

And it’s not that you don’t sleep with your girlfriend before you get married

It’s that you love God and you love your neighbor as yourself

End. Of. Story.

He banged the table with good enough effect that twenty-five years later I can still hear it.

He might have added that the hard gospel doesn’t mean that you coerce others into pretending that they believe what you do, or that you prefer the poisonous swarm of collective ego that manifests in sectarianism or tribalism, and certainly not that you aggress upon people who are not engaged in harmful actions. It is entirely possible to develop a social structure rooted in the laws of love (which quantum physics and theology, biology and poetry seem to tell us are synonymous with the laws of the universe). Geopolitics does not have to be about mutual enmity or even suspicion. It can be about the hard gospel of sacred hospitality: where we call forth the love of others by treating them as we would want to be treated ourselves.

This vision is not gullible, but when offered from a place of making the strong choice to let go of selfishness, separatism, and scapegoating, always willing to protect the vulnerable, and inviting a good measure of the wisdom of serpents along with the gentleness of doves, sacred hospitality is actually a gorgeously sophisticated diving into the truth of what human beings really are. What life really is.

Anyway, back to Homer.

The first question many people are asking about The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s truly epic adaptation of Homer, is how faithful it is to the original. My answer begins with a gentle push back on the premise of the question: how much does it actually matter if something is faithful to a prior text? To call upon another ancient teacher, Hippocrates shifted the common understanding of disease as having physiological rather than otherworldly roots, and we gave his name to an oath that should guide anyone in a position of authority (though it was actually others who coined the idea of do no intentional harm); yet he also believed that illness could be attributed to four humors which don’t actually exist. Relying on what Hippocrates thought is not going to help clear a common cold, not to mention more serious conditions; but extrapolating from the core ethical notion associated with him could serve us well, even if he didn’t write it. There’s value, of course, in getting as close as possible to historical information about the story of Hippocrates, but biographical data doesn’t exhaust meaning.

So it is with The Odyssey, whose “accuracy” I’m not qualified to assess. But I do know something about life, and about movies, and about storytelling, and this movie, about this particular life, deserves sustained attention for what it says about storytelling. I’ve seen it three times in four days, and I’ll see it again, not because I “love” it, but because of what it loves. That beautiful idea, first shared with me by the critic Jeffrey Overstreet, is a good guide to thinking about art generally. This is true even if it’s not clear what the work loves; and in this case The Odyssey more than most films of its scale is eliciting hugely contradictory responses.

If, like me, all you know of the poem is that it’s about Odysseus, king of Ithaca, taking two decades to first fight a war and then get home from it, facing obstacles along the way while his wife fends off suitors who think they’re entitled to her body and their island, that’s all you need to know. Nolan’s version has characters speaking in the vernacular and with US American accents; he overcomes the distance created by the habit of Hollywood epics to have ancient Greeks speak like mid-twentieth century English aristocrats. This method of bringing things down to earth means that the baneful magic of Circe (who in a striking piece of psychodrama turns men into pigs to illustrate the genuine horror of unbridled appetite married to coercive power), the cave-violence of the Cyclops, and the dead emerging from the black sand of Hades feel more real. A film clearly influenced by Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts avoids the borderline camp of those two by making wounds look like they’re actually bleeding, the sea like it’s made of metal, the way it often does.

Some have said that what’s missing in The Odyssey is the presence of the gods. Odysseus is (initially) a skeptic, but Athena (whose words and even gaze seem to be the distillation of Nolan’s vision; played with steely authority by Zendaya, the best actor of her moment) points out that you don’t have to hear God speak in words. The sacred is present in pain, in thunder, and in the most tender moments too. Zendaya’s casting is part of an inclusive representation tapestry Nolan weaves that could be called aesthetic activism of an utterly benevolent kind; and the way her character of Athena is a projection of a human whom Odysseus saw on the worst night of his life - a much worse night for her - is the most morally intense moment in the movie. Casting Elliot Page, a physically slight trans man, as Sinon - the young solider left behind with the Trojan Horse - and whose first words in the film are “A gift” is politically groundbreaking. (Although Page shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of revealing to the mainstream audience that transformation is often not only necessary, but when people choose to share their evolution, it can be an offering of deep, even sacrificial, generosity to others.)

The rest of the company are immersed - Samantha Morton’s Circe is sinister and pitiable; Charlize Theron makes Calypso a broken dream; Himesh Patel as the at-risk best friend of Odysseus carries the projections of those of us who sometimes wonder if we are being led astray; Anne Hathaway gives weight to the lonely empowerment of a queen who knows her throne might actually have nothing holding it up; Tom Holland does coming of age brilliantly; Robert Pattinson is completely believable as a villain motivated by shame; the magnificent Bill Irwin fully present in a very difficult role to make into something other than a caricature; and the absolute standout is John Leguizamo’s blind servant Eumaeus. But Matt Damon anchors the film in one of the all-time great portrayals of ambivalent heroism. This Odyssey is, in the end, a profound treatment of the most important questions human beings must face: who are we, what are we for, how should we treat each other (and ourselves), what stories will we tell?

I can’t easily recall a Hollywood blockbuster in which so much change happens to the protagonist. Nolan is famous for the way time overlaps and re-invigorates itself in his movies - we feel the two decades elapse, turn back, re-start. Odysseus is learning as he goes, and when all is said and done (and trust me, a lot gets done, to a lot of people), like the rest of us he is different but the same. The signature of this Odysseus is to twang his bow before a hunt, to warn a target; he’s embodying the law of Zeus - a prototype for doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. But his commitment to reciprocal welcome is shaky - Odysseus’ impetuousness and unintegrated is seen to cause nothing less than mass killing and the death of his friends. And after twenty years of pillage, the monstrosity of what ensued his failure to follow that law - “turning a fight into a hunt” by pretending the horse that hid murderous intent was actually a present - has become undeniable. The moral injury is enormous; the guilt unbearable. So he gives himself to the sea - to the care of the gods - and lets go of his obsession with control, with winning. This is what we all must do, sooner or later; better if it’s sooner, or at least better if we start sooner - although the grace of truthful storytelling says that it’s also never too late to accept responsibility and try - falteringly - to begin a life of repair.

That’s more optimistic than the ending of this immense, challenging, compelling movie, which laments the collapse of a civilization, and intends to warn the audience about that same potential for our own. The stewardship of a people, of a planet, requires leaders who know how to use swords but refuse to do so in aggression. Cultures can disappear, but songs will still be sung. Truth-seekers will sing that swords are not the heart of life, hospitality should be. Our mythic spiral is supposed to confront us with a warning that when we violate the sacred worth of another, what we’re actually doing is killing God.

I’m really delighted to share our dear friend Jon Warner’s latest essay - an insider view of reflecting on what it might mean to treat ourselves as we would want others to treat us.

Seven-League Boots

For the first time in a long while, I found myself out of work. In the beginning I took it as an opportunity to catch my breath and get my professional bearings straight. As I searched for new opportunities I spent time with my kids, did projects around the house, and worked on my health. But as days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months I began to get nervous. I had many interviews, and many rejections. I had time on my hands in plentiful amounts, but no clear destination. I began to feel like a wanderer in a strange and daunting place. And as my time of unemployment grew, I began to feel lost, and a creeping self doubt became a constant companion. Wandering has always been hard for me. Well, “always” is a strong word. I think as a very young boy I could wander. I remember lazy summer days, the cuffs of my jeans filled with burrs and stickers. My pockets stuffed full of interesting rocks, or string, along with the Old Timer pocket knife my dad gave me. The purpose that filled my heart was to see what was over the hill, at the top of the gully, or across the canal. With dirty hands and mussed hair, I climbed trees and jumped down draws into shallow rivers of runoff from the snow. I felt safe in that space. Ambling through hot days and star-filled nights, knowing my folks were at home, there was dinner on the table, and books and comics to read by my comfortable bed.

I don’t know when I exchanged my pocket full of magic beans for cold, hard cash. I can’t remember the exact date, and I don’t think it happened all at once. I gave up a few beans to take a summer job, to get enough money to go to the movies or buy a couple of Big Macs. Then life thrust its hand into my pockets and took a few more.

Maybe more than a few.

I was flying down the newly paved road in our neighbourhood. The steep incline was thrilling, and the thin skateboard under my sneakers vibrated despite the smooth new layer of asphalt beneath its wheels and trucks. I carved big S-shapes back and forth across the road. Mailboxes flew past in a blur, and I was laughing for the sheer joy of the speed. My hair streamed back behind me; helmets were not even a consideration in those early days of the ’70s. I knew, with the surety of youth, that I wasn’t going to wipe out, that no cars would suddenly appear, that a boy hurtling down a steep road was as impervious to harm as a young Hercules. I shot out of the hill, cutting across the road and into a driveway, letting my momentum carry me down the sidewalk. Friction on my wheels bled the speed from my wild flight, and I eventually had to push, my foot boosting my flagging momentum. I was eager to get home, have a snack, see my brothers, and tell them about the truly excellent ride I’d had on the way.

But I could see from a block away that something was wrong. People were running up to my house and back again. Our neighbour’s old Ford pickup was at the curb, doors open. My oldest brother was being carried into the truck, the leg of his jeans torn and soaked in blood. It was on his hands too, and his face was terribly white. My neighbour’s face was frozen in a rictus of fear, all the colour drained away down the cords of his neck.

“What happened, what happened?” I yelled as I abandoned my skateboard and sprinted to the truck.

“I’m okay, Jonny. Mr. Pope is going to take me to the hospital. Tell Mom.” The door slammed closed and they sped away. I watched, numb and uncomprehending. Tears streamed down my face. Mrs. Pope had her arm around me, but I couldn’t really feel it.

“Matt is going to be all right,” she was saying. “He just cut himself on the bumper of our car.” My eyes followed her pointing finger by default. I saw their old Chevy, the colour of pale green I would later associate with port-a-potties and mental hospitals. The old chrome bumper was dripping red, the rust spots camouflaged by the spray and spatter of my brother’s blood. How could this be? We don’t get hurt; we don’t bleed beyond the scrapes and cuts that come with a boy’s life. Yet my mind kept re-playing the scene, unrepentant and real. Matt’s pant leg soaked through. Blood everywhere, more than I had ever seen. How could one person bleed so much and not die?

The question pulled more tears from me, and I cried in earnest.

The comfort and kindness of neighbours held me up until my parents arrived. My brother came with them, his knee stitched and heavily bandaged. And the grown-ups were right: Matt was okay. He carried a thick, twisting line of scar tissue forward, but he healed. Our wounds eventually close, mended, leaving their marks. My skateboard gathered dust in the garage for the rest of that summer. I had learned a terrible secret, a lesson in danger that lived close, that simmered in the very pot we ate our eager, savoury summer meals from.

That lesson only gained power later, a few summers on, as my brother’s life drained away completely. The rules of loss sank deep into the soil of my being, far deeper than anything else that had penetrated my young psyche. No one is safe. We all get harmed in this life, this tale told by our unreliable narrator. And even when you think you’re safe, that is probably a thin veneer over a yawning chasm.

Step

Carefully

The magic beans left to me had lost much of their lustre. I traded them for lotus leaves, and that kept the monsters and demons away for a while. After that, I don’t recall wandering into hills and valleys in carefree adventure. I knew that when things get bad, they can get unbearably bad. I traded my Seven-League Boots for something more sensible and sought safety in being part of big things; organizations and companies that could weather storms and shelter me from the harsh light that shines down on the good and the wicked alike. That became long chapters of my life.

The problem with that kind of safety is that chapters inevitably end. Life changes as we age and grow, and the thread of our narrative takes unexpected turns. When that structure is pulled down around us, when our enemies lay the land barren, sowing it with the salt of our own tears, what do we do? I dithered. I wanted safety and was unwilling to put on my old sneakers and venture into the hills; not wanting the scrapes, the thorns, the falls. I had forgotten the thrill of jumping downhill and splashing through rivulets of cold snowmelt—the joy of speeding along a path, wind in my hair, laughing at simple exhilaration. In the forgetting there is a great loss, a diminishing of the spirit that is agony itself.

Reaching into my pockets, I hope to find a magic bean or two among the crumbs of lotus and the ragged tears in the cloth of me. I am reminded of Shel Silverstein’s invitation that has followed me down the corridors of my life:

“If you are a dreamer, come in

If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,

A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...

If you’re a pretender, come sit by the fire

For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.

Come in!

Come in!”

Closing my eyes, I can almost feel that wind on my face, hear the growl and scrape of those wheels as my arms fly out and, once again,

I

Fly

With over 20 years of leadership experience in the games industry, Jonathan Warner is a storyteller and seasoned studio leader passionate about crafting compelling narratives. His work has reached millions of players worldwide, and he is proud to have been nominated for a BAFTA for Toy Story 3: The Game. Jonathan is continually driven by a love for storytelling and a curiosity for new challenges in the gaming industry. He lives in British Columbia, Canada with his wife, daughters, and dog.

Perhaps the most frequent tragedy is almost the simplest: entire lives obsessed with fending off death, and in the process never experiencing life at all. The paradox at the heart of our existence: to truly live there is no substitute for becoming more fully aware of death.

We’ve created entire cultures - economies, religions, nations - dedicated to pretending that accumulation is the goal of existence, and that somehow having more “things” (not just material goods, but the gut pleasures that derive from feeling superior) will not only satisfy, but keep us alive forever.

This is not just a lie, but it’s actually a form of insanity, denying as it does the sole thing that we all know will happen to us.

Life is not supposed to be about accumulation, or domination, retribution, isolation, purification, or victimization for that matter. Those are all stories that humans have evolved in vain hopes of bringing about peace and security. But we know they don’t work: what we accumulate rots if it is not shared, the price of believing we must dominate others is a corroded soul and the need to constantly protect from enemies, retribution-based revolution simply puts us in the place of the people we were previously oppressed by, isolation is the psychological equivalent of locking ourselves in a freezer and hoping we’ll be warm enough, the end of purification is that nobody will ever be good enough for us, and living the victimization narrative keeps us trapped in our wounds without ever letting them become scars.

The wisdom of the ages, the experience of creativity toward the common good, and the insights of everything from quantum physics to slam poetry really does point to the truth that getting out from under these stories of selfishness, scapegoating, and separation doesn’t require a change of circumstances, but a change of narrator.

Who is telling your story?

Who is telling you?

Do you believe that stories shape the limits (and ambition) of what’s possible?

Do you ask yourself what stories you tell?

Do you know if they are the most true, or most helpful versions available?

These are among the most significant questions we can ask.

They are part of the answer to the need for shelter without which we cannot survive. But true shelter is far more than four walls and a roof. Shelter, refuge, sanctuary, home: who I am, where I am, where I’m from, what I am, how I am. All stories. Mostly unconscious. Often lies.

Transforming the stories of selfishness, separation, and scapegoating requires a conscious commitment to a different lens. I call it the lens of liberation and reconciliation, imagining a story laboratory in which we can experiment with better, more truthful, more helpful stories. Another word for that story lab is, quite simply, life.

I am not merely a more or less economically productive individualised unit, but a co-creative participant in the tapestry of being.

I am not reducible to membership in a national or ethnic group, and I must reject any “ism” whose tenets cause others to suffer.

No matter who you are, the invitation is the same: there is nothing as important as the commitment to love. It must not be an afterthought, a leftover, something we can consider at the end of the day, at the weekend, when we’ve retired, when politics changes, when we’re grandparents, when we feel better, when we’re less ashamed, when we’ve got “enough” money in the bank, when we get a new job, when our bodies heal, when the time is right. So many people near the end of their lives express profound regret in this regard: they did not show more love to others; they did not let themselves be loved; they did not love the world; they did not love themselves.

There’s no blame here, and certainly no intended shaming. Part of the challenge of being alive in a world where stories of individualism and “us against them” assert themselves so loudly is that models for radical self-acceptance, courageous love, and deep inclusion are accordingly less audible. The paradox of self-giving love is that it doesn’t often issue a press release when it comes to town. I understand the impulse to humility, and there’s a way in which doing good deeds in public can be more ego than encouragement. But I think one aspect of the current crisis in how power is being exercised is permission to risk appearing arrogant or unbecoming.

This is not a time for timidity about the things that the most enlightened and bravest people teach us. This is a time to wholly commit to being truly permeated by wisdom, allowing ourselves to be made whole through opening to an experience of love that might be worthy of the name. That can happen this very second, and it will take a lifetime. But as it happens, it will expand my circle of self beyond the narrow constructions and temporary gratifications of separatism, in exchange for the spectacular-ordinary/ordinary-spectacular experience of the interwovenness of all things, from the coffee cup on the table to the recesses of interstellar space, from the pain of the world to the pain in my soul, from the magic of moonlit kisses to the mundane-miraculous act of helping neighbors build a barn. Or a peace process.

This not a time for timidity about such things.

An old acquaintance used to say that “sectarianism is like piss down the inside leg. Initially it gives a nice warm glow, but after a while you don’t want to sit in it.”

That’s a harsh analogy, to be sure, but an appropriate one.

We rarely use equally strong analogies for love, with similar words like “kindness”, “mercy”, and “compassion” often relegated to the realm of the superficial and weak. One of the solutions is to beef up not only how we embody their meaning, but in how we speak about them. I think we should risk building poetry rollercoasters, co-authoring authentic and audacious metaphors for love that live up to the brazen precision and sharpness, courage and creativity of those who have most fully lived.

The kind of love that is willing to bathe the broken body of a stranger.

The kind of love more interested in sharing than stockpiling.

The kind of love that doesn’t hide from suffering, but helps carry the suffering of others.

The kind of love that offers itself not only to those others, but to itself.

The kind of love that recognizes that *my* people are *all* people.

One of the most captivating principles comes from another friend, who says “Because oppositional energy always recreates itself, the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”

Note that he doesn’t say we should never oppose anything - just that we should be aware that even with the most necessary or even most honorable oppositions there will always be the risk of fueling the thing we are facing. One extraordinary synonym for the alternative is the truest protest is presence. Before you quote me on that, I should say it comes from the wisdom of the crowd, not me. But that in itself is another practice of the better - we’re all in this together, and where a phrase originates is often less relevant than whether or not it is incarnated. The truest protest is presence. But how to presence the presence?

