Meeting The Wild Man – How Wounded Boys Become Men
Written by Richard
Hey Tribe,
Welcome back!
Are you a wounded man? You know if you are. In a way, all men are. But being wounded isn’t the problem.
The problem is that most men these days don’t know what to do with their wounds and make identities out of the pain, suffering and resentment.
Worse still, increasingly culture is turning against masculinity itself.
If you’re not being fed the progressive notion of masculinity as toxic then you’re left with the unconscious men of today.
This is leaving men with nowhere to turn, as neither of these conceptions amount to real men.
But what is a real man?
Manboyhood
I recently finished reading Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John: A Book About Men ’, a fantastic mythical insight into how men have traditionally come of age and learned to transcend pain, rejection and boyish naivety.
Iron John is originally a Germanic myth that roots our culture, and Bly breaks down the story in contemporary terms, showing what we’ve lost in our modern era of soullessness and cowardice in the face of danger.
Iron John tells the story of a young prince who frees a Wild Man and learns from him, he goes from fear to courage on his journey, and processes his traumas along the way.
This piece picks up on the key element of the story, the child of a distant father (or positive male archetype), enmeshed by the Great Mother, stuck in what I call ‘manboyhood’.
Manboyhood is an endemic condition in this age.
The Way Out: Meeting the Wild Man
One vital point Bly makes is that your mission is not to become the Wild Man, but to learn from him, leaving him to be wild.
While the Wild Man of Iron John is poetic metaphor, your own notion of the Wild Man will appear when you take the decisive step away from blaming others, victimhood and fear.
The first step to this is understanding this spiritual axiom:
YOUR WOUNDS ARE GIFTS.
Perceiving wounds as gifts may seem impossible to you, yet this is the first step to wisdom.
How else did the great men of history become great without their suffering?
Ghandi was great because he was oppressed by the biggest Empire of all time.
MLK was great because of the very racism that tormented him physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Churchill was great because of the Nazi menace that ploughed through Europe and threatened to plunge the continent into darkness.
There is one question to ask yourself in your own life if you feel your suffering oppresses you and has no purpose:
How can your suffering help others?
As soon as you answer that question with your heart, you will see your suffering has meaning.
The point isn’t to seek out suffering, life will give you enough of that, the point is to use what suffering you have been faced with, and to work at not creating more.
Joining the Tribe
Once a man realises his suffering contains the seed of connection and the potential to help others, he opens his pain from insular obsession, to outer identification with the world.
Part of being a man is being able to be honest, stoic and helpful to others.
Part of being a man is also learning to be part of a community.
Narcissus, the mythical character from whom we get the word narcissistic, was a man stuck in his wounds, and crucially as the tale goes, separated from his tribe.
In his loneliness with his wounds, he fell in love with his own image, this is the tale of a man who rejects society to stay in manboyhood, using grandiosity to hide himself from the world.
Many modern men fear the tribe, they fear exclusion, yet they must consider that whatever holds us back will kill us quicker than what we fear.
This is the truth of growth.
Richard
This is a shorter version of a post on the Recovering Man website