|
Forrest Craver has
been doing men’s work for more than 20 years.
He was senior interviewer for Wingspan: Journal of
the Male Spirit for many years. He has led or
co-led more than 40 retreats or workshops for men
including The Mankind Project, Men in Recovery, and
regional clergy retreats for United Methodist and
ELCA denominations. He is a lawyer and a nationally
recognized fundraising consultant for nonprofit
groups. He is the author of a short book of
Spiritual Poetry entitled “This Well Has No
Bottom” and is finishing a book about
intergenerational breakthrough approaches for boys
and men in American culture. His websites are
cravercreativeservices.com/and
transitioncolorado.ning.com/profile/forrestcraver
or eMail.He
lives and works in the Denver metro area.
Conflagration
Invocation
Reflections on the
transition movement: Confessions of an activist
Elder Facing Up to the Fierce Urgency of the
Now!
Ten
Years After
Columbine
Young Men Today
– Looking for a Path Forward in the Long
Emergency
Conflagration
For the Dream of the Earth held by Thomas
Berry.
Tree people roots in mother Amazon, burned
alive
crucified with whirling blades of steel
whipped with chains
Blood sap oozes onto the face
of the crying mother of us all.
Tree people dragged by massive caterpillars
shamed with no explanation
Caterpillars crawl across sacred ground,
hungry,
relentless, bright electric eyes burn through the
night
devouring, addicted to wood
their steel scoops could eat your entire house
in a single bite!
"Why is mother earth being burned
alive?" The tree people ask
each other, weeping.
Deer people huddle in council with raccoon and
squirrel.
Bird people forget their ancient prejudices and
circle up,
crow with eagle and owl.
Now earth mother is burning...conflagration
Conflagration! Have the two legged ones gone
mad?
Messages coming to us from the other world.
Messages of earth and heart. Shift the letters.
Same word.
Earth. Heart. Heart-Earth.
As heart dies, mother earth dies.
Wake up sisters and brothers.
Go the the lodge of the heart.
Ten thousand ancestors stand in a circle of hearts
on fire.
Drumming, chanting, invoking.
The ancient ones call us back to full heart.
Back to loving our mother
Spirit and blood of sun dancers mingles with
grief of pipe carriers.
Grandfathers and grandmothers in lodges across the
stomach
of Mother Earth pour spirit water into the flesh
and bones
on ancestors soon to be.
The sun rises. Water pourers open the door to
the East,
to the creator.
Ten thousand shaman light their sage, cedar and
sweet grass.
Invoking, praying, doing give away.
A spiritual war is coming.
Fire must yield to water.
Tears of the grandfathers. Sweat of the
creator.
Soul waters come pouring in.
A mighty storm is coming to heal the
conflagration.
From This Well Has No Bottom: A little
book of spiritual poetry
Invocation
A miracle is the wholehearted
invocation
of the Divine, combined with suspension
of all disbelief
Allowing the Other World to
Shatter and reconstitute this world.
Through Invocation, the dead are raised
and the blind see again.
Invocation is how the multitudes of the hungry are
fed
and all good deeds come to full fruit.
Brothers and sisters, let us not be like little
children
and invoke our puny ego self
or that of our colleagues
when so much more is waiting to be called
forth.
Let us resort instead to the full power of our
Creator
Invocation is surrender to the Divine Will
allowing your flesh to be the Altar on which
The Will of the Holy One Reigns
This is why the Ancients say the Holy Ones
are Hollow Bones.
Forrest Craver from This Well Has No
Bottom, a little book of spiritual poetry
Young Men Today –
Looking for a Path Forward in the Long
Emergency
“By Time and Age many things are taught. Time
growing old, Teaches all
things.”--Aeschylus
I get to know a lot of people in Denver and
Boulder at meetings and community events. Although
I am clueless about women, I am a 65 year old man
and have learned a few things about manhood.
I’ve been around men of all classes, races
and ages –at retreats, in personal
friendships, business relationships, and various
spiritual communities, men’s groups, and 12
Step groups. Over the course of six and a half
decades, as a son and a father of two sons,
I’ve learned a few things about how men think,
how they smell, what they like to eat. and what
their unfulfilled emotional and spiritual yearnings
are all about.
My sense is that something has profoundly
changed for young males in the 20-25 age range.
Robert Bly says in his book, “The Sibling
Society”, that adolescent males don’t
really come into their own until they are thirty
years old.
And Bly’s book was written twelve years
before the global economic meltdown. What is
missing for young men according to Bly is
mentorship by older men. I am speaking here not of
technical or professional mentorship, like dental,
medical, legal, corporate or scientific
mentorship.
Rather I am talking about psychic or spiritual
mentorship. Only older men can provide the organic
nutrients younger men yearn for – whether
those young men realize it or not. It’s hard
to go looking for what you need-- if you are
clueless about what you really and truly need.
Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, James
Hillman, Michael Meade, Robert Moore and others who
have studied masculine psychological structure and
the male archetypes point out that the biological
father can play a significant role. And yet, in the
final analysis, far more is needed by the young man
than a good Dad. The reason is that the father-son
relationship is too intensely rooted in biological
connections and family dynamics. “Psychic
contamination” is the phrase Carl Jung
used.