I’m glad you asked. It’s the simplest and most complicated thing, it’s ancient and brand new, it’s common and cosmic, it’s everywhere you go and cannot be hidden from, although most of us are ignoring it, choosing stones instead of bread. Sometimes we’re eating the stones, sometimes we’re throwing them, sometimes we’re tying ourselves down with them. But that can stop, right now. Here’s how. Bear in mind that it’s completely straightforward and kaleidoscopically complex at the same time, it will change your life overnight and never be complete; and that I’m not an expert but an amateur which is better, because true amateurs are true lovers. Ok - here we go, a breathtaking and totally ordinary, entirely unoriginal but deliciously creative mantra for how to live:

Whether you believe you’re made in the image of God (a word that cannot contain its meaning) or come from stardust, or both, live in reverence toward the Source of all being, and let that reverence overflow into fierce and tender care for every one you meet, starting with yourself.

Let yourself be spellbound, in untamed awe before the enormity of existence, and let that awe transcend your tendency to treat life as a game, a competition, an exhaustion. Let yourself be reawakened daily by two Suns: the one in the heavens and the one at the consecrated core beneath everything. Know that beneath all anger is fear and beneath all fear is love, and that learning how to tell the story more truthfully will lead you to see, to give, and to receive such love as you have only previously dreamed, or mourned that you might never experience.

Don’t treat each day as if it were your last, but as if you were seeing things for the first time.

And beloved people, please hear me: while it has always been the case that the foundation of life is to love, right now one of the things we need the most is for more of us to say so.

These ideas resonate across the gender spectrum, and I know many women and folks who experience their gender beyond the binary who are also leading in service to the common good. But because one of the other pressing needs in our society is for men to experience healing for their wounds and the redemption of unhealthy masculinity, transformed into ways of being that are good for everyone, we’re convening guys who want those same things, at a retreat on the first weekend of October. The details are at www.storyfire.org. If it calls to you, or you know a man who might feel called to it, please share.

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The catastrophe of humans dominating each other

Believing they could “possess” each other, or “own” land,

Enclose it.

Denying the true stardust-sacred substance

Of what we really are.

*

In terms local to where I’m from, the catastrophe of making St Patrick into a lucky charm whose most notable accomplishment is turning the Chicago River green.

Instead of knowing him as the first outsider to Ireland who called us Irish human.

Never mind the catastrophe of disregarding the holy bewilderment of knowing that Patrick had escaped indentured servitude to flee Ireland, but returned out of love for her people.

The catastrophe of what was then done in his name to eradicate Indigenous tradition and spiritual practice.

The catastrophe of acting like he is the only saint of Ireland, conveniently forgetting Brigid, whose mysticism and poetry might have been a more hospitable balance to Patrick’s perhaps more dogmatic religion.

The catastrophe of an Empire founded on the idolatry of nationalism, and of nationalism infected by the idolatry of supremacism, and of supremacism addicted to the idea that it is not enough to win, but that everyone else must lose.

By the time I showed up, the story of Ireland most loudly told was the story of a fight, and we were coerced into taking sides, even if we could glimpse, however faintly, that our opponent might have a point.

But that story was a lie, or at least incomplete to the point that its telling distorted our very lives.

Thank God some people tried to steal the truth into the story.

Thank God I fell among some of those thieves.

Thank God, and Patrick, and Brigid, and Mairead Maguire and Ciaran McKeown and May Blood and Seamus Heaney and Sinéad O’Connor and Paul Durcan and Ruth Patterson and John Dunlop and Lesley Carroll and Alan McBride and Monica McWilliams and John Hume1. Thank God there were rogue elements, subversive agents, tricksters who told another story.

People who signaled that the catastrophe of sectarianism could be, would be transcended by a better way of meeting the legitimate need for belonging; that doctrinal zealotry could be, would be transcended by a better way of meeting the legitimate need for something to believe in; that life-denying traditionalism could be, would be transcended by a utopian vision that not only meets the legitimate need for stewarding the parts of the past that offer genuine stability but also imagines a future you’d actually want to step into.

Our catastrophe was

ideologically extremist

religiously blinkered

culturally narrow.

The answer is not their opposite.

It is do all these things - ideas, religion, culture - better.

So call me a

fundamentalist

tribalist

reactionary regressive…

If by fundamentalist we mean taking the stewardship of the things that make for the common and cosmic good, and the shared traditions of all wisdom teaching: to devote ourselves to love, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, to be a matter of life and death…

If by tribe we mean all humans who have ever lived, are alive today, or will be in the future2…

If by reactionary we mean repudiating the

cultural norms

religious poison

and political pretensions

that deny the very realities of what life actually is…

If by regressive we mean a clear focus on the mythic truth that where we are going to is largely shaped by where we’re coming from, and that we need to discern between the integrated mycelium and the fraudulent separatism.

And there’s good reason why one of the wisest contemporary poets says, in notes that could be consciously intended to be about the green place I’m from,

We have got to get back

(and forward)

(and up)

(and down)

To the garden.

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This is an elaboration on Part 1 and Part 2; I’m planning one more part next week, about the center of it all.

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1. A Foundation and an Endless Ending

Life is an interweaving of the common and the cosmic. Human beings are not merely witnesses but participants in a 13 billion year old universe (and counting). The very substance of our bodies is made from solar grains; the very matter of our matter truly - let’s say it - matters. The wisdom traditions tell us that we are made also in the image of the sacred.

Some might want to pit these stories against each other - but the most integrated, wisest, human way to describe things holds that both are true.

It turns out that Stardust and Sacred is one of the most practical ways to describe what lies at the foundation of who we are.

If you let that story really permeate, really season you, it can change everything about what you think a human life is for. Not success, nor dominance, nor even happiness - although joy is real, and worth pursuing.

But life is better understood as a pilgrimage — a sacred journey of discovering your unique gifts and learning how to give them, and discerning your real needs and having the courage to seek communities that can genuinely meet them; all held in a web of the common and the cosmic, which has existed for billions of years before you emerged, and will hold the legacy of what you experience and share while you’re here, long after you’ve gone wherever we go to next.

At the ethical heart of it all is this beautiful notion: your life is not worth any more or any less than anyone else’s.

We are recipients of, interwoven into, and share in responsibility for the common and cosmic good. The common runs from the most ordinary and practical (food, shelter, safety, belonging), through politics, ecology, and the largest stories we tell about why we’re here. What I refer to as the cosmic could also be called the metaphysical ground of things, the universe understood both materially and as a living song. However you understand the word God is at the beginning and end of both. Nothing is too small to matter, nor too large to ignore.

2. Bring your gifts, and ask for what you need.

The principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” is usually treated as a merely “economic” idea, but is actually a pretty good description of what a fully human life and community looks like. Down mountains flow rivers for valleys to drink; we are all both rivers and valleys. In the world of what I’m calling elemental pilgrimage, we share from what we have, and we receive what we genuinely need. Both are sacred acts of participation in something larger than yourself.

The radical claim underneath transformative men’s work is that overcoming patriarchy is not merely about rebooting how power is shared between competing groups. It is about recovering something true about what humans are, and what we are for.

When men do the truest inner work, they don’t just become better partners or fathers. They become more fully themselves. And a man who is more fully himself — who knows his gifts, honors his needs, and understands his place in the constellation of life — is not a threat to women or to anyone else across the gender spectrum.

He is a gift to them, just as they are to him.

That is the common and cosmic good. That is the elemental pilgrimage.

Whether or not you know it, this is the journey you are already on.

3. We Are Already Stars

It is not merely a poem to say that you are made of stardust. The iron moving through your blood right now was forged in the dying heart of a star that collapsed billions of years before this planet existed. You are not like the cosmos. You are made from it: ancient and present; only here for a moment, but unrepeatable; everything, everywhere, all at once.

The great traditions hold that you are also something more than matter: your image holds the imprint of the sacred. You have always been both things: stardust and beloved, elemental and particular, as old as the universe and fully known within it.

The truly inhabited life is a pilgrimage of discovering what you, specifically, are here to give; mingled with the equally important, often harder, frequently avoided work of admitting what you genuinely need, and finding people who can help you receive it.

Every person shows up with unique gifts, not given for your benefit alone, but given through you, for everyone.

Every person arrives with real needs, and to name them is not weakness but an honest accounting that can not only help get your needs met, but give permission to everyone else to name theirs.

When given with integrity, nobody’s gifts outrank anyone else’s; and nobody’s needs count for more or less than anyone else’s. While this is a kind of utopian thinking not always embodied, it is also not a ungraspable fantasy. It is, instead, a description of what is actually true about human beings. The story of us is a story of competing visions, one of which violates who we really are, and has been doing so for a very long time.

4. The Story That Has Been Killing Us

By creating hierarchies around gender, race, class, the accident of geography, the name of the family you were born into or the country that drew a border around you, the myth of conquest determines whose pain and gifts will be taken seriously and whose will be disregarded.

Patriarchy is conquest over gender, suppressing women’s gifts, denying women’s needs, and treating women’s lives as at best instrumentally valuable, and at worst disposable.

But patriarchy has also damaged men. It teaches boys that most feelings are dangerous. It gives them illegitimate power-over others while stealing their humane power-with themselves. It tells them that aggression is the main - or only - strength that counts.

This leaves so many men with isolated lives, which no matter how they look from the outside feel like cages.

Such men are performing a role rather than inhabiting a life. The only prizes available in that game turn out to be hollow.

It does not have to be this way, for another story has also been lived across many cultures and eras. It’s a quieter, sturdier, and - at least in the myths we can choose to live by - perhaps older than the story of conquest itself.

This story honors that every person arrives bearing irreplaceable gifts meant to be shared, and every person carries genuine needs the community is responsible for helping meet. In this story, belonging is not a reward for performance, but an inheritance. The name we are giving for a way of experiencing this belonging is elemental pilgrimage.

The conquest story promises belonging, safety, meaning, and identity, but delivers counterfeit, hoarded, festering, defended versions of all four.

The elemental human pilgrimage actually provides warm belonging, true safety, profound meaning, and sacred identity to everyone, without the violence of pre-determining who counts (or even that we should be “counting” at all).

5. A Path

The challenges men face in mental health, loneliness and lack of connection, suicide, and purposelessness are real, and there are two primary responses.

The first is the manosphere: damaged men offering anger, hierarchy, and someone to blame. This is the conquest story disguised as liberation, filling a genuine vacuum in a destructive way.

The second gathers itself in therapy, consciousness-raising, and conversations about aggressive masculinity. It can be genuinely valuable. But it is incomplete when it appears to treat manhood as the disease rather than the wound, or when it offers men personal growth but treats them as siloed individuals rather than initiating into the truth of our essential interdependency with people, planet, and the Spirit.

What is needed is a third path, including the following:

Real inner work. Not merely processing feelings, but an honest reckoning with fear, shame, grief, and pain that actually helps us discover ourselves as more human than machines. It is not merely “personal” or individual, but interweaves shared stewardship of the village of community, bio-region, nation and planet.

Connection is foundational. Most men have never been welcomed or initiated into deep friendship, emotional honesty, or asking for help. On the contrary, many men were conditioned out of these possibilities: they deserve healing as well as patience as they navigate what for many will be an almost entirely new way of being.

Elemental also means it must be affordable and accessible. The work must not be restricted only to men with money, men with cultural permission, and men who already speak its language.

Race and class are taken seriously. People live within specific tributaries of the conquest story involving - among other things - race, ethnicity, and economic resources. The work has to acknowledge this rather than asking men to squeeze into a framework built around someone else. The pioneers of transformative men’s work deserve respect and gratitude for their enormous efforts; but they do not own the table or the room where the work must happen.

Gay, bisexual, and trans men are not merely “welcomed”, but such men are understood to be irreplaceable contributors to leading the work. The view from the edge has always been able to see the center more clearly than the center sees itself - but gay, bisexual, and trans men matter in and of themselves. Authentic men’s work needs no deeper reason to acknowledge the exclusion (and worse) of such men, repair the damage done, and revel in the rainbow of Beloved Community in which everyone belongs. The ambition of the elemental pilgrimage - at the risk of over-repetition - is nothing less than no-one’s gifts left uncultivated, and no-one’s needs left unmet: an ineffable human symphony.

It takes spirituality seriously without requiring a particular creed. Hunger for something larger than individual ambition is not pathological: it is the yearning for existential wonder, embodied mysticism, lived relationship with mystery. Authentic transformative men’s work does not shy away from the spiritual.

It understands that personal change and the wider world are fearfully and wonderfully entangled. The goal is not only a man with integrated emotions: it is a man whose inner work flows into (and out of) how he uses whatever power he holds: at home, in society, in the world: even for how his life touches that of the strangers he will never meet.

The fundamental premise of this kind of men’s work is simple: men do not need to be diminished to become good. They need to be genuinely met in their depth, in their hunger for meaning, in their real struggles; and then they need to be decisively invited into something larger than ego, tribalism, or competition.

This is less immediately cathartic than weaponized anger or macho myth-making; but it is closer to a life worthy of the name.

6. Men’s Work is one thread, not the whole tapestry.

Many women have been engaged in self-examination, communal healing, and building just communities for a long time. This has often happened without recognition, under the weight of the very systems men are only now beginning to question. Transformative women’s work is not a parallel track to transformative men’s work. It is central, necessary, and in many traditions much further developed. Transformative men’s work honors this; it challenges and nurtures men to learn how to show up as worthy companions rather than grateful students or defensive strangers.

The same is true for the work happening among trans and nonbinary people, and anyone who experiences their gender as something more complex or nuanced than the restrictive stories often told about what gender is. These voices should not be peripheral to a conversation about gender and healing. They/we often see most clearly what genderism has been doing to all of us, because they/we have had to wrestle with it consciously in ways many of us have never been forced to. Their/our experiences are not supplementary, because the elemental reality of human beings was not rooted in a gender binary to begin with. The elemental is much more spacious than that. They/we are essential.

There is still value in men gathering as men: specific needs, wants, griefs and joys surface more easily among people who share the shape of a struggle. Some things are easier to name in company with those who know the same territory.

But such gatherings must be understood as a subset of humanity, not a destination. This is preparation for showing up more fully in the full human community — with women, across the gender spectrum, with the young and the old, with those not yet born and those long dead whose choices still contribute to the rocky and smooth places we inhabit.

The elemental pilgrimage moves toward full human community. A permanently inward-focused men’s circle is a binge-drinking session at the well of life, in which the water will turn sour. The true destination is not just the men in the circle, but everyone - and everything - else.

The point of Men’s Work may very well be that one day we would not need it anymore.

7. The Four Pillars

There is room for everything good - and of course different Men’s Work communities will have different needs and emphases. But we believe that the men’s work that will matter most rests on four commitments.

First: Do the inner work and build the community. Genuine psychological depth — shadow work, emotional literacy, healing from trauma — without either treating masculinity itself as the disease, or conceiving of the endgame as nothing more than a “better” masculinity. It means showing what real friendship is, modeling honest conversation, showing how to ask for help without the ask feeling like humiliation. It means sitting in circles, breathing together, speaking what is most true: from the terrifying to the magnificent.

Second: Engage honestly with power. Conscious, ongoing, uncomfortable engagement with power — in all its forms, always in service of the common good, always prioritizing the most vulnerable — is not a partisan contamination of men’s work, and certainly not a distraction from it. It is part of the heart of authentic men’s work. To ask how you can serve from your gifts rather than dominate from your fears; to discern the relationship between the personal and the communal, the individual and the social, the nourishing and wounding impacts you have (whether intended or not), what you have honorably received and what you have taken (consciously or otherwise) is not diminishment. It is liberation. And it turns out to be, for many men who finally try it, a deep source of joy - and empowerment.

Third: Learn the real story of gender. Not the narrow binary handed down by the conquest story, but the full, astonishing kaleidoscope that ancient wisdom and contemporary knowledge both gesture toward. Before we are gendered, we are human; after we have experienced authentic initiation we will be more human still. What some of us call “masculine” and “feminine” are better understood as elemental capacities every person carries: Focus and Expansion. Heart and Action. Fierce and Tender. Clarity and Spontaneity. Structure and Flow. Moving Forward and Welcoming In. Logos and Eros. Building and Dissolving. Yin and Yang. The work is learning which of these you have been trained to suppress, what it costs you and others to keep suppressing them, and how to dive into the genuinely creative tension of being a person in a body in a world that tells stories about gender which can imprison or liberate. You can choose which stories to kindle, and which to quench.

Fourth: Make the work available to everyone. Sliding-scale pricing, peer-led circles with a good dose of elder wisdom, presence in community centers and barbershops and faith communities and prisons. Honest engagement with race, class, sexuality, and culture, not as complications to manage but as essential textures of the work itself pointing toward Beloved Community. No one should be left outside because they cannot afford it, or do not speak the language, or do not fit the assumed demographic.

8. Growing Down as Well as Up

This work will ask men to grow down as well as up.

Not only toward vision and achievement and reaching higher — but down, into roots, into the body, into grief, into joy, into the earth. It moves toward the generations that came before and the generations that will come after. It conveys the knowledge that you are not the first person to sit with this struggle, and you will not be the last, and that being held by that larger story is not weakness but wisdom.

It will ask men to take seriously the matters of life and death that we call politics, economics, culture, ecology. The outer world is not a distraction from the inner work. The outer world is (partly) what the inner work is for.

It will ask men to face authoritarianism, including the authoritarianism that sometimes lives inside us with creative, courageous, costly leadership that understands service as power toward the good. That kind of leadership can indeed attract men who are currently hypnotized by outwardly macho but inwardly terrified ways of being. Some men are so afraid of their own vulnerability that they sometimes literally harm others because they cannot tolerate difference, cannot tolerate the idea of sharing power, cannot tolerate the presence of someone whose freedom in their own differences feels like a threat.

Having been shaped by many of the same forces, we do not hold such men in contempt. We recognize them, and we are offering them a different way.

9. The Elemental Pilgrimage

The word I keep returning to is elemental.

We are literally elements. Carbon, iron, calcium, oxygen dancing with each other over billions of cosmically-guided years into the temporary yet irreplaceable form that is you.

