When does a mantruly start the life he is meant to have? He can be broken a thousand times and feel derailed from the tracks of purpose, fall on the spears of vice, and offer his whole heart to the one he loves, only to see it crash to the ground like a cigarette butt, waiting to be stepped on. He is not fully at Home in his domestic shelter, pandering ritualistically at menial things, yet world travel can instill a deep sense of rootlessness, a longing for something real, familiar, integral.
The saga of a mans life can be frought with setback, melancholy, pain, defeat, restlessness, and reckless self-indulgence, which divorces him from experiencing the primordial power of the Masculine. The Protector, Provider, and Presider in him that conspires to create him like a King. The weaknesses that can restrain and prevent an otherwise good man from waking up and becoming a living example of being good at being a man.
His soul is hammered on the anvil of his own life, and in deed he is the anvil, the forge, the hammer and the source material being shaped. He carries a tremendous burden uphill, to forever meet new summits that rise into the halls of the Gods. His hard work becomes larger and more important than life itself. As the wielder of these tools, he is also living through the ancient archetype of the Hero, and the Shaman. He can look at his table, and decide to change his creation. If he is unsatisfied with it, he can make subtle changes or scrap it, and start completely over. What this has to do with a meaningful life is the raw nature of power, and manifestation.
The flexibility a man bolsters from being able to bend and understand the continuing narrative of his own living myth as something that is adaptable, and fortified under stress, transforms weakness, builds tensile strength and versatility. By meeting with his own shadows, and confronting the great beasts that live there and forcing them into the light, so that even the darkness within him can stand afore, fully revealed and be appreciated as truly his.
In this, I think, are something recanted approachable to the life a man is meant to have. He stands in the land of his own claiming, and for me this is a landscape, and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, even to love the sorrow, for the pleasures it divides. Like periods of rest between the days, or the hunger between meals. To discover that pain and pleasure are twin beings, and necessary to appreciate beauty when it comes. Seven and a small score years ago I decided to walk into a life I was meant to have after realizing some of these truths myself. I swallowed what I thought I knew, regurgitated it, and chewed the cud. And by digesting the past, could write a wholly new book of my existence. One that stemmed and sprouted from my own soul but grew to include many others on the Hero’s journey away and back again. It was to become not only my story, and the purpose of my life, but of those I met, who ultimately were as deeply woven into the tapestry of this saga, one with all the aspects of a good story, for it is one worth telling…
:aferalspirit: 