But our elemental nature is also true at every other level of meaning.

Philosophically: elemental means belonging to reality, prior to any human power arrangement or story about it. Conquest is not elemental but a story.

Spiritually: elemental carries the weight of what sacred tradition points toward: fire, water, breath, ground, both literally and poetically understood. The spiritual not as something supernatural interrupting the natural, but as a deeper truth about nature.

Politically: the elemental pilgrimage grounds radical egalitarianism (the conviction that no life is worth more than any other) in something deeper than electoral aspirations: but what is simply (and beautifully) true.

Pilgrimage conveys the fact that this is not an end point, and the history of authentic pilgrimage tells us that it is a choice to which all of us are invited.

10. The Point Is Beloved Community, Fierce and Gentle

We are called toward each other by the elemental nature of what we are, by the common and cosmic good, and by the specific people in front of us.

M/We. The self and the community, the inner and outward journey are held in the same breath. The inner journey and the outward one, common and cosmic.

Not men alone. Women’s work and men’s work and the work of everyone who lives more truthfully in the full spectrum of human possibility are not competing projects but tributaries, all flowing toward the same river.

Intergenerational mutual mentoring: the young and the old hold space for each other, with each generation offering what the others cannot give themselves. All the gifts and all the needs of all the generations are recognized and honored.

Vocations of service with the common and cosmic good: the most ordinary and practical things, and the largest questions of how human societies should be organized are understood as sacred.

The practices are simple and ancient: breathing together, sitting in circles, telling the truth about our lives, learning to receive as well as give.

The vision is boundless.

The commitment is total, or else what’s the point? To live for the truth that every life counts equally. To give for it. To sacrifice when necessary. And, at times, to protect the vulnerable even at great personal cost.

11. Who You Really Are

Through fire and darkness, through the slow and violent and improbable emergence of complexity, the universe has been in motion for thirteen billion years. It has produced, among other things, you.

With your specific damage and your specific gifts, your unmet needs and your unrealized possibilities. Your life, which has never existed before and will never be again. Woven into the common and cosmic good, so that you can experience life itself, and the rest of us share in receiving your gifts and meeting your needs. You deserve to take your life seriously.

That is not merely an inspirational quote.

It is also a responsibility.

An Important Note: I am profoundly grateful for the influence of many people and communities who have mentored, challenged, and supported my process of trying to discern a meaningful contribution to the future of men’s work. Chief among these people is Brian Ammons, along with the Mankind Project, and innumerable artists, psychologists, and healers (clergy, therapists, writers). What I’m writing here cannot be said to have been written by me alone - and it is, of course, not a comprehensive prescription. It will have blind spots, its emphases may not be yours, and I obviously don’t even know everything about what I know, never mind not knowing what I don’t know. So I welcome your feedback in the comments. The treasure at the end of this all is a world in which everyone lives in interdependence with people, ecosystem, and spirit; creatively from their gifts, and with the sustenance of having their needs met with dignity, honoring the past, and leaving a legacy of, quite simply, the kind of love that cannot be reduced to sentiment. A love that feels more like devotion, gravity, courage, creativity, service, and mutual reverence. I’ll write more about that in Part 4.

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If you feel called to gather in person to explore and ultimately embody these ideas, come to www.storyfire.org

The Challenge and the Invitation

Authentic men’s work is an invitation to enter another world1.

One that existed long before any of us got here, and will continue to evolve.

In which every human life matters equally, and the ecosystem, planet, and universe are tended - and tend us.

It is an invitation to imagine our lives as both stardust2 and sacred3,

Woven into a miraculous web of common and cosmic good4.

Where you can bring what you have, and ask for what you need

Your wounds can be healed, and your calling clarified to co-create a safer, more compassionate, more beautiful, more alive world

To tell stories that are true but may not have “come true” yet, because we haven’t told them enough. Or lived them.

The Purpose of Men’s Work

To learn and share together how to live and tell our stories and the stories of the world we find themselves in, in the most truthful, creative, and generative ways.

Four Pillars of the Work

1. Me and We and Everything Else

The most authentic men’s work will embrace and initiate into lived wholeness5, which can be defined as the experience of knowing yourself to be a bearer of gifts and needs, woven as an individual into a community of people and planet, held by Spirit: a Me and a We and an Everything Else that both needs you to show up fully, and has the answer to your needs too. A men’s circle that turns inward and stays there has confused a hospital with a village: the destination is the whole symphony of humanity.

2. Gender and Other Stories We Tell

Gender matters, but gender isn’t matter. It’s a story6. The work will take seriously the wisdom of history, psychology, religion, culture, and all authentic stories about what it is to be human7. In men’s work this must include the study of gender. When taken seriously, this can be liberating for everyone.

3. Who Belongs to Men’s Work?

The best men’s work is socioeconomically accessible, culturally relevant, and transformative across difference — taking seriously that race, ethnicity, class, and ability shape what being a man means in different communities. These differences aren’t complications to manage, but a fundamental part of the work itself.

We should transcend the limitations of the concept of being “welcoming”, for welcome assumes an ownership of the work that does not exist. Also some folks from a vast range of backgrounds are already part of the work, often isolated, and at personal cost. They should be co-leading it. What’s needed instead of “welcome” is intentional openness — knowing that whoever shows up will reshape the work, and that this is the point. There is no universal masculinity to initiate people into, only the blend of shared and different experiences of what cultures have told us it means to be men.

People who carry identities other than the most culturally privileged must be present at the foundation, not added later.

And while some folks will always feel called to meet in cohorts8, there should be no identity-based, financial, physical, or cultural barriers to receiving the truest gifts this work offers. That may sound idealistic, but men’s work should always keep prioritizing removing barriers to access.

4. Nothing is Not Political

Authentic men’s work will commit to conscious engagement with power in all its forms, for the sake of the common good, prioritizing the needs of the vulnerable. It must take “politics”, “religion”, “culture”, and “economics” seriously. This is not political partisanship, but simply standing in the tradition of all authentic humanness.

Not to engage with power, including elected power, is an abdication of integrity based on the false notion that being a person is the same thing as being an island9.

We all have and we all lack some power: the challenge to bring what we have and ask for what we need is not a political imposition, but an invitation to a life worthy of the name, where loving our neighbors as ourselves is both a responsibility, and a treasure worth seeking more than anything else10.

The Responsibility of Leading Men’s Work

1. Know Yourself. Do your own work of growth, healing, accountability, vision, and service to and with the common and cosmic good. Don’t do it alone - consciously make yourself accountable to peers and mentors, across the gender spectrum11.

2. Imagine a world beyond “Men’s” Work. A man is not fully healed, indeed he is not fully human, until equitably integrating with the presence, gifts, and needs of women, and people across the entire spectrum of gender12.

3. It takes more than a loud voice13. Integrated archetypes or balanced roles: leadership as service, an open-hearted range of emotions across the spectrum from anger to joy to grief, courageous and compassionate action, resourcing the imagination toward what the room (or the world) needs, and conscious stewardship of life (yours, mine, ours, the ecosystem) are both the result and the path toward it.

4. Seek Wisdom, not only knowledge or “tools”. This work requires us to grow down as well as up.

Next time I’ll share more about the how, what I’m calling an elemental pilgrimage.

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Below is the first part of a new manifesto, as it were, offered here with a request for feedback to help shape it - point out blindspots and suggest refinements. Part 2 and Part 3 are here. If you feel called to gather in person to explore and ultimately embody these ideas, come to www.storyfire.org

Note: A Definition of “Men’s Work”: communities, guides, and paths that lead men into honest self-encounter with wounds, healing, and a life sharing in the common and cosmic good. Organizations doing this work in the US include the ManKind Project, Illuman, Sacred Sons, and A Call to Men; offering men the possibility of being truly seen, supported, and held accountable by other men, and welcomed into a brotherhood that asks something real of them. At their best, these communities are not an end in themselves, but point to something we could call integrated authentic personhood, interdependent with all people across the gender spectrum.

The Challenge and the Invitation

Authentic men’s work is an invitation to enter another world.

One that existed long before any of us got here, and will continue to evolve.

In which every human life matters equally, and the ecosystem, planet, and universe are tended - and tend us.

It is an invitation to imagine our lives as both stardust and sacred,

Woven into a miraculous web of common and cosmic good.

Where you can bring what you have, and ask for what you need

Your wounds can be healed, and your calling clarified to co-create a safer, more compassionate, more beautiful, more alive world

To tell stories that are true but may not have “come true” yet, because we haven’t told them enough. Or lived them.

The Purpose of Integrative Men’s Work

To learn and share together how to live and tell our stories and the stories of the world we find themselves in, in the most truthful, creative, and generative ways.

Four Pillars of the Work

1. Me and We and Everything Else

The most authentic men’s work will embrace and initiate into lived wholeness, which can be defined as the experience of knowing yourself to be a bearer of gifts and needs, woven as an individual into a community of people and planet, held by Spirit: a Me and a We and an Everything Else that both needs you to show up fully, and has the answer to your needs too. A men’s circle that turns inward and stays there has confused a hospital with a village: the destination is the whole symphony of humanity.

2. Gender and Other Stories We Tell

Gender matters, but gender isn’t matter. It’s a story. The work will take seriously the wisdom of history, psychology, religion, culture, and all authentic stories about what it is to be human. In men’s work this must include the study of gender. When taken seriously, this can be liberating for everyone.

3. Who Belongs to Men’s Work?

The most authentic men’s work will be socioeconomically accessible, culturally relevant/transformative, and ethnically inclusive. Some people will always feel called to meet in cohorts, but there should be no identity-based or financial barriers to receiving the truest gifts of integrative men’s work.

4. Nothing is Not Political

Authentic men’s work will commit to conscious engagement with power in all its forms, for the sake of the common good, prioritizing the needs of the vulnerable. This is not political partisanship, but simply standing in the tradition of all authentic humanness.

Not to engage with power, including elected power, is an abdication of integrity based on the false notion that being a person is the same thing as being an island.

We all have and we all lack some power: the challenge to bring what we have and ask for what we need is not a political imposition, but an invitation to a life worthy of the name, where loving our neighbors as ourselves is both a responsibility, and a treasure worth seeking more than anything else.

The Responsibility of Leading Men’s Work

1. Know Yourself. Do your own work of growth, healing, accountability, vision, and service to and with the common and cosmic good.

2. Imagine a world beyond “Men’s” Work. A man is not fully healed, indeed he is not fully human, until equitably integrating with the presence, gifts, and needs of women, and people across the entire spectrum of gender.

3. It takes more than a loud voice. Integrated archetypes or balanced roles: leadership as service, an open-hearted range of emotions across the spectrum from anger to joy to grief, courageous and compassionate action, resourcing the imagination toward what the room (or the world) needs, and conscious stewardship of life (yours, mine, ours, the ecosystem) are both the result and the path toward it.

4. Seek Wisdom, not only knowledge or “tools”. This work requires us to grow down as well as up.

I’ll elaborate on these notions in the coming days. I welcome your company on what I think might best be called an elemental pilgrimage.

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Begin in Belfast as the city pulses with the music of the Fleadh - the world’s largest gathering of traditional Irish music. Move into the stillness of the Mourne Mountains with gifted storytelling guides, a special guest whose thinking is reshaping how we understand this moment, and spiritual companions to help you integrate what you discover. Come home changed.

Places are genuinely limited - if this transformative immersion retreat calls to you, we invite you to register now.

Details at www.irelandretreats.com

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Tomorrow (Friday) evening through Sunday at noon.

It might be what you need. Join us?

www.theporchgathering.com

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Báyò Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosoper, writer, activist, professor of psychology, and he’s also one of the most original thinkers I’ve encountered - although as you’ll see from our conversation below, he would probably challenge the idea of “originality”, at least as it is understood in the mainstream. Ideas travel, Báyò says, “enlisting minds” as they migrate.

One of the ideas that has enlisted Báyò’s mind has captivated me over the past year since I first heard him talk about it. “The crack” between eras, between worlds - not exactly Leonard Cohen’s “crack in everything” through which the light gets in (and as my friend Nancy Hastings Sehested says, it’s also the portal through which the light gets out). But not entirely unrelated to that crack; and, perhaps playfully, perhaps more substantially, also woven with the craic that Irish people speak of when discussing the experience of being alive, in the world, right here, right now. The crack invites us to become experimental practitioners of the Japanese art of kintsugi, gilding the broken lines on shattered plates, revealing a hitherto impossible beauty.

I believe that Báyò is speaking into the induction path of the conditions for the birth of the world so many of us want to see. I’m delighted that he will be with us in person on an immersive retreat in and around Belfast and the north of Ireland in August. You can find out more about this opportunity at www.irelandretreats.com. I am confident it will be a life-changing gathering.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE IRELAND RETREAT

Read on, or listen below to this conversation about one of the most hopeful notions many of us might consider: that in order to get out of the mess we’re in, and certainly in order to go somewhere new, we need to allow ourselves to become lost in - or at least near - the cracks.

A CONVERSATION WITH BÁYÒ AKOMOLAFE

Gareth Higgins: All right, Báyò. Lovely to see you. Lovely to be with you, and thank you. Thank you for conversations over the past year since we met and all the things that I’ve read of you and I’ve heard you saying I’m fascinated, I’m stimulated, I’m challenged, I’m provoked. I’m not sure I understand it all. I’m looking forward to it.

Báyò Akomolafe: Hey, same brother.

Gareth: So, you know, when we met at Esalen, you said something that struck me and has sat with me for, I guess, a year now and it has a particular cultural or ethnic resonance with me; and that is this notion of “the cracks”. And so would you speak to like what does it mean to live in the cracks?

Báyò: Well, I don’t know that we can actually live there, because it challenges life itself. Life is ontological. Life has geometry and shape and boundaries and it does things and it undoes things. A crack, however, is life in excess of itself.

It’s when there’s too much possibility abiding in form that form cannot hold it. So it’s not when I think about cracks, I don’t speak about inadequacies. I don’t speak about a negative zone, a space that needs to be filled up with something. I speak about quite to the contrary, something exploding from form, something that doesn’t fit into it. And this is why I speak about the monster, or the monstrous. The monster is not an evil thing. The monster is not a bad thing. The monster is just reality reworking itself. Right? It’s right there in the etymology of monster. The monstrum. It’s to work, to rework. So the monster puts reality to work. The monster challenges the forms we’ve adopted. The monster is the unfinished incomplete business of a world that has never been fully articulated. Right? And so living with the cracks is maybe short form, short code for being touched by this ravenous, hungry paraontological thing that never leaves us quite settled. I know, I crept that one in to just shake you a little bit. [Laughs.]

Gareth: Okay, thank you for the clarity. [Laughs]. So not only did you use the word ontological, you’ve used the word paraontological and we have many dear listeners and readers connected with the porch and some of us are lovers of words like ontological and paraontological and some of us love those words, some perhaps less.

Báyò: Yes, yes, yes. [And some of us] roll our eyes.

Gareth: And talking about ontology is a bit like when people talk about the Enneagram to me. I have some dear friends who adore the Enneagram, it’s been deeply helpful to them. And every time somebody has someone who knows what they’re talking about has tried to explain the Enneagram to me, I find it very helpful. But as soon as the conversation has ended, I’ve totally forgotten what they said and have no access to what they meant. So can you go like a layer deeper or maybe a layer more accessible to everyday conversation?

What do you mean by ontological and paraontological and the monstering of the moment? I love that. I mean, the image I have in my mind is of Godzilla rampaging through the streets. And there’s certainly a downside to that. Like if you don’t get out of the way, you’re going to get fire-breathed on you. There is a downside, but…

Báyò: Just a little bit of a downside. Just a little bit.

Gareth: It certainly shakes things up. And I also was hearing you talk about living with rather than living in the cracks. So, you know, are you talking about what a lot of us perceive, which is right now we are in a place between worlds, culturally, psychologically, maybe even metaphysically, or what would you say around these words like ontology, paraontological and so forth?

Báyò: Yes. So ontology is just a, you could call it a branch of philosophy that wants to understand how things come to be. Not just how things come to be, but what is. Questions about existence, what is real, what is not. How to even think about that is an ontological concern, right?

But then, paraontology is a newer, relatively recent creation of Black scholars. And it comes from a serious contemplation of Black life in the United States. Right? Because, and not just in the United States, it’s the entire vocation of the transatlantic slave trade and its practice of capture and how bodies were contained within a vessel and forcefully transported to the so-called new world to live and die under conditions that were told to them were just nature. Right? Like, why is it that I’m in a ship that is that with with containment and measurements that are just this wide enough for me to keep breathing.

And why have I been shackled, stolen from my parents, stolen from my people, my community, my names, my ancestors, my food, my practices, my culture, to live and die in a plantation somewhere in this new world that has a name I do not even know how to pronounce. Why is that the case? And the response to that was, well, it’s because you are beneath. You are inferior, smaller. You are closer to animal than animal is close to the earth. Right? You are less than. And therefore, the most useful deployment of your talents would be to put you in productivist extractivist arrangements. And that’s the best use that nature has granted you by dint of our hard examination of the scriptures.

Right? And so this idea that nature itself as ontology has already pre-programmed certain bodies to death, the wretchedness and the misery of slavery proliferates conversations in the paraontological register, right? And what the para is doing is like, well, we’re not quite sure of ontology then. Para means beside. So if ontology means we’re gonna live this way and there’s nothing, there’s no hope, then maybe I don’t want ontology. Maybe we have to speculate about something else, something beside ontology. So paraontology comes from a serious consideration of Black life and Blackness. Right? That makes sense now?

Gareth: It opens my mind as a white person around the self-reflection that’s necessary in response to that, but also as an Irish person from the North of Ireland where that word para has deep meanings as well, as in paramilitary. And so we’ve been used to the use of the word, and to being besides and to looking at things from what we’ve been told is the natural order of things. Let’s say at best it isn’t working. Even if we perceive ourselves to be people who are on the right side of that natural order, let’s say the privileged side, the easy side of that natural order, it is [thankfully] consensus reality in the North of Ireland now that things were not working. Like things were not working, and something needed to change. [There’s] lots of disagreement about what wasn’t working, who was to blame and what needed to change. But it seems to me, like as I said, the light bulb that went on for me was, in you talking about the cracks, was both a kind of a sociological description of the reality of the society I grew up in, which is it was a crack. The whole society was a crack. Even when the loudest voices would say this is the way it is, everybody knew that that’s not how it actually was. There’s a phrase, which could be received in a bleak way, that even the dogs in the street know, right? That what you’re saying isn’t the total reality for everybody. And then of course, there was this moment, anybody who knows the North of Ireland.

And anyone who spends time there will know that we have this word that we use to describe the things that people do together for fun, right? The things that people do together that that that kind of elevate our spirits. And that word is actually craic. It is spelled C-R-A-I-C. And when people even when people ask each other, how are doing? What they will say is, how’s the craic?

[Of course] we don’t intend what you mean by it. But I’ve decided that when I ask people, how’s the craic that it’s really a way of asking, how’s your parontological reality right now? It’s just a short form of saying it! And what I took from what you were saying about that was like, we don’t have to rush to a solution.

Báyò: Yes, yes.

Gareth: We certainly need to be engaged in helping to make things fairer, better, safer, more compassionate for people. We certainly need to be intervening where there’s risk and danger and where people are being harmed. Perhaps…well, I don’t think there’s any perhaps about it. One of the things we’re discovering in the North of Ireland is 28 years after our peace agreement was signed, the peace agreement did not mean an end to the crack.

It did not mean that the crack was now repaired and we were in a totally new society. In a sense, I actually think our peace agreement, which could be an example or a help to other parts of the world where there is deep political polarization. Not to shine our halo because we made lots of mistakes along the way, but societies like the North of Ireland where people did decide no matter what we think about this thing that’s happening right now, we need something better. And what our peace agreement brought into being actually was not a resolution, but a crack. We acknowledged the crack and we’ve been doing, and I want to ask you about this now, without knowing that this is what we were doing, we’ve been doing what you invoked as kintsugi. You speak about that Japanese art and I wonder what you mean by political kintsugi, sociological, cultural kintsugi?

Báyò: Yes, it is, just to take some steps back, it would be to say that reality is just a small part of what we’re concerned about. Reality is just a tiny aspect of what we are concerned about. Because reality is not just what is, reality is speculative and anticipatory. It misbehaves, right?

To consider a crack is to situate a field of thought that helps us notice, like you said, rushing to the solutions can often just reinforce the problem. In fact, I’ve said it elsewhere that solutions fix problems, as in they fix them in place. They cement them. They concretize them.

There are the out-plane of the economy of relations that made the problem possible in the first place. if you see a swirling pool that... and you say, I’m on the right side of history now. Well, being on the right side of history is just like being on a carousel.

You know where I’m going with this, right? It goes round. It just goes round, right? We’re seeing it in Israel right now. At some point, they were recipients of the most inhumane acts of genocidal relations. And now that carousel, that logic spinning around, and they just passed a law against Palestinians, determining the right to kill them.

Gareth: [The carousel] is going to come around again.

Báyò: As if that wasn’t already happening before. So the solutions and the problem are just like how virtue works. A lot of what I say is that virtue is also colonial. Virtue has a hidden life and a career. You can do good, but doing good is still part of the same whirlpool that generates the logic that gives birth to the harm you’re trying to decimate. So the crack becomes necessary because the crack is where the machine generating this continuity “problem and solution”, “experts”, “harm versus good” where that machine curdles and stutters and breaks down and invites something else different that is different and beyond in excess of the machine. So the crack is para ontological it is speculative it is not categorizable it is not a definitive stream of activities that you can put in a manual and say this is what a crack means because if you can legibly do that then it’s just a solution.

But a crack is something that we only know in retrospect. It is ecological, is speculative, it is retrospective. But there’s something about the work of making sanctuary with the cracks, hosting the monster that feels like it breaks through the habitual patterns of sensing and perceiving the world and allows new forms to take root. This is really important.

Gareth: So what is the kintsugi to which we are called?

Báyò: Yes, so kintsugi would be, you know, that beautiful art form that notices the sites of rupture instead of the thing that has ruptured. It notices that breaks come before the thing, the form that breaks. So that metaphysical disruption allows them to trace out the cracks with golden lacquer, right? They trace it out and allow you know, forms, the splintered edges, the cracks to shine, to shimmer in their brilliance. The work of tracing cracks is the work of staying with the moments when we do not fit in, when our failures are louder than our successes, when the idea of moving forward no longer seems applicable in the moment, when grief seems more invitational than success, when the names that we’ve applied to the world, whether the enemy or the friend, seems blurry. Those moments are monstrous and terrifying, but there’s something that invites us to stay with them that might feel like the political equivalent of tracing cracks with kintsugi.

Gareth: I’ve tried to find language for this, but I haven’t got it yet - and I think that’s good because that feels like a “cracked” thing. If I could tie it up neatly, that would be antithetical to what we’re talking about. So when I say it seems like an invitation to gild the moment, I don’t mean to fix it, as you’ve said. Now I don’t know if this exists within the Japanese cultural history of kintsugi, but I’ve seen plates that have been shattered and then, you know, a lovely kind of gold weave has brought the plate back together. But the likelihood is that the plate may break again. And so we’re not talking about a permanent thing.

So what I’m wondering is this how it weaves with you: You’ve talked about something you call post-activism. What do you mean by that? And knowing that loads of us think activism is a great thing, that we should, of course, we should be activists; and some of the noblest histories of humanity are of activists.

Báyò: It is. Of course.

Gareth: So when you speak of post-activism you are not denouncing these people, but what is it that you are saying when you talk about post activism?

Báyò: No, I’m not. I’m not. [It’s] the shouldness, you say, “we should be activists”. Well, the shouldness of activism is not in question. It’s just that should itself is a terminal that is not the entire world. We like to conflate our “oughtness”, or the “isms” that we have, or the shouldness of things, and we like to conflate it with the world itself. But should is just a tiny aspect of what the world is doing.

So if you ask me, should we be activists? Definitely. But there’s more in excess of the shouldness, right? And the way that I would say to speak to post-activism is this, that yes, activism is great. It’s done a lot of good things, but that’s the point, brother. It’s done good things. You see where I’m going with this? It’s done a lot of good things. Just last year I was in Scotland and I was speaking to people about the entire industry of fashion sustainability and how good activists in this industry are doing their darnedest to clean up. They know that the planet has been destroyed and so they’re cleaning up new practices, new benchmarks, new standards and this practice has given birth to a cottage industry

It has given birth in part and has sustained a cottage industry in Ghana. I don’t know what it’s called in in the language in Ghana, but it translates to the dead white man’s clothing. It’s basically roadside traders selling the clothes that have been imported as waste, as recyclable waste from the global north, right? It yields about 15 million pieces, items, dumps it in Ghana every week. 70 % I think of which is sold and 30 % goes back into the ocean. This is “goodness”.

This is the architecture of goodness. What’s maintained here is a dopaminergic notion of correctness, of righteousness. We’re doing the “good” thing. But the good thing, what it actually feeds is an underside, a hidden underbelly and shadowy realm of replication that actually supports and creates the conditions in which this harm proliferates itself.

Gareth: So one response to that could be then shouldn’t we just get more discerning about how to do activism well, and have fewer unintended negative consequences? But I think you’re saying something more. And what I think I’ve heard you say before, and I’ll put this colloquially and if this is not what you’ve intended, please amend it. I say this as someone who’s been deeply involved in activism and was mentored by incredibly honorable, courageous activists. Part of the flaw in the lens is it’s all about what we can do to change the world, and it never asks how might we sit still long enough to let the world change us? And I don’t mean the world as in the the gospel version of “don’t be conformed to the ways of this world”. I mean the ineffable cosmos and the material reality of the planet that we can’t even but see one percent of. What would it be like to allow ourselves to be awakened to what the world can enact upon us?

Am I understanding something that you were alluding to?

Báyò: Yes, yes. I never think of ideas as reducible to human minds, right? It’s that it enlists bodies as it travels, as it migrates. But you’re right. I mean, to some extent, we need to come to terms with the very brutal fact that we don’t do “better” very well. [Because] “better” still replicates the same logics as well. There are too many historical instances to recall of our many many gestures at doing “better”, But “better” is still within the continuum, the species, the stream of logics that just keep on the message, the story, that just keep on repeating the same phenomena over and over again. So I don’t really trust in “better”, nor do I trust in a utopian arrival point where we have solved everything.

I do believe that we get stuck like ants in a death spiral. I’ve spoken about this many times as well, that ants often get in some kind of pheromonic prison. They secrete chemicals that lead them around in circles and they don’t know how to burst out of the circle. It’s a trance and they’re stuck and they keep going round and round and round and round and they die in a circle. Sometimes they’re on the right side of history and sometimes they’re not but the circle holds true. That is seemingly what we are in today with climate chaos, with the genocidal relations that are birthing the horrific things happening in the Middle East right now, with the anthropocene, with the decline of trust in democratic institutions, with democracy itself as a holding pattern. It seems like we are in a spiral loop of death of some kind. And as a scholar investigating the paraontological and Blackness and the poetics of making sanctuary and the monstrous and cracks, I feel, and this is only a feeling as creaturely as it could be, I feel that our work is not merely to move forward, it’s to investigate the awkward.

And that may not look like a solution, it may not look like a future, it may not look like “this is the grand design of tomorrow”, but it’s in the small molecular moments of the crack that I feel that new possibilities are glimpsed speculatively, molecularly, fugitively.

Gareth: Can you name an example? And I’m aware of the fact that even the use of the word example might be part of the problem.

Báyò: Yes, it’s hard to exemplify this because it’s too nuanced; this is not some highfalutin elitist concept that is we have to we have to rise to some philosophical atmosphere called “the crack”. No, we’re speaking about the small moments when attention shifts, when the thing that feels like the right thing to do doesn’t feel like the appropriate thing to do. [An example] that I use very sparingly, with great hesitation or humility is the Standing Rock protest…And of course it failed. At the level of politics, it failed. In one regard, it failed, right?

I know that Greenpeace is being, is at the moment they’re being sued for a demonic amount of money… [And] at a level of politics, it failed, and at a level of infra-politics, which is [the] counter-cultural forces of resistance and basically coming from beyond the usual categorical political tools of resistance, finding other ways beyond calling your senators to push back against the establishment, even that field. But at the level of the para-political, where things that were designated, designed, anticipated did not pan out, but people found other ways to be with each other, to notice each other, to find each other, to… to sense the world differently, like other glimpses of possibilities emerged that are not usually the subject of matters of scale or standard or solutionism, but something happened.

Gareth: They’re not matters of how the story gets told by the kind of pre-existing dominant storytelling mechanisms. I don’t want to diminish the sorrow of the place that I grew up in and the suffering that happened to so many people, including my own family and by extension to me, I don’t want to diminish that by any means.

Báyò: Yes, yes. Yes, yes.

Gareth: And at the same time, if you look through the history of what we call with quintessential Irish understatement “the Troubles” between 1968, 1994, by extension to 1998 when the peace agreement was signed and even to the current moment, because there is still active suffering underway. The parallel to the Standing Rock protest, in a smaller scale in a different culture, was the work of things like the Corrymeela community and the Irish School of Ecumenics, [and other peace building communities and reflection spaces where people were living into a different kind of world, even when the dominant voices were saying it was impossible]; even the work of the YMCAs actually in the north of Ireland, deep community work that was bringing people together from across lines of difference. And no, they did not succeed in ending the troubles in 1972 or 1978 or 1981. But first of all, we will never know how much they prevented from happening because you can’t prove the negative. The other reality is that the degree of stability we have in our society right now is substantially, though not completely attributable to, if I may use the term, the parapolitical, the subterranean stuff, the stuff that wasn’t getting books written about it, the stuff that wasn’t appearing on the radio or the television. And it seems to me it’s a source of sadness that a lot of the people who were most deeply involved in that don’t know how much they did.

Báyò: Yes, yes.

Gareth: So I want to avoid “shoulding” here. So I’m going to use “might” instead of “should” and say, given all this, given the spiral (and I think there’s other spirals happening that are that are beautiful and exciting and life giving), but given the existentially threatening spiral, how might we live amidst the ordinary and extraordinary, the light and the bleak and the burden and the blessing of being here now? If we are, let’s say, a person of some resources and some lack rather than those who have inordinately enormous resources or who are inordinately enormously targeted by the spiral. How might we live?

Báyò: Your question as multi-faceted as it is recalls for me what you said about changing the organism. The organism that perceives the world as unfair, as shaped against it. There’s something about challenging the posture and the centrality of the viewer, of the asker of the question, of the doer of things. Right? And that is not the same as saying change yourself to change the world. No, it’s not some anthropocentric or inner vocation that if you only align your chakras, that the world will merely reflect the work you’ve done within. It doesn’t come down to that because the inner world is outer. The personal is already political, is already fungal, is already ecological. But for me, I return again to fields and how they make things possible, how they obscure things from view, how they shape our perceptions. And all of those things seem to be the matter of fields and cracks, right? It’s how subjectivity is shaped. It’s how we understand power and privilege. It’s how we understand agency, the stories we tell, the stories that are too dense, so they subside somewhere in the unsaid, in the liminality of the unsaid and how they impact us in return. All of these things are not amenable to our human fingers. They don’t orbit attention. They’re doing some other kind of crazy work out there, creating the conditions for us to live and think and talk as we are doing right now, brother.

[To ask then] what is ours to do, I would say that beyond the shouldness of things, the Rumian fields that have been described as the fields of good and evil, there are things to do. But they don’t look anything like what we think they [should look like]. They may look like what disability theorists and people exploring autism call an autistic politics. I have learned to call it [this] - it’s what my son told me when he was going around in circles and I asked him “Why are you going around the circles?” He was six years old or five years old and he said “There are things I have to do that you know nothing about.” There are perceptions to explore, there are sensations we haven’t felt yet and it doesn’t come down to the feeling subject: it comes down to how the subject has always been the world exploring and experimenting with itself. What might we do is a very difficult question to answer. But I think that there are spaces of practice that might allow us to investigate the edges of how we learn. I call this paragogy, not pedagogy. That’s another thing to explore. There lots of paras in my language, but yes.

Gareth: I’m sure we’ll get to explore this when we’re in Ireland together. Part of why we’re talking now is to let folks know that we are delighted you’ll be with us in Ireland in August for a retreat that’s part of a series of retreats that we have had the joy of co-hosting for over a decade now where we bring people to spend a bit of time in the North of Ireland having something other than a tourist experience. [It’s also] something other than a cloistered experience, both of which may be fine in their best terms. But we want to share with people what has happened in the North of Ireland, the good of it, in hopes that it gives people at least some respite or some inspiration or some sense of assurance that there are other possibilities and one of those other possibilities like the fact that I have not fully awakened to this yet and may never fully awaken to it is is betrayed by my question, which is what might we do because it seems to me that part of what we I’m going to risk a should here. I’m going to risk a really big should and say what we must what we must do is revisit who the we is. Ask ourselves Who is the we that is seeing and Who is the I that is seeing? This this may be a question that is more relevant to some of us more than others, because some of us have been used to unconsciously accepting that we are the We with a capital W and that everybody else [isn’t in that We].

Báyò: Yeah, “we: are the ones doing the doing.

Gareth: It isn’t rocket science, but it [may also be] metaphysically beyond grasp to seek to walk in the shoes of another. The great Indian American filmmaker, Mira Nair said to me once that she wants people to watch films that “help the audience see life through the eyes of the other”. And the other isn’t just the human other, although let’s start there. That’s a good start.

Báyò: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Gareth: So I’m just wondering about re-imagining the “We” and re-imagining the “I”. So we’re moving toward the end of our time together today, but I want to ask you, what draws you to Ireland?

Báyò: Ireland feels like a sibling I haven’t met yet, right? And I mean it in this sense, that when I think about Frederick Douglass [spent time in Ireland], just the exposure and reading up on the visit, you know, and the statue that was recently mounted [in Belfast] to honor that visit seems to me like an invitation to consider Blackness through the histories of this land. And Blackness is not skin color. It’s important for folks to know that Blackness is not reducible to skin color. Blackness is that which calls into question coloniality’s claim to power. [In facing] coloniality and empire standing as this final totalitarian claim to power, this exclusive claim to power Blackness is the lichen, the fungal excreting, secreting movement of things that says you’re not complete. There’s something else afoot. There are movements on the ground you have no clue about. That’s Blackness. And Ireland, you know, is, seems like the Blackest place to explore this.

Gareth: Wow, well, I am thrilled at the prospect of being alongside you and with the folks that will join us. We like to allow for spontaneity, and I guess that is a crack. I guess we allow for the crack and what will unfold will unfold. So we’ve talked about secretions and excretions and ontologicality and paraontology and etymology - there’s lots of ologies here in this conversation! Let’s finish with, I guess you could call it a doxology. What’s your prayer for people listening to this?

Báyò: That our roads will be rough. It’s a blessing, it’s not a curse. To say May your roads be rough is an invitation to be met by things that the map did not account for. It’s to be met by bumps in the road that shake us into a realization of our longer and larger bodies. That we’re not the smooth citizen subjects that we think we are. May our road be rough and may the disturbance be our sanctuary.

Gareth: Last question and I like to ask this of anybody that I’m having a conversation. What’s the prayer that you would invite from others for you?

Báyò: That is one that I could not have anticipated. That is a deep gift to think about.

Gareth: It is asked from the heart and not just from me. You know, I think this is part of what what what we at the Porch feel called to. There’s a degree to which we’re not all in it together because clearly there are vast range of difference of resources and needs. There’s a degree to which it is just it’s a way of covering over the cracks and actually denying true need out there to say we’re all in it together.

And there is also a way in which it is absolutely true: We are all in it together and we would all in our in our best moments want to offer goodness.

Báyò: My prayer is… My invitation for gifts of prayers is that I would stay true to the calling of the Crossroads and that I will be supported and protected as I follow this weird fidelity of making sanctuary with a crack in my life.

Gareth: Thank you for your time, your words, and an anticipation of more to come.

Báyò: Thank you, brother. See you soon.

SPEND A WEEK WITH BÁYÒ AKOMOLAFE, GARETH HIGGINS AND BRIAN AMMONS IN IRELAND, AUGUST 5TH-12TH, 2026, IMMERSED IN TRANSFORMATIVE STORYTELLING…

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE IRELAND RETREAT

The Porch Gathering is just over two weeks from now, and we’ve decided to make it easier than ever to opt in at whatever registration fee works for you. Take a look at www.theporchgathering.com. If the Gathering calls to you, we ask that you consider the resources you have available, the benefit you feel you’ll receive from participating - both now and in the future, and register now. There are scholarships available that can cover up to 75% of the registration fee - these are offered in the spirit of the gift, and the circle of inter-being we are woven into as human beings. You matter deeply, what you bring matters, and we’d love to have you with us. Details below.

JOIN US AT THE PORCH GATHERING

We want to make the Gathering widely accessible, so we set the registration fee lower than many comparable events; if you can afford to pay more, please do so: we will use any such contributions to offer partial scholarships to folks who aren't currently able to afford the registration fee.

And if the registration fee is beyond your reach for now, please read on below for information on scholarships available to anyone that needs one, that can significantly reduce the registration fee - we'll be glad to help.

We ask that you pay from the heart - consider the resources you have available, the benefit you feel your friends will receive, and your desire to support the work of transformative storytelling, and opt in at whatever registration level aligns best with those considerations. Go to www.theporchgathering.com and use the following codes to support your attending.

For 10% scholarship use the code PORCH10
For 25% scholarship use the code PORCH25
For 50% scholarship use the code PORCH50
For 75% scholarship use the code PORCH75

The Gathering is just two weeks away - we’re going to enter into something life-giving, meaningful, and surprising. Maybe you showing up will be part of the surprise - but it’s helpful to know numbers soon, so please register now.

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It’s not about money and power, but imagination and presence.

PS: I’ll share some thoughts on PROJECT HAIL MARY later this week.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PORCH GATHERING

We wouldn’t say that the storytelling crisis will be resolved simply by changing the story, but we’ve spent nearly a decade now with The Porch, and all the connected endeavors interlaced with the good folks in The Porch community, and we keep discovering that much unnecessary suffering results from bad stories. Better stories aren’t merely the antidote to unnecessary suffering, but can release us into new ways of thinking, living, being.

It has been said the most important human need that usually goes unmet is the need for mutual recognition - not elevating one of us over another, but simply truly being seen, and seeing each other. We’re here for a short time, although sometimes it seems awfully long. We can spend that time in panic or ignorance, by seeking to dominate others or serve the common good, by indulging in fantasies of retribution or transformation, withdrawing into isolation or nurturing a contemplative life, scapegoating others or taking our place in the ecosystem of interdependent responsibility, weaponizing victimhood or binding the wounds of the brokenhearted, accumulating more and more for ourselves alone, or learning to steward (and craft) beautiful things, and share them.

Porches are “in-between” spaces, the mid-point between home and the world. They’re often sheltered, though not sealed. They’re places for rich conversation, exploration, play, a shoulder to cry on, or even places where a nap can be found.

This is the shelter we need. The best way to respond to a bad thing is to do something better in its place.

The best way to respond to panic and ignorance, to the devalued bonds and faded hopes is to - radically, truly, beautifully, experimentally - live.

So at the Porch Gathering in April - just over two weeks from now, we’re opening a space for significant ideas of grounded hope, individual and communal purpose, provocative and meaningful storytelling, and - frankly - enjoying life together. We truly believe that we are here not just to save the world, but to be changed.

As we’ve already said, our work is forged partly in real suffering, conflict, and trauma - as individuals and in the societies in which we were born and raised. But we also learned creativity, resilience, and the kind of deep love that goes beyond platitudes or feelings. What we seek to offer is not a panacea or quick fix, but deeply rooted in the history of transformative storytelling, authentic spirituality, and courageous creativity for the common good.

Our vision is that the Porch Gathering would be a place where a couple hundred people could come together to take life seriously without taking ourselves too seriously; meet brilliant people from all kinds of places; and better understand ourselves, our place in the world, what we can do for the good, and the ways in which we can authentically give ourselves a break.

The third Porch Gathering runs from Friday evening April 17th through Sunday lunchtime April 19th, 2026 (we’ll have an optional pre-gathering retreat Thursday night April 16th and deep dive workshop Friday during the day too) with a range of storytelling, music, breakout sessions, talks, movies, and opportunities for quiet or just connecting with friends old and new. We’ll have a generous handful of speakers/musicians/facilitators distinguished in their fields, and good options for engaging a better story and way of being, including deepening a sense of community together, and practical tools for the journey of living with courage and creativity.

It’s not a typical conference - more like an informal festival-meets-retreat, where conversations on the sidelines matter as much as anything that happens on a stage. The times are showing us that we need each other - and we need truer and more helpful stories to guide us beyond cultures of domination and separation, hopelessness, and constant activity. The Porch Gathering is a place to find those stories, and to meet people who will share the journey.

Join us?

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It’s good to name that; and it’s even better to illuminate alternatives; best of all to create on-ramps for men to opt into meaningful male community that meets actual legitimate needs in ways that promote the most good for everyone, and a safer and more compassionate world.

Inside the Manosphere isn’t all that different from a lot of talk out there - we could see it as adjacent to the explosion of interest in true crime podcasts: telling bleak stories about the worst of human behavior, without paying proportionate attention to possible paths out of the mire.

I wish more journalists and documentary makers were resourced to focus on the enormous good work being done to reimagine authentic manhood as a subset of authentic adulthood. There are individuals and communities imagining and co-creating a world of fairness, safety and compassion in which everyone, of every gender experience is treated equitably, and facilitated in discovering their own genius of gift to contribute to the ecosystem of people and planet, living in interdependent chosen families (households and neighborhoods, but even regions, nations can do it) that will also serve their deepest needs.

The best of this work - some of the most important, non-negotiable work of our time - is integrating at the level of the soul the kaleidoscopic ways human beings can show up. Some good “men’s work” leans heavily into mythic archetypes - the basic four are usually named as sovereign (leadership), lover (feelings), magician (visionary catalyst), and warrior (courageous compassionate protection). Recently some wise folks have begun to talk about a fifth basic archetype, the steward, who helps discern and organize the other four - much like when I sit down with my calendar for the next week and (sometimes!) try to imagine what I will need to enable me to do the things I’ve planned.

At any rate, while there are many archetypal systems and stories about how to become more whole, the story told by those five archetypes is a compelling one. But there’s nothing innately gendered about it.

Leadership, feelings, vision & catalyzing, courageous compassionate protection, and stewardship belong to everyone, regardless of biological sex or gender. The way those five aspects of being human manifest is obviously partly to do with the culture (family, education, religion, politics, and other forms of storytelling) we’re born into or live amongst.

The lack of sturdy wisdom stories about manhood told in our wider culture today is a key reason why the manosphere exists. The answer is not merely to criticize what’s broken, but to tell better stories about manhood, about integrated authentic personhood.

What men need is the same thing that all people need: food, water, air, and shelter - which is more than four walls and a roof, but something more accurately described as the story we tell about what matters, and an interdependent community context in which to experience that meaning, which is - at heart - about sharing, giving and receiving love.

The cultural storytelling milieu is a form of shelter for our lives. Depending on whether or not it’s a shelter made from wisdom, it will either keep us safe and warm, or have a leaky roof, or it may ultimately collapse in on top of us. The work of transformative storytelling matters.

This is part of a series on integrated authentic personhood, healing the souls of men (and the impact that would have on the web of relationships with all people). I’ll share more resources as we go, but for now a really good option for anyone reading who cares about the story we’re telling about who we are, what we’re for, and how to get there is the Porch Gathering, happening in just under four weeks from now. It’s a weekend of transformative storytelling, courage, creativity, and community, for such a time as this.

Details are at www.theporchgathering.com - if it calls to you, please join us.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PORCH GATHERING

PS: This coming week I’m delighted to be teaching again with the magnificent Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. It’s a two-day workshop on Wednesday & Thursday 25th & 26th March, called Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs. We taught it together last year, and it was wonderful. There are still spaces left - click here for details.

ONE MORE THING: ALTERNATIVE OSCARS

I know I say it every year: the best reason for the Academy Awards to exist is to bring attention to films that many folks might otherwise not see.

The second good reason is to encourage filmmakers to reach beyond what they’ve previously discovered.

The third is to acknowledge the variety of work that has appeared onscreen in the previous year.

The fourth is to provide a platform for remembering the lives of movie people who have died since the previous ceremon. This year that includes Rob Reiner, Robert Duvall, Val Kilmer, Diane Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Michael Madsen, Peter Greene, Terence Stamp, Graham Greene, Diane Ladd, Richard Chamberlain, Homayoun Ershadi, Henry Jaglom, Harris Yulin, Tatsuo Nakadai, Udo Kier, James Foley, Joe Don Baker, Claudia Cardinale, Lalo Schifrin, Leslie Dilley, Robert Benton, AND Lee Tamahori - not all household names, but every one of them co-created an image that will live in my mind forever, and perhaps yours too.

And the fifth reason is to give the entertainment community an opportunity for a party among peers; it’s a weird business, Hollywood, with a lot of people who dream of getting into it discovering once they’ve made it there that they can’t wait to leave. They deserve a moment of mutual affirmation of the meaning of the work, not the business.

Of course the voting record of the Academy doesn’t equate to a history of the greatest films ever made. There’s a treasure chest of movies just waiting to be discovered, their gifts and provocations hidden till we open ourselves to them. So here’s a list of films that weren’t nominated for Best Picture, and a few words to convey what those films mean to me - I hope this will encourage readers to watch some you haven’t seen; and please add your own suggestions in the comments.

For what it’s worth, I intended this list to be much shorter, and to write more about this year’s nominees today - but the joy of skimming through Academy Awards’ history was that there are just so many movies of surpassing wonder that I couldn’t find room for them all. Here’s the beginnings of a list of extraordinary movies that were not nominated for Best Picture1.

1930s

Make Way for Tomorrow - loving regret

1940s

Fantasia - the cosmos is here

The Shop Around the Corner - love is a funny thing

A Matter of Life and Death - love is a giving thing

Odd Man Out - the cost of tribalism

1950s

Rebel Without a Cause - intergenerational blindness

Vertigo - possession

1960s

8 1/2 - creation

Hiroshima mon Amour - a necessary lament

The Leopard - power must be stewarded by someone

Au Hasard Balthasar - selflessness

Point Blank - revenge is futile

2001: A Space Odyssey - evolution is where we are

The Swimmer - unconsciousness destroys

Once Upon a Time in the West - nation-building is never one good thing after another

Oh! What a Lovely War - self-confrontation

1970s

Little Big Man - broken history

Five Easy Pieces - emptiness

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes - mournfulness

Women in Love - terrible beauty

Ryan’s Daughter - forgiveness

A New Leaf - growing up

McCabe and Mrs Miller - business

Aguirre the Wrath of God - the colonizer colonizes his own mind

Solaris - reality with an upper case R

Fat City - machismo is death

The Duellists - nonviolent resolution

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - cosmic Narcissus

Days of Heaven - beautiful Depression

Superman - a flying Messiah

Being There - a walking Messiah

Stalker - finding meaning requires losing certainty

All that Jazz - there’s no business like ego-business

The Black Stallion - an interdependent ecosystem thrill ride

1980s

Heaven’s Gate - epic folly (the story, not the movie)

Koyaanisqatsi - life out of balance

Blade Runner - people who need people

Das Boot - humanizing the enemy

Paris, Texas - repair isn’t perfection

Broadway Danny Rose - community

Mass Appeal - truth hurts and heals

Desert Hearts - love hurts and heals

Runaway Train - a hard-won dignity

The Purple Rose of Cairo - life hurts, art heals

Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources - loving your neighbor is good for you too

Matewan - dying for justice is better than killing for money

Raising Arizona - accepting the weirdness of family life

Babette’s Feast - everyone is an artist

Where is the Friends’ House (above) - heroism sometimes demands childlikeness

The Dead - speak what we feel, not what we ought to say

Jesus of Montreal - gospel of the streets

Do the Right Thing - truth of the streets

The Abyss - the love between partners is a microcosm of cosmic love, and vice versa

1990s

To Sleep With Anger - be careful what you invite in

Malcolm X - the evolution of a great life

Fearless - the evolution of a great death

Three Colors Trilogy - coincidence makes the world go round

The Hudsucker Proxy - joy is the best business

Smoke - if you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust?

Lone Star - Forget the Alamo

The Apostle - both sincere and a con man

Kundun - spirituality as the core of responding to suffering

After Life - how death can help us live better

The Straight Story - a brother’s a brother

Ratcatcher - empathy at the margins

Beau Travail - a call for integrated manhood

2000s

Yi-Yi - the whole of life

In the Mood for Love - touching hearts, not hands

Wonder Boys - life is the art

AI Artificial Intelligence - keening for the human

The Royal Tenenbaums - a late redemption is still redemption

Monsoon Wedding - what we owe each other

Mulholland Dr. - fame is a curse

The Village - grief untended can kill

The New World - who gets to tell the story?

The Fountain - do what you love right now, for tomorrow may be too late

Stranger than Fiction - nothing more powerful than a story

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - nothing more powerful than a story

Revanche - a more complete reconciliation

Wall-E - calling us back to ourselves

2010s

Shutter Island - the cost of moral injury

Le Havre - welcoming the stranger

Margaret - the cost of guilt

Holy Motors - what role are you playing?

Stories We Tell - how other people’s narratives shape our own

Cloud Atlas - history repeats until we evolve it

Before Midnight - along with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, one of the great cinematic odes to love and loving conflict

Interstellar - what we call love and what we call physics may be interwoven

Love is Strange - at the center, an unshakeable love

Calvary - facing the darkness

Mr Turner - astonishing art and grubby earthiness

Pride - all just causes come from the same human place

The Salt of the Earth - trauma can be transformed through creativity

Inside Out - it’s complicated

Embrace of the Serpent - shamanic mystery, hidden in the forest, and selflessly given

The Assassin - sometimes it is necessary to reject our mentors

Paterson - the miraculous ordinary

Endless Poetry - a life in art

mother! - a biblical invocation against climate destruction

Wonderstruck - the city as a location for spiritual direction

Maudie - sorrow and love

Faces Places - an intergenerational enlightenment

Blindspotting - a race to overcome racism

Diane - a life worthy of the name

2020s

Wonder Woman 1984 - repentance in action

The Painter and the Thief - true crime treated as sacred

Mass - an impossible healing made possible

Amsterdam - integrated activism

Empire of Light - begin afresh, afresh, afresh

Perfect Days - a whole life in one week

A Thousand and One - holy motherhood

Monica - asks the audience if we are scapegoats, or scapegoaters?

All We Imagine as Light - women wombing wholeness

Joker Folie à Deux - a public apology

Kiss of the Spider Woman - sometimes melodrama is the only way to tell a true story

Sorry, Baby - fragility and strength

What are the movies you love, but the Academy didn’t recognize? More importantly, why do they matter to you?

JOIN US AT THE PORCH GATHERING

We’re five weeks away from The Porch Gathering of Transformative Storytelling, living into a better world through better stories. Our friend Báyò Akomolafe offers provocative guidance in those words about these times - and we aim to take the provocation seriously.

From April 17th-19th at Montreat near Asheville we’ll gather to laugh, learn, sometimes cry, celebrate around the “campfire experience” of transformative storytelling, and gain tools for constructive, respectful, and thoughtful living. We believe mutual recognition matters more than elevating one person over others, and that each human being has a unique creative contribution to make to the world. Everyone is invited to bring what they have, and ask for what they need.

If the stories we tell shape the possibilities we can imagine, then the primary crisis we face is a crisis of storytelling - about who we are, what we’re here for, and ultimately what life itself can be.

Our work at The Porch is forged partly in real suffering, conflict, and trauma - as individuals and in our communities and wider societies. But we also learned creativity, resilience, and the kind of deep love that goes beyond platitudes. And we claim absolute delight at the goodness of life, both as a gift to which all people are invited, and as a challenge to the broken order of things. What we seek to offer is not a panacea or quick fix, but deeply rooted in the history of transformative storytelling, authentic spirituality, and courageous creativity for the common good.

In planning the 2026 Porch Gathering we return to the wisdom of Báyò Akomolafe, especially his beautiful provocation these times are urgent, let us slow down. At the Gathering Báyò will join us for a virtual conversation, and we’ll offer opportunities to explore the poetry of existence, and the embodiment of our doubts and loves. Guides on the journey include writers, poets, counselors, musicians, all of them storytellers - just like you are too.

Perhaps most of all we’ll seek to discover more of what we call the shift from What are we called to do? to How are we called to be?

Our stories often hold us back. The Porch Gathering is a space where better stories come to life.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PORCH GATHERING

The Porch Gathering 2026 Highlights

Pre-Gathering Retreat

Thursday April 16th - Storytelling as Hospitality

Before the Porch Gathering begins you're invited to a retreat focused on welcome itself. Enjoy a wonderful opening meal and informal interaction, leading into taking a day apart on Friday morning and afternoon.

There will be spacious silence, creative contemplation, gifts for mind and body, and an opportunity to learn more about the vision and practice of transformative storytelling.

The Porch Gathering

Friday April 17th - Setting the Table

An Evening of Transformative Storytelling, Community, and a Conversation with Báyò Akomolafe

Saturday April 18th - Going Deeper

Sessions with Irish storyteller and Porch co-founder Gareth Higgins on Transformative Storytelling in the Current Moment, writer Jasmin Pittman on when words fail, leadership guide Micky ScottBey Jones on finding better answers by asking better questions, poet Brian Volck and a provocative panel about poetry and existence, grief counselor Tamara Hanna and community musician Jenna Lindbo, multi-instrumentalist Billy Jonas on The Story of Song & The Song of Story, singer-songwriter and inspirational teacher David LaMotte, and our co-founder educator and spiritual director Brian Ammons.

Sunday April 19th - Sending Forth

A morning focused on how to discern and share more life-giving stories as individuals and in community, at home and in the world, with a closing gathering of depth and connection.

The Porch Gathering is less What are we called to do?, more How are we called to be?

Will you join us?

Learn More at www.theporchgathering.com

Registration is open, and details are at www.theporchgathering.com

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The Porch Gathering is a bit like a retreat, a bit like a festival, and a bit like a conference, but most of all like a chosen family reunion of people who want to discern, co-create, and share the shelter of a better story. We’re less interested in being a “big” event than in the depth of life-giving experience that unfolds over the weekend. We don’t like using scarcity techniques to promote what we’re doing - so instead of giving deadlines and discounts to try to incentivize people to register, I want to say simply this:

If The Porch Gathering calls to you, please take a look at www.theporchgathering.com, and sign up soon. It helps us with planning to know how many folks are coming. If the idea of a weekend of community, creativity, courage and the common good seems like what you need, we’d love to have you with us.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PORCH GATHERING

MORE DETAILS: We gather as a expansive community to laugh, learn, sometimes cry, celebrate and learn around the “campfire experience” of transformative storytelling, and gain tools for constructive, respectful, and thoughtful living. We believe mutual recognition matters more than elevating one person over others, and that each human being has a unique creative contribution to make to a better world. Everyone is invited to bring what they have, and ask for what they need.

We often say that the world isn't falling apart, but the story we're telling about it could use some help. Another way of saying that is that the primary crisis we face is a crisis of storytelling - about who we are, why we're here, what we're here for, and ultimately what life itself can be.

Our work at The Porch is forged partly in real suffering, conflict, and trauma - as individuals and in the societies in which we were born and raised. But we also learned creativity, resilience, and the kind of deep love that goes beyond platitudes or feelings. And we claim absolute delight at the goodness of life, both as a gift to which all people are invited, and as a challenge to the broken order of things. What we seek to offer is not a panacea or quick fix, but deeply rooted in the history of transformative storytelling, authentic spirituality, and courageous creativity for the common good.

Our stories often hold us back. The Porch Gathering is a space where better stories come to life.

Schedule, Speakers & Guides, Accommodation details, and Registration are all at www.theporchgathering.com

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

About twenty months ago a book fell into my lap that I imagine will stay in my mind and heart forever. When people ask me to describe David James Duncan’s novel Sun House I tell them it’s a story about people in the Pacific Northwest, and in Montana, who have something happen to them, and who then do something with it.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise that the thing that happens to them, and the thing that they do about it, might be among the things that each of us most want to have happen to us, right now, and for the rest of our lives. It’s set in what we might call the real world, but it has the courage to envisage a way of being in that world that neither bypasses the brokenness, nor lets itself be dominated by the uninitiated voices of separation, dehumanization, selfishness and greed. It wants to value all lives as of incalculable worth, it honors the incomparable gifts of spirituality - lived relationship with mystery, life as a practice not toward perfection but growth - both growing up and growing down into the metaphorical soil of spirit, wisdom, story and the literal soil without which our hands - and hearts - may appear clean, but will actually just be antiseptic, walled off from authentic experience. Sun House is a story about interdependence - interbeing, actually. It gave me language to describe things I’ve been dancing with for decades. Reading it - and listening to it - gave me more life, or more life to my days.

It’s a source of deep gratitude to me that David James Duncan is becoming a friend of The Porch, and will join us on one of our Ireland retreats this coming June. About half the spaces on that retreat are already taken, so if you’d like to join us on that retreat, now is the time. All the details are at www.irelandretreats.com

David would be among the first to note that none of us are worth more than any of us; and part of what we try to do at The Porch is to nurture a culture of mutual recognition not pedestals, in which every one of us is affirmed in our gifts and callings toward the common good. One of the things Sun House does is to tell a story in which everyone matters.

Today I’m delighted to share a conversation I had with David a few days ago - in it we talk about courage, creativity, the common good, and he shares a truth about how to be in the world at times of crisis. I hope these words offer some shelter, inspiration, and awakening to you.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR IRELAND RETREATS

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID JAMES DUNCAN

CLICK ABOVE TO LISTEN, OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Gareth: So David, I’ve said to you before that Sun House is the story I most want to live in. And when I said that to you a few minutes ago, you had an answer that surprised me.

David: I said it’s the story I would like to live as well.

Gareth: I have a sense that there’s certain kinds of writers who feel like the writing is being done through them in some way. And that kind of feels like what you’re reaching for there. [So] what do you mean when you say it’s a story you’d most like to live in knowing that you wrote it?

David: Because a lot of the time, more than with any other book, I mean, just the sheer amount of time, fourteen years, was huge. But I wrote things in that book that I think are beyond my ability. I think I kind of disappeared. An example would be the Queendom-Come Shards, where Lorilee is receiving prophecy from a lake, from this amazing jade lake that has a lot of limestone under it and was struck by a meteor. There’s an incredibly deep body of water that’s almost like a tube going down toward the center of the earth that was opened. And I was actually using the words that like there’s a magic inhabitant in the center of the earth where it’s, I think, 7,400 degrees Fahrenheit. And yet it’s her home because she is Sophia. She is what the Lûmi call the Gahan - Ka’isht. Well, what I said about her that I really liked was that it is as impossible for Sophia not to be creative. It is impossible for her not to be constantly creative as it is impossible for the sun not to shine.

And well, I like that sentence. I think it’s true. And you know, there have been six great extinctions that we know of. We’ll come back from this one too. I mean, something will, life will, an abundant planet will return. What’s up for grabs is whether humanity will survive in decent numbers.

Gareth: So that line you just said about it’s impossible for Sophia not to be creative - I have this view that the gift and the calling of every single human being is to participate in co-creativity in some way, but most people don’t believe that they are creative people. And I think even most people who are employed in what gets called the creative industries may not think that they are creative people. Knowing that most people are not going to become published authors or, you know, musicians with a recording contract or filmmakers who get to participate in what might be called Creativity with an Uppercase C, what would you say to people who are carrying the burden of thinking I’m not creative because I don’t have a book contract or because I don’t sing in public?

David: I teach a writing workshop [four times a year] that goes from morning on Friday through Sunday evening. It lasts three days. There’s a cottage here just across the driveway from where I’m sitting that perfectly holds eight people, plus Erin [colleague], plus me. So I teach a group of eight people. I’m thinking of these iconic sentences of Mother Teresa. I was looking at those earlier and I’m just going to recite them before I continue. She will sometimes just say these things very calmly and a friend of mine who’s a Trappist monk now, he was with her in Calcutta, on the streets of Calcutta with the Sisters of Mercy and with Mother Teresa and got to know her rather well. One of the things she said that really struck me was When I finally see Jesus, I’ll tell him I loved him in the dark.

[And here’s] another one: May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.

And another one, this is my favorite.

We can do no great things, only small things with great love.

And I’ve found that I can teach eight people in a cottage across the driveway with great love and they feel it. And their responses are so beautiful that I won’t be reciting or I’ll start crying again.

They’re so appreciative and they come from all over the country, Florida, Maine, Virginia, Alaska. And I think it’s fulfilling to Erin and I as it is to them. And it doesn’t feel like teaching.

Gareth: And so do you feel that people have an experience of awakening a creativity that they didn’t know they had or didn’t believe that they had?

David: I’ve had several students who just said flat out I’m not a writer. And then they end up writing quite well. And right in the ad that’s on my website, I say that a lot of times there are people who have not discovered that they’re writers because they’ve never tried to do it creatively. And it turns out they can do it rather well.

Gareth: One of my yearnings is that everybody would know, whether or not they’re a writer, that they have a creative, I guess to use an old word, a charism or a gift within them. And most people just haven’t had it validated or called forth. I think my grandmother, Olga Lambe, I don’t know that she wrote or kept a journal, but every time there was a communion service at her Methodist church in East Belfast, on the Saturday the day before the communion service, she would go down and buy a loaf of sliced white bread and then take a pair of scissors and cut the bread up into tiny little squares. And she would walk down to the church. I went down with her a few times to do this. She would walk down to the church where she had been present on the day they had cut the first sod to build that church in 1957. And in the 80s and early 90s, I would walk down with her sometimes with a plastic bag that had these cut up squares of bread and a bottle of Schloer. Anybody in the UK and Ireland who’s listening to this knows what Schloer is, but if you’re outside the UK and Ireland, Schloer is like red grape juice with bubbles added to it. It was slightly fancy - it was fancier than Coke, and obviously had no alcohol in it. She would bring a bottle of Schloer and she would unlock the back of the little table where they would keep this and she would put it in there and then close it so that the next morning at the church service, the bread and the fake wine would be available. Now, that’s not the only thing she did in her life. But honestly, when I think about that, there was an art to her doing it. I think she would never have thought of herself as a creative person. And I regret if she never had that validated within her, you know, a necessary, imaginative gift to a community.

OK, so I would love it if you if you would read what might seem unusual for people to listen to. I think that one of the things about Sun House is even the acknowledgments section at the back of the book is a story in itself. And there’s part of that first page of acknowledgments that I’d love you to read. I’d love people to hear it and for us to to talk about what you’re saying there.

David: Acknowledgements in Four Stories. Seventeen years ago, in a world in which the problems facing humanity and every living thing had overwhelmed our politics and many a politician’s sanity, I came to feel the world situation is so darkly mythic, epic, overwhelming that only a collectively mythic and epic response stood a chance of righting the countless wrongs.

But though I’d seen countless op-eds calling for a change of consciousness if humanity is to survive, I’d seen zero op-ed descriptions of what this consciousness looks, feels, tastes, sounds, and lives like as it addresses inescapable biological and spiritual realities with the love, truthfulness, and justice they demand. This impasse set me dreaming of an outpouring of stories in what the praise poet Anne Porter called an altogether different language. I was suddenly attracted to tales that felt like walking El Camino in Spain, where it’s simply ordinary to befriend total strangers taking the same walk. We’re like a hundred day spiritual retreat in a place far from our species raging in asphalt and fumes, which at age nineteen I did in a mountain fastness I can still summon by simply closing my eyes.

I kept quiet about my new literary efforts, figuring many would consider me mad to attempt something so potentially optimistic in a time so dark. But as Mae Sarton once said, and I only know Sarton thanks to Maria Popova’s splendid blog The Marginalian, there is no place more intimate than the spirit alone.

Soothed again and again by that very intimacy, I began to marvel at how many of my friends still believed spiritual forces can be summoned with mythic, mystical, or poetic language sincerely said, because we’ve seen it done, or have once or twice done it ourselves, and the stories begin to come. Then they begin to intertwine in ways that increase their potency, and they didn’t stop coming for sixteen years when Sun House was at last complete.

Upon learning the manuscript was 360,000 words long, some of my friends laughed and asked who had time for what even my esteemed editor called this beautiful behemoth. In an age of governance by tweets and news shelled out by logarithms, while even the logarithms are rendered nonsensical by the invasion of clickbait and ads, my reply, “everybody puking sick of tweet governance and ad prostituted logarithms,” didn’t appease the skeptics. But as it turns out, everyone in these acknowledgments not only gave Sun House time, they thanked me for what it gave them in return, leading me to want to thank them, not with a rote list of their names, but with the brand of words I love best, stories.

I’ll just add that the students that come to these little workshops, something’s changed in the last couple of years. They’ve all read Sun House. So there’s this gigantic conversation underlying the conversations we’re having ⁓ that feels very present in the room.

Gareth: I’m looking forward to being part of conversations like that when you come with us to Ireland this summer. OK, lots of things jump out at me there. Only an epic and mythic response can meet the moment. That’s my paraphrase. And I guess it was twenty years ago or so that you were first having these thoughts that only an epic and a mythic response can meet the moment where I guess we would say there’s a bleakly epic bleakly mythic dominating story. I always think it’s a bit like Godzilla kind of just rampaging through the land. Now your response is not to kind of imagine another Godzilla who’s there to decapitate the bad Godzilla with more dominance [although] the response is epic and, and, and mythic.

And the two questions that are in my mind, first of all, is if twenty years ago you thought things were bad, like, I think a lot of us feel like, goodness gracious, we were concerned, scared, angered, despairing, ready for something to change and willing to participate in that change two decades ago.

And then it feels like two things have happened at once in those two decades, that lots of things have gotten worse. And I like to call it a frontlash rather than a backlash, that the energy of desire for transformation toward the common good and toward, love this word that I think, Thich Nhat Hanh coined of Interbeing that goes far, far [further] than interdependence. To me, it’s, it’s a sense of ever increasing union, not just with other human beings, but with the entire ecosystem. It seems like both things are happening at the same time. What do you think?

David: Yeah, I think the only administration I can think of that was as destructive as this one was the one Abe Lincoln oversaw during the Civil War. The loss of life, you know, was gigantic.

I can’t remember the exact number, but just at Antietam, one battle, I walked that battlefield with Barry Lopez and an amazing thing happened. We walked up to a cannon and a Robin shot between our heads, like right between our heads and went up the cannon barrel. And Barry walked over after she flew away and peeked inside and she had laid seven robin egg blue cannonballs inside that cannon. And it was a cannon that was going to produce a weapon called a robin, a variety of thrush that would travel farther than any weapon we could ever in its life would travel unbelievable distances and do amazing things. That was one of the more enjoyable walks I ever took that day with Barry on the battlefield.

22,700, I think, is the number of soldiers that were killed.

Gareth: So robins don’t have to be metaphors. They can just be robins. And I sometimes think actually when we try to use metaphor, metaphor needs to be handled with care because sometimes the literal fact is more than enough on its own. And with that caveat in mind, where do you see metaphorical robins right now?

David: Well, I walk a hillside where there’s a 900 foot elevation gain and loss in a two and a half mile walk that I take every day. Something I see often up there that blows my mind are Northern Harriers. They are big predators. They have this beautiful white on their rump and they glide almost without a wing beak, just really following the contour of the land and they will suddenly just do a flip and they’re flying in the opposite direction and then they pounce and they get a vole almost every time. They make that incredible move and it’s just so gymnastic for such a big bird to be able to fly that deftly and that deadly. It’s a skill that voles wish they didn’t have. And to me that could be used as a metaphor for lots of things, but so many things in the natural world to this day, despite how reduced it is, are so incredible and so beautiful to watch, so beautiful to understand if you’ve really checked them out for years. I’m getting up there in years. I’ve been around for a long time. It doesn’t need to be a metaphor because what it’s doing is so beautiful, so skilled. Why add literary techniques to that, to just describe what happens is satisfying?

Gareth: Thank you. Well, at the risk of sounding like I’m responding in opposition, I’m not. This is just kind of an allied thought. I think I read somewhere that Jim Harrison encouraged you to try to turn into a river. Am I getting that right?

David: He ended up in one of his poems - and he told me this too - he said he wanted to finish his life disguised as a creek. And he talked about joining the flow at night and swallowing himself endlessly. And Jim is associated with some rather famous meals. I think Jim could swallow himself!

I was very fond of that man. Boy, he was fun to be with. The way I put it in a little essay about him, when he died, once you spent time with Jim, he just exuded genius. But I said, he also had incredible problems. And I feel that his problems were also geniuses.

I don’t think Jim would argue with that.

Gareth: So help me understand that last piece. First of all, I’m feeling this sense of, the place where I’m sitting has a lot of windows. I just literally saw a bird just fly past the window just as I turned to the right there. I’m really drawn to the idea of putting a consciously chosen force-field between me and the impulse to metaphorize everything I see.

I just enjoy the birds for being birds at least, at least some of the time, at least some of the time. I’ve often thought about Mary Oliver’s astonishing and repeatedly recited poem that ends with what will you do with your one wild and precious life? And I think about how often I’ve heard that poem recited and how rarely I’ve been in a conversation in which people have actually felt empowered to answer the question. What will you do with your one wild and precious life? And I would imagine that Mary Oliver in the next life, wherever she is now, is wanting people to read the poem, listen to the poem, but let the poem work on you. And I think this goes back to my grandmother and to other folks who have not had their own creativity validated. I want to say to people you are entitled, you are actually entitled to ask this question of yourself. You do not have to be “a poet” to ask poetic questions or to feel like you deserve to ask yourself, what am I going to do? That my life is wild and precious too. And at the same time, these birds, I mean, there’s loads of them flying around the window at the moment. There’s a time to just let them be birds.

David: I have a poem by Rumi in my hand that is perfect affirmation to what you just said. It’s called Love Dogs.

One night a man was crying, Allah, Allah. His lips grew sweet with the praising until a cynic said, so I’ve heard you calling out, have you ever gotten any response? The man had no answer to that. He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick green foliage. Why did you stop praising? Khidr asked. Because I’ve never heard anything back. Khidr says, this longing you express is the return message. The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master. That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.

Gareth: So you say in that first page of the acknowledgments - and you’ve already illustrated it - you say the brand of words I love best: stories. Do you remember what story or stories touched you first?

David: Yeah, I was seven years old in the second grade. And the teacher invited us all to write a story. And we had been writing for less than a year. But she invited us to write a story. And we all had this oversized green pencils that were in public schools in those days. I started writing a story that was trying to solve the riddle.

I knew that Christmas was Jesus’ birthday and I knew that he had an invisible father who could not be seen. And how does the invisible father get a present to his son, Jesus? And I think the next sentence in the story is, Jesus ran to the house and ate his breakfast. And then he went out. He did exactly what I would have done, what I have done. He went out into wilderness and his sheep, her name was Deborah, but the way it was spelled was D-E-B-O-R-E-H-A. And so I pronounced it Diborja. So when I read the story later, it was a little embarrassing. Diborja. Anyway, Diborja has gone out in the night and had a lamb. So that’s the present. And then Jesus remembers that the previous Christmas when he was six, he found a sparrow with a broken wing. And so it’s just a continuation. If you sit home like a child of divorce, being grumpy on the couch, nothing good can happen. If you go out in a wild place untrammeled by man, ⁓ something good might happen.

That’s been true for me thousands of times, especially on rivers and mountain ridge lines. I mean, [I spent] 100 days at 7,500 feet in the Wallowa Mountains when I was nineteen, just joy after joy.

Gareth: I think a lot of us, when we look back at the stories that entered our lives in formative years, that have then stayed with us, that there’s some element of like, nothing has changed and nothing needed to change. I’ve just gone deeper into this same core thing that was revealed to me. And I don’t know what the chicken and egg is.

I’ve often shared with people that when I was eight years old, my mother took me to see the movie about Gandhi. And, you know, like, why do you take an eight year old to see Gandhi? I asked her, I mean, that’s that’s over 40 years ago. I asked her a couple of years ago, why did you take me to see Gandhi? And she said, because I thought it was important for you to know about this great man and all the wonderful things he did. And I thought, all right, it’s it’s not rocket science.

But what that did for me - it did at least three things. The first thing was actually a recognition that movies could be more than cartoons and so-called kids’ movies, which were all I had seen up to that point in my life. The second was this thing called India. I had heard the word India, but I didn’t know what India was at eight years old in Belfast. There was a sense of this expanded world and seeing this place that to the degree that Richard Attenborough’s illustration of that place is accurate. And I know you have thoughts about that that are really striking in Sun House, but there was this sense of like, there’s another world out there. And there’s these people who are so different from me. And at the same time, we’re exactly the same. And then the third thing was it was probably the first portrayal of courageous activism for the common good that I had encountered, that there was this one man and these people around him who tried to contribute to ending something wrong and embodying something good, and that there was a spiritual heart to this as well. Now when I was eight years old I don’t think I would have articulately laid it out like that, but I have a very, very strong memory of going to that cinema, a very strong memory of seeing that film and of being changed by it. And those three or four dimensions - first that movies can be meaningful and that art can be meaningful at a metaphysical level. The second thing being that there is a bigger world out there in which everything is different and everyone is yet the same. The third being people in throughout history, some people have given themselves over to the common good and you can do that too. And the fourth being there’s this thing called spirituality, which is actually woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s not separate, you know, religion and science, politics and culture are not separate entities. They’re all woven in together. That that kind of came into my consciousness in 1983 when I was eight years old, right?

And it’s not a badge of honor. It just landed on me, just like your Jesus story landed on you when you were seven. It’s no longer a matter of concern to me what the chicken and egg is. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is this kind of became the story inside me and the story that captivates me, compels me. It’s the story I measure myself against and find myself lacking.

Hopefully no longer do I beat myself up over how much I’m failing. I just experienced life as an opportunity to continue growing.

David: And live Mother Teresa’s We can do no great things, only small things with great love. That’s my guide when I teach.

Gareth: And I think what’s astonishing about that statement is the intricate focus of one life; and small things done greatly is actually an astonishingly vast thing to say. I don’t want to get too utilitarian about it, but it’s achievable. It’s achievable to do small things with great love. It’s achievable. What are some of the other stories that wove into your life that kind of felt like a mirror for you?

David: I don’t know why it moved me so much, there was a movie about John Paul Jones, the Revolutionary War commander of the very few ships that the colonies owned, whereas the Brits had the British Navy … And when his ship was sinking, he yelled something very close to We have not yet begun to fight. They just jumped off the ship onto … the ship that had pulled up alongside of them and sunk them with cannonballs or whatever. For some reason, I guess just because it seemed impossible.

So I’d had this sinking feeling and then suddenly they have a better ship than they had before because they’re crazy mofos.

Gareth: So what is it about We’ve not even begun to fight - knowing that you’re not an advocate of violence?

David: Yeah, not a combat kind of activism, but I’ve done some really big projects as an activist, take on a Canadian mining corporation that was trying to put in a sign at Heat Bleach Gold Mine on the Big Blackfoot River. And I broke that story. And it took a year and a half out of my life because I kept feeling I had not yet begun to fight because we weren’t getting anywhere for a while. When I knew that we were going to achieve victory. was like a bunch of ranchers were worried about the mine because all these activists, like my friends, various river protection organizations, were just watching the Blackfoot, like, hawks to see how much water was being used. So suddenly the ranchers were being watched, and they hated that. They liked the freedom that they used to have. And so they joined the flight. And when it reached the point where the Cowboys were for us and the Indians were for us and the Rotary Club of Missoula was for us, I knew we were gonna win.

Gareth: So what’s a fight or a tactic or a path that you feel maybe right now we haven’t yet really begun it?

David: Adoration of the planet and the fact that we got nothing without this beautiful earth and so many people are treating it with unbelievable blind selfishness and greed and wreaking havoc. there are technologies now that are so horrible that I’m not going to dwell on that. [But when it] comes close to me, then I do take action. The second really big project I got involved in, wrote a, Speed wrote a book in seven weeks. Rick Bass took on Montana politics. I took on what happened when these mega loads from Asia entered the Columbia River and came all the way up four wild and scenic rivers that Exxon Mobil was blocking and thought we should be grateful to them because they were bringing lots of tar sands gasoline down to the states and that’s still going on. There are gigantic tar sands oil trains that go by the nearest railroad track to where I’m sitting now.

The story I told was the creation story of the Nimiipuu, the Nez Perce people. It’s called The Heart of the Monster. And it’s about a monster that lived in the previous age of the world that just ran around devouring every creature that lived. so Coyote got himself cleaned up and he was like, Yoo-hoo, monster. the monster ate Coyote and ⁓ as Coyote was going down his gullet, he passed Grizzly Bear. Grizzly Bear like roared at him and Coyote just punched a Grizzly Bear in the nose and that’s why Grizzly Bears have a short snout. And then someone stepped on Beaver and flattened his tail - you know, all the traits that various animals have.

Coyote is countering them, but he also brought flints and obsidian blades. And so he just went down into the monster’s gut and started sawing at the heart to get it to fall. It seems like there was a big opening inside the monster and the tribes have committed, it’s a very strange place because what the kind of basalt we have here is columnar basalt, which is very geometrical. And the heart of the monster is a huge pile of basalt rubble. It would have filled a ship. It would have filled a battleship. And it’s just lying helter-skelter. so it seems like something from space or something dropped this huge thing and broke it to pieces. that place where the monster’s heart is, is the creation point of the Nespers people. So it’s both, I always felt the story, the myth was both a prophecy and historic, know, ancient history, but both things. I still feel that. And I think the monster now is the corporations and I think at some point that’s going to change.

Gareth: I don’t want to lose something. He said it a couple of minutes ago, but by the kind of overture for what you just said, I think it really, I want to sit with it and I’m sure there’s people listening. want to sit with it as well. When I, when I asked you, what’s the, what’s the fight that we have not yet really even begun. Right. And your answer was adoration of the planet.

Adoration of the planet. It’s not, that’s not a typical answer to what is the fight we need to participate in. And I think you speak to something that has been for a lot of us. We maybe haven’t had a language for it yet. Some of us often quote the Franciscan teacher, Richard Rohr, who says the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better, because oppositional energy always recreates itself. And that doesn’t mean that we should never engage in oppositional tactics. Sometimes we do need to stand in front of a bulldozer. Sometimes we do need to snatch someone’s hand away from the fire. But probably to a factor of 10 more than that, we need to step in to the creative thing. And I want to, I want to, I mean,

You may not even need to say more about it, but I just wanted to acknowledge that your response to the question about what fight have we not begun yet? Your answer was adoration.

David: Yeah, there’s so many people define themselves in ways where there’s no spirituality at all. And I had a terrible, wonderful experience, both things. When we first moved to Montana, Adrian and I were in a, we had an old canoe and we were taking our daughters, when Celia was three years and 11 months old and Ellie was a year and a half old and we were floating down the Bitterroot River and and Celia noticed well it was right near us on the bank a doe had been shot by somebody and run down to the river and its head was underwater and its body was very beautiful lying there but its eyes were had become a cloudy blue.

And Celia looked at it for a long time and then turned to Adrian and said, is it dead? And Adrian said yes. And Adrian has wonderful doe-like eyes and so does Celia.

Next, Celia asked Adrian, are you gonna die? And Adrian said, yes. She’s a truth teller. And then she said, is daddy gonna die? She’s like getting desperate now, know, grasping for straws. And Adrian said, yes. And then came the fatal, am I gonna die? And Ellie was shooting tears into the river.

They were traveling like two feet. She was crying so hard. And ⁓ Adrian turned to me and ⁓ we always had this difference. Adrian is uncomfortable about sloppy talk about spirituality and would rather just skip it. And I won’t go on too much more about Adrian, but she turned to me. And she’s a wonderful sculptor. She makes these gorgeous sculptures of women covered with textures of wild creatures or certain, like she makes beautiful women out of honeycomb that look like something that bees made and incredible pieces. But anyway, she just looked at me and she looked like a sculptor herself. She’s like, our little girl is devastated.

I don’t know what to say to her. So, word man, you’re on.” And I said, “Celia, look at me. Please look at me. I know that doe’s body looks very sad and it’s too bad. They run down to the river when they’ve been injured or chased by a predator and it looks sad, but incredibly, it’s way less sad than it seems, because that doe has left its body, which is wrecked. And it’s traveling around something Tibetans call the clear light now, and it’s looking for another creature to inhabit. And the same thing happens when a logger cuts down a tree. There’s some essence of tree that becomes something new. I mean Celia turned into a different kind of sculpture. She just looked like the title of the sculpture was, whew, that was a freaking close one. And and ⁓ a short time later we were we were sitting on our back deck. We had a fifteen year old Chesapeake Bay Retriever who was on its last legs and a Dalmatian that was healthy.

But as we were just sitting there, Celia was just trying to get the mathematics of what might be the order in which our family of four dies. And so of course she wanted me to die first. And I said, I’m not dying. Only my body’s dying. I’m not going anywhere. But at some point in our conversation, Clara let out this global disaster of a fart. Celia turns to me with a perfectly straight face and says, Clara is teaching us to believe in the invisible. I felt like she metabolized the word soul pretty darn well.

Gareth: Well, I’m just going to say adoration again. Adoration is the word of the day. It really should be the word of the era. It’s the it’s the invitation. We have these questions in in the community that that hosts these conversations, the porch community with the we call them porch circle questions. Sometimes people actually literally gather in circles and they ask these four questions. We we’ve found them to be tried and tested ways of helping people connect with each other and and and I think with a with a richer sense of of life and and meaning - and I’m skeptical of the word purpose because it can feel too much like industry and productivity. But maybe meaning is enough. But before I ask you those questions, would you read this first quotation that you have in Sun House called Magic Words? ⁓ Because I, you know, this is how the book starts. And I think it’s one of the many things in the book that is absolutely true.

David: The speaker is named Nalungiaq and she is an Iglulik female elder of the 19th century. Magic words are the most difficult to get hold of, but they are also the strongest. Magic words or magic prayers are fragments of old songs or apparently meaningless sentences heard in the days when animals could talk and remembered ever since by being passed from one generation to the next. In the very earliest time when all spoke the same language, words were potent and the mind had mysterious powers. A word might suddenly come alive and what people needed to happen would happen. Nobody could explain it. That’s just the way it was.

Gareth: I wonder if one of the reasons that magic words are the most difficult to get hold of is because lots of us use more words than we should. And I suspect people who know me are kind of hopefully gently laughing at me right now because I come from a culture in which we’re sort of genetically predisposed to use lots of words. But assuming that there are such things as magic words and that if we really allow word and spirit to dance with each other. Here’s four questions that you’ve generously agreed to try to respond to. The first one, David, is what are some of the things that you’re finding life-giving these days?

David: Well, I think the title of this conversation could be adoration. To actually spend the time, I’m at a window here with a huge ponderosa pine tree next to me. And five months ago, a little Douglas squirrel started harvesting maple keys and pine cones and all kinds of things. And it’s been doing that every day for five months.

Sometimes it has to run off a red squirrel, another kind. It’s introduced species here, but the little native Douglas squirrel. When he runs up that tree, he or she, he runs up the tree using these tiny little nub branches ⁓ and he rises up as fast as a flicker can fly up the same tree. He’s unbelievably skilled at running around in the in the heights of it. It’s a 100 foot tall Ponderosa pine and this little guy is the master of it. Anything like that, you know, I already mentioned the Northern Harriers that I love to watch do their kill dives. In the spring sometimes we get a few Sandhill cranes that are migrating back to Alaska from California and they’ll stay a few days. The year of COVID, they actually nested. was on a different, I was living on a farm then, and they nested in this huge field next to the Bitterroot River, right below where I was working every day so I could watch sand hills. And there were a lot of, a lot of coyotes. There was a choir of them that was singing every night and I was worried about them, but then I found out cranes have a dagger beak and they know how to use it. So just the variety and these seemingly opposed creatures. You know, a young Sandhill crane is called a colt, as if it were a horse [and] that choir of young coyotes that were just learning how to howl together, it sounded like 25 animals, but it was probably fifteen. The colts have such opposite needs, but they were able to live in harmony for that whole summer. Other things happened too. The trumpeter swans were flying right through the cottonwood trees, right outside my window some days. They have a ten-foot wingspan. And you just see the 10-foot wingspan on a trumpeter. And if you’re not experiencing adoration there’s something wrong with you.

Gareth: So if adoration is what you’re finding life giving, what are one or two things that you’re finding not life giving? we always want to, you know, there’s a caveat to that question. These first two questions, what are you finding life giving? What are you not finding life giving? They’re adaptations of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a highfalutin name, but a down to earth guy, deep, deep, deep, deep, into the earth. And the way, as you know, the way he would ask those questions is what are some of the sources of consolation in your life and what are some of the sources of desolation in your life? And I think often when we ask each other, how are you doing? Like these days, I never know what to say when somebody says, how are you doing? It’s become sort of a synonym for hello.

I like to speak about what I’m finding to be sources of consolation, what I’m finding to be sources of desolation. But to talk about the source or to talk about the thing that I’m finding not life-giving is not the same thing as to give myself over to the despair. It’s simply a way of describing it and naming it so that people can know me better, maybe that we can see each other better. It’s not the same thing as feeling that despair. think sometimes be a way of releasing some of it. If you would share with us, what are some of the things you find that are not life giving to you?

David: Anything having to do with national politics at this time. America is just taking huge hits. I think we’re also probably bankrupt. And ⁓ it’s just dreadful to spend much time on that. The Washington Post sends their headlines and I will read those headlines in like two and a half, three minutes and that’s it for me and politics that day. I’m not effective if I’m thinking what can I do to stop mumping trust as I like to call them ⁓ and the answer is nothing you know and if they could hear me they would just disagree with everything I’m saying and so why think that way? And I just feel sorry for journalists because man, read poets, not journalists. I mean, they have to tell you what insane people are doing and that’s a rough job. And I feel for them.

Gareth: I think one of the things I find not life-giving is the sense of before I even think about something, like let’s call it the news, which I think, you know, it’s a kind of a false description. It should really be called the olds because what shows up in the news is repetitious spectacle about awful things and how to face it. And without being an irresponsible person or ignoring it or bypassing it. And at the same time, falling under its spell is an absolute distraction that not only is an unpleasant experience for me subjectively, it totally takes me away from what I might be doing and living that could make a contribution to the world. with that kind of in mind, the third question we like to ask is, what is a better story that you feel called to? Or what are some of the energies in the world that you feel compelled to claim more of for yourself and for the others whose lives you do touch?

David: A hero to me is Thomas Merton. And ⁓ I’ve read a lot of his work, but ⁓ what I want to get at is that Merton had an adage that I really took to heart when I was young, that said spiritual secrecy is the protector of spiritual integrity. And I found a spiritual master that I adore when I was 16 years old, and he’s been in place for me ever since. And no, I won’t tell anybody what his name is or where he lives. But it’s unbelievably consoling to me.

He’s written some of most beautiful prayers imaginable and with kind of universal appeal. So he really is someone who at some point, probably in a pretty distant past, allowed God to break his heart so completely that the whole world came in.

it’s just, yeah, it’s just that I feel bad mentioning someone that I’m not comfortable naming, but I also feel like it protects the integrity of the relationship that we are in, even though he’s not in a visible body. It’s an intense relationship. And I repeat his prayers. I know a lot of songs I can sing about him.

And he’s got a lot of followers, but he’s still laying low, which I like.

Gareth: Well, mean, I think you’re talking about like, you know, a better story and it’s a rare story, at least in what used to be called Western or certainly Eurocentric culture, that some secrets are matters of life and death and that there’s an invitation or an encouragement to the rest of us that there might be some, there probably are some things that are so precious that they will only grow deeper to the degree that they are held very, very close.

David: I would say many of the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh fall in that category. He met MLK. I would like to have heard that conversation. Maybe it exists somewhere, I don’t know. But those men are highly advanced souls.

Gareth: And they didn’t always publish everything they thought.

David: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Gareth: Yeah, not because they were hiding it, but because the depth like is so I mean, I think that’s a profound thought that you have a you have a teacher and I’m not gonna I’m not gonna try to get you to say it seems to me that the depth of what of what that relationship has done for you is deeply related to the degree that it has been held in the hermitage of your own heart.

David: Yeah. And it - it is almost impossible for me to despair.

Gareth: Wow. Tell us the secret of that.

David: Well, there are people in the world who might know everything. You know, I’ve got Edward Abbey sitting over here saying, God is love, not bloody likely. That’s Ed’s cross to bear, but he also had an integrity about things too. And he was a person of substance, [who] just had a rustic personality. We don’t share the same sense of humor, but he also made me laugh when I was reading The Monkey Wrench Gang. He has a character who he establishes that his nickname is Rudolph the Red. [Something] like 300 pages later, he’s walking in the desert with this woman and he says it’s going to start raining even though the skies are clear. And she asks how he can know that. And he says, this is the whole reason he had that name. Rudolph the Red Nose Reign, dear.

Gareth: So I’m not sure that that is a there’s a direct through line between you saying it’s almost impossible for you to despair, and that there are some people who may know everything. [Laughs] Along with, along with Rudolph the red, why is it almost impossible for you to despair?

David: I had an older friend, he’s still my friend. He’s in New Mexico now, but he lived, he went to Stanford University and we avidly wrote letters back and forth to each other. And one of the letters he wrote to me, he had this sentence, I refuse to kiss the rancid ass of despair. And I think that’s not a bad description of what we’re doing when we surrender to despair.

And I don’t want to be kissing no rancid ass, that’s all. Sorry, it’s not more profound than that.

Gareth: All right, last question. And in a sense, this is the heart of all of our conversation. We like to ask people, what would you like to offer others? And also, if there was support that you need, and I mean, God knows all of us need some support. What would you ask for for yourself?

David: I have wonderful support. My friend who is friends with Cesar Chavez and Mother Teresa, he’s a Trappist monk and he lives a day’s drive from me, so it’s a haul. I I know this man so well. We went to India together. ⁓ I met him on the very first day of college. ⁓ And ⁓ we’ve just been like that ever since.

Most of what we do when we walk around the Abbey where he lives ⁓ is make each other laugh ⁓ because the world is just so strange.

Gareth: Laughter is part of the antidote to the rancid ass kissing.

David: Well, just to know someone that well, for as long as we’ve had, more than half a century, we’ve been very, very close. And ⁓ he’s my spiritual brother, there’s no other way to put it. I mean, it seems to me like this, where you experience support in your life is in deep relationship, enduring conversation. And somebody said to me once to learn to take life seriously without taking yourself too seriously.

My days are solitary if I work a full day and I almost always do. But in the evening, ⁓ there’s a couple of restaurants I frequent. And I mean like really frequent because I just want to be around the sound of the bizarre noise and meaning that just even little chunks of conversation that I’m picking up from people who don’t know I’m listening to them. But I really enjoy that and a bunch of the people at this restaurant have become dear friends. I love both my last two landlords. And that’s a little odd. They’re wonderful people.

Gareth: So what’s one thing you’d want to anyone listening if there’s only one thing you can say to them?

David: Just one thing. What I told my daughter, the soul is indestructible. You’re in it for the long term in ways that you don’t know about yet. But a friend of mine, Tom Crawford, has a wonderful book called Be Broken to Be Whole, Book of Poems. And one of the things he says in that book is that when people die,

The interesting thing about dying is you’re not dead. ⁓ So you get another chance of some kind. ⁓ I think karma is real. I would be careful, you know, try to be a moral person, try to be kind all the time, try to be compassionate all the time. ⁓ Things crop up the same way you see a cool bird where you could be showing a person who maybe looks a little devastated some kindness and I try to do that.

Gareth: We’re going to Ireland together in the summer. There’ll be a bunch of people coming with us. The porch community takes folks to Ireland where I’m from every summer to have a bit of a deep dive into the landscape, the culture, the story of conflict transformation and peace building and reimagining our lives and our place in the world. And I’m just overjoyed that you’re coming with us. I’m interested in what you might be looking forward to about that.

David: Well, I look forward to meeting people, new people who are interested enough in this thing to travel a hell of a long ways.

I have lots of stories if you ever want stories. A lot of them are in the mood of ⁓ we can do no great things, only small things with great love. And in the stories I like to tell, a lot of times the story will be half dark and then some unbelievably beautiful cause of joy will arise unexpectedly. And I like sharing stories like that because they’ve happened to me.

Gareth: David, thanks for this conversation. It’s a beautiful, enriching experience for me. Thank you.

David: You’re welcome. We’re going to have fun in June.

PS: When I asked David if there was an extract of Sun House that he especially likes to read aloud, he offered the following scene, emblematic of the magic of this extraordinary book. I have found so much grounded hope in reading Sun House - a wildly imaginative embodiment of the consciousness, community, and creativity that The Porch aims for. I hope you’ll listen to David’s words, I hope you’ll consider joining us in Ireland in June (www.irelandretreats.com), and if you can’t make it that far, the April Porch Gathering in North Carolina awaits.

And now, David James Duncan reads from Sun House. May you find some of the enormous shelter it offers.

It feels appropriate to type a reminder of the last line of that extract: God I love the things that man says, and feels…

Please find more of the astonishing Sun House at www.davidjamesduncan.com/sun-house; and if you want more transformative storytelling, in a spirit of courage, creativity, and community, we’d be glad to have you.

JOIN US AT THE PORCH GATHERING IN APRIL

And if you want to explore some of the landscape of transformative storytelling and the things that matters most, please consider joining us at The Porch Gathering in April - details at www.theporchgathering.com

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PORCH GATHERING

PS: I’m doing a thing about initiation thresholds, next Monday night; you’re invited. Details at the end below.

LONGER VERSION: I once asked a simple question of a priest known for his tendency to both courage and entertaining curmudgeonliness:

What is the solution to all the world’s problems?

I told you it was a simple question, not an easy one.

It was twenty-five years ago, at a card table in the back garden of a South Belfast rectory, on a sunny-but-cold day (my favorite). I was twenty-five years myself, and now I’m fifty, and the good priest is in another world, but his answer will stay with me forever.

The answer is the hard gospel.

Uh-oh, I thought. Sounds like the last thing we need - for one thing, the gospel as it manifested in the culture he and I shared was often vastly in tension with the good news it was supposed to represent. Some of the rhetoric was hopeful, but it was accompanied with things that definitely deserve to be called trappings. There were kind people, communities of belonging, and sometimes courageous action for the common good; but the cultural mores of those communities often overlapped with life-draining, body-denying, spirit-burdening demands to fit into strict, dehumanizing roles that just left many of us feeling less-than, most-of-the-time. The hard gospel sounded like something even worse. But I liked this guy, and I figured that anyone with such a curmudgeonly hue might surprise me, so I asked him to elaborate.

What’s the hard gospel? Well it’s not that you don’t sleep with your girlfriend before you get married, and it’s not that you don’t say Fuck. It’s that you love God, and you love your neighbor as yourself. End (he banged the table) of (he banged it again) story (one more time).

Like I said, it will stay with me forever.

I know that “God” means different things to different people, probably eight billion things to eight billion people, but in the world in which I find my belonging, it refers to something like the Ground of Being itself, the deeper, larger, ineffable Reality of Things, which can reveal itself in the form of a Person, a Creator, a Friend, a Father-Mother, closer than skin yet stretching beyond the imaginable cosmos. And of course that means God can be found in the image of an infinitely loving bloke with a beard sitting on a cloud, endlessly adoring us, drawing us into more authentic versions of what are made from - the dream of love itself.

The most integrated fusions of what is usually called “science” and “religion” (which are really just two unnecessarily separatist words for “knowledge” or “experience”) assert the same thing: the story of the universe is the story of the evolution of love; depth increases union; stories shape our encounter with reality; and whether or not you “believe” in “God” as commonly understood, or whether or not you practice what most people think of as “faith”, this love, this union and the yearning for it is what brought you into being, and continues to invite you into becoming.

In other words, as I’ve said here before, whether you think we’re made from stardust or in the image of the Divine, or both, what this really means is that we are made from, and for, love.

One way to describe the way things really are is to say that at the core of existence is light, which is a manifestation of love, and love is radically stronger than hostility. Love is not naive - at least not in the sense that word is typically intended. For love is surely uncynical, but it’s not unknowing. And it’s not always soft and tender - there’s a reason that our word “courage” is related to a Latin word that evokes wholeheartedness. Bravery - even the kind of bravery required of protective warriors who go into fires, but don’t start them - is part of love.

You don’t need to take my word for it - all the insight of spiritual traditions, all the clearest findings of what is conventionally called science, all the experiences of our forebears who lived (and sometimes died) for the common good assert the same thing: Love, creatively stretching yourself for the sake of the good, is stronger than death. And the foundational instruction we have inherited from people who have embodied the permeation of sanity, wisdom, and imagination is one we may have first heard on a grandparent’s knee. It’s been with us all our lives, and lots of lip service is paid to it, but rarely does it show up as a cultural norm, never mind a basic practice of being human.

Devote yourself to love, love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you.

These words, so over-spoken yet under-embraced, so transcendentally true yet ordinarily ignored, so obviously the essential start, mid, and end point of life yet usually relegated to the realm of fluffy ideas that work for “heroes” but not the rest of us, or don’t really work at all, but should be considered no more “realistic” than poetry.

It’s not that you don’t say Fuck, nor that you must fit into restrictive and repressive cultural norms that owe more to Victorian-era notions of etiquette and social hierarchy rather than what makes for a life worthy of the name.

It’s that you commit to an ever-evolving journey into what my friend Dan Snyder calls the Abyss of God’s Love - a deepening discovery that the foundation of life itself is love, and the pinnacle of life’s experience is to be enveloped by that love.

These is not a fluffy idea. The more I learn about the people I would consider heroic - Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Harvey Milk, James Baldwin, Winona LaDuke, Jane Goodall, Joanna Macy, John Hume, and many more whose names are not widely known, but they are, in fact, everywhere - the more I see that they were, at their best, animated by love. Even when anger and resistance to injustice were present, these were manifestations of the assertion that they, and they people they were advocating for, and even their enemies, were worthy of love.

There is a profound need in the current moment to assert that love is as strong as the most human people have revealed it to be.

There is a profound need to grab hold of love, mix it in the dirt and beauty of both everyday life and dramatic surprises; to insert talk of love beneath the surfaces of polite company, political conversation, polarized communities.

Saying Love out loud in public should be as powerful as saying Fuck in church.

Love should transcend the false dichotomy of sacred and profane.

Love is the substance of life, and it deserves to be treated as more important than literally anything else - the most serious thing, the most joyful, the most worthy of attention, the most notable characteristic, the most desirable ambition, the best use of time, the highest reason for doing anything, the most effective fuel for courageous action, the bedrock source for wisdom, the greatest gift.

Want to be a better person? Learn about love.

Want to heal disintegrated masculinity? Learn about love.

Want to make a difference in a world of heavy shadows? Love.

Want to face, accept, and repair your own story of yourself? The path is the same, and always has been.

Love travels through the mycelial network of ideas and ecosystem, and you are its bearer as much as anyone you admire or hope to emulate.

It’s a fucking miracle, and better than even those words can convey.

So are you.

And today I want to make my New Year’s Resolution - a better resolution, I imagine, than losing weight or making more money, or keeping a journal every day, or getting more organized.

I resolve that this year I will daily open myself to the hard and beautiful truth that the most important thing, the foundation of life, and the pinnacle of aspiration is to devote myself to love, to love my neighbor, and to love myself.

I will do more of the things that invite that truth to permeate me, mind, body, soul.

I’ll seek to claim love as more consequential than anything else, and to discern the difference between claiming my own dignity and taking myself too seriously.

I’ll deepen my interaction with communities on a similar path.

I’ll try to convert to the hard gospel.

Will you join me?

*I mean that literally, too - if you want to connect with other people exploring transformative storytelling in the spirit of such love, consider coming to The Porch Gathering in April. Click the blue box for details.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PORCH GATHERING

PS: A Note I Wrote To Myself, and Which Might Offer You Some Shelter Too

It might seem terrifying, but it’s really falling into ease

Into the Abyss of Love

Where you cannot be harmed

Or misdirected

Where love is the substance of your experience,

Of your existence.

Whether you sit in your kitchen or a park bench, in a library or on the road.

Walking by the shore or a forest trail,

With a pen in your hand or a ladle.

Whether you’re working on a car or in a garden, doing homework with people who need your help, trying to act like admin is just a mundane word for sacred co-creativity, working out or napping, organizing or grieving, agonizing about the world or trying not to be diverted by what algorithms have decided should dominate your day, there is at least one thing that eclipses every idea, data point, fear or delight, and there is no good reason not to begin (or begin again) to imagine yourself claimed by that one thing this very moment:

You came from love, you belong to love, you are known by love, welcomed by love, invited by love, awakened by love, delighted in by love.

Your place in the world is to share love, to receive and give it, and to experience yourself being constantly constituted as the all-suffusing substance of love woven around, within, and into the entirety of self and soul.

Just a thought.

NEXT MONDAY NIGHT

From friends who are hosting what looks like something lovely - if you’re going to be nearby for any of the dates, please join us. Registration is required, but it’s pay-what-you-wish. Details below.

Something is stirring. A threshold calls. A moment of becoming.

The THRESHOLDS conversation series at the William Black Lodge in Montreat near Asheville, NC is a set of three intimate evenings exploring life’s transformative thresholds—how we meet them with purpose and presence, and what unfolds along the way. You can join one conversation or all four.

Here’s what’s coming up:

Gareth Higgins — Jan 12, 6:30–8 pm
Gareth opens the series talking about unmarked life transitions and how they shape us.

Mahan Siler — Jan 13, 6:30–8 pm
Mahan joins for a reflective conversation on the journey from elder to ancestor.

Jean Sutton — Jan 19, 6:30–8 pm
Jean Sutton (author of the forthcoming Ritual Well) will explore ritual as a living language of the soul, and how creating our own ceremonies can help us honor the thresholds that otherwise go unmarked.

Sign-up is required (pay-what-you-can), and space is genuinely limited—so don’t wait!

Click here for pay-what-you-wish registration.

WHAT IS THE PORCH?

The Porch is a slow conversation about beautiful and difficult things. We are called to transformative storytelling, because what people need is a better story about who we are, why we’re here, what life can be, and how to give and receive in ways that help co-create more shelter and meaning for everyone.

If you want to support us, here’s how you can help:

Subscribe to this newsletter as a paid member - you can also subscribe at no cost.

Alternatively you can support via Patreon here.

Or click here to donate with a one-time gift to support the vision of transformative storytelling.

Share this post with a friend who might enjoy it.

Whatever you can do, your connection with us matters.

We truly wish you every good thing, and the gifts of courage, creativity, and community, in the spirit of a better story.

Discover more about The Porch at www.theporchcommunity.net

Mixed Feelings

Hamnet is clearly something special, a gorgeously composed and authentic-feeling imagining of the love between Will and Agnes Shakespeare, their grief over the terrible loss of their son, and the way Hamlet may have emerged from it. I was captivated by most of it, but the climactic scene’s power was utterly overshadowed by the clichéd use of a piece of music - Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, an exquisite tune that has already been exquisitely used in at least two other movies. Rarely has such a beautifully crafted film fallen at so predictable a hurdle.

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme carries that same burden of repetition. Anderson’s work is so identifiably his that his movies could easily be seen as chapters in the same book, but I felt that this one was too knowingly intricate; more about how it’s about what it’s about rather than being about the thing it’s about - and I’m aware that that repetitive phrase could be spoken by one of Anderson’s characters.

Jay Kelly has a lovely premise: the most famous actor in the world can’t find anyone to go to his lifetime tribute gala because nobody really likes him. But I couldn’t truly see George Clooney in the role, because everyone knows Clooney is the opposite of that character. Might have been better to cast a bunch of A list stars as his colleagues and family, and have a slightly unknown in the main role.

It’s hard to make a film about the creative process, and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is worthwhile, but the best scenes are when Bruce is alone.

And A House of Dynamite felt like the middle section of a three part film, lacking examination of how we got to the stage where a nuclear missile could be launched, and an exploration of what could happen afterwards.

Hidden Gems

I Swear, about Scottish community worker John Davidson who lives with severe Tourette’s Syndrome is one of the best British films of recent years: informative, moving, and a huge crowd-pleaser. It’s likely to be released in the US in 2026.

The Baltimorons joins last year’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point as a film about this time of year that manages to be heart-warming without sugarcoating the reality that for many people Christmas can be difficult.

The Life of Chuck was expected to be a huge hit, but disappeared almost without trace; it’s ripe for rediscovery as one of the most life-giving Stephen King adaptations.

Adventure

Cinema comes from kinesis, which means movement; three superlative examples of true cinema delighted me this year, and each with something to say.

Superman is high-class popcorn, with a sense of joy; but it doesn’t shy away from taking violence seriously.

28 Years Later is a propulsive revisiting of family and national myth; with one of the most moving story-anchors of the year.

And Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is a massive undertaking, perfectly executed. A movie in which the US President accepts the risk of backing down rather than belligerence; in which a highly diverse ragtag community of people mix competence, creativity, and courage to save the world; and which contains the greatest man-stuck-alone-in-a-submarine-rolling-to-the-edge-of-an-abyss scene, and one of the greatest action sequences per se.

Nearly in the Top Ten

Reifenstahl is a brilliant patchwork documentary about the life, craft, and misdeeds of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker; Highest 2 Lowest one of the most purely entertaining movies of the year; Weapons a horror film about the need for each generation to learn the difference between being respected by the next one, and suffocating it; One Battle After Another a great satire of ambition and community; Come See Me in the Good Light a tender documentary about the poet Andrea Gibson, their journey with terminal illness, and their community of love and art; Rebuilding a small gem which ends with a declaration about the kind of community we need - and could create right now - all it takes is the decision; and Wicked: For Good a substantial, somewhat bleak coda to the first Wicked’s exuberance.

My Ten Favorite Films of 2025

10: Blue Moon - Richard Linklater directs Ethan Hawke’s most immersive performance as Lorenz Hart on the night he fears the best is actually not yet to come.

9: A Little Prayer - a perfectly formed vignette about how parenting never ends.

8: Köln 75 - thoroughly delicious telling of how eighteen year old Vera Brandes midwifed one of the greatest nights in music history.

7: The History of Sound - evocative of Brokeback Mountain, a road trip on foot through love, trauma, prejudice, and the tender acceptance of loss.

6: Sentimental Value - a film of profound subtlety, about generational wounds, and doing whatever we can to participate in repair, even what we have is not necessarily what the other party thinks they need.

5: Sinners - a spectacular gumbo, whose pivotal scene induced the most intensely exhilarating catharsis in this movie year.

4: Sorry, Baby - a gift of a story honoring the complexity of surviving great suffering; humor and horror co-existing.

3: It Was Just An Accident - more comedy amidst cruelty, in a film whose very existence is an act of courage. Iranian director Jafar Panahi is willing to humanize the very people who are oppressing him.

2: Kiss of the Spider Woman - the most underrated and sadly one of the most underseen films of the year; but close to a masterpiece, in which the melodrama of Hollywood’s Golden Age provides the perfect backdrop to a story of revolution and love across lines of difference.

1: Train Dreams (above) - a film about a whole life that gave me more of my own.

These are works of art and wonder, of sorrow and redemption, of dreaming the world by seeing it through the eyes of the other. They are exactly what we mean by Transformative Storytelling - and if you want to explore more of these ideas, experience a slow conversation about beautiful and difficult things, and participate in a community seeking to share and live a better story, join us at The Porch Gathering in April. Details at www.theporchgathering.com.