In the last two years, I’ve encountered
many young men who are adrift. Or at least they
sure seem that way to me. I could be wrong. And
yet, I have a deep feeling that they know at some
level of consciousness why they are drifting.
In their gut they are aware that the Long
Emergency is descending upon them in a very up
close and personal kind of way. “In your
face” is the feel of it for a young man today.
For the context and implications of the Long
Emergency, see the author of the book with that
title, James Howard Kunstler.
With 70 percent of Americans fearful of losing
their jobs, according to recent polls, what is a
young man to make out of the future that is coming
his way at ever-accelerating rate and
intensity?
My observation and reflection from experience
with some of these young men is that the deeper the
consciousness of the young man, the more
disorientation he experiences. In the 60’s,
many young men said a profound “NO!” to
the corporate America way of life. They dropped
out, tuned out mainstream culture and turned on
with drugs.
For young men today, it often comes out as
“holy shit” or “what’s going
on?” Being overwhelmed by economic meltdown,
the response may be to turn off the economic
realities of life and drift. And yet, it is a
subtle kind of drift. Not a full blown depression
-- but a deflation, likes “someone burst my
balloon and I never saw it coming. What
happened?”
It’s like waking up and for a few moments
not knowing where you are. Young men who are well
educated and awake,” get it” that the
foundations are shaking. And what I see is that
“the best and the brightest” young males
are getting pounded by their own depth
consciousness.
Whatever “the American dream” has been
– it is clearly in the process of foundational
deconstruction. I would hasten to add that all of
us are at risk. Therefore, we fervently hope and
pray that reconstruction and transformation are
coming some place down the road.
But the facts are troubling indeed. In one
month, 57 people die in mass murders here in the
USA, all committed by men.
According to the National Institute of Mental
Health statistics, males are four times more likely
than women to take their own lives. And males 20-24
are six times more likely to commit suicide.
If you read Bly’s “The Sibling
Society”, you understand the double bind all
men are in. He characterizes the majority of men in
their thirties and forties as adolescent males in
older bodies-- lacking the full capacities of
mature manhood.
Therefore, our problem is that you can’t
give a younger man what he needs if you don’t
have it yourself. And the lack of capacity within
older men is compounded by the economic meltdown
that Kunstler characterizes as “The Long
Emergency.”
This combination of factors is our “double
bind” and our dilemma.
What then is our way out and our way forward as
men? How do we practically retool emotionally and
spiritually?
One solution I propose is to form small groups
of 8-10 men who live in the same neighborhood or
community. These small men’s groups would meet
at least twice a month. The conveners would be a
man in his 20’s and a man in his
60’s.
The wisdom of the older man borne out of
standing near to death’s doorway cannot be
overemphasized. At the age of 60, most men wake up
to the fact that they are standing in the sunset
time of their lives.
Simple chronology dawns on a man with a rude
awareness when he reaches 60. More of his life has
been lived than is yet to be lived. Some of his
intellectual and physical powers begin to wane.
This can be an epiphany for an older man.
As Robert Kennedy said, quoting The Greek poet
Aeschylus: “And even in our sleep, Pain that
cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the human
heart. And in our own despair, against our will,
Wisdom comes to us by the awful grace of
God.”
The role of the older man is to cool things
down, reassure, and bless the younger man. The role
of the younger man is to fire things up. This is
the alchemy of male soul work and restoring the
inter-generational bond among men that was cut
asunder with the rise of the Industrial
Revolution.
As the famed mythologist and historian of
religion, Marcie Eliade said:
“The fall into modernity has been the
single most catastrophic event to ever afflict the
human spirit.”
What he means is that when we moved off the land
and into urban areas, we lost our sacred connection
to the Earth, animals, plants, and our own
consciousness of being one with the Earth.
The second solution I propose is for national,
regional and local mentorship groups to get gender
specific. The elephant in the room is
“political correctness.”
Yet the biological and psychic facts are that
men and women are hard-wired in fundamentally
different ways. And if we are to strengthen and
deepen mentorship programs across the United
States, we need to own up to and implement a gender
specific context which will have salience and
impact.
There is a fierce urgency to the Now -- for
communities across our country struggling to retool
and realign economic structures and public
services. And there is a fierce urgency for older
men to mentor young men who are seeking a path
forward in The Long Emergency.
Ten
Years After Columbine
Sunday, April 19, 2009 marked
the tenth anniversary of the school shootings at
Columbine High School in Colorado. Shortly after
the shootings, I wrote an essay about the incident
which is attached with this update
perspective.
What have we learned as a
result of the innocent loss of thirteen lives and
numerous serious injuries in Colorado ten years
ago? Well, we’ve tightened school security
nationwide and made it more difficult to get guns
into schools.
But what have we really
learned about why young men go off the deep end
with terrifying violence. My sense is that as a
nation we still have not addressed in any
meaningful and sustained way what is happening
today. See Young Men document attached.
Rather than decreasing,
homicide and suicide among young men are on the
rise. It is rising for white, Native American,
Hispanic and African American males. But I
don’t see or hear about the national education
and psychological associations addressing this
issue in any kind of focused and sustained
way.
The facts themselves are
alarming. Suicide is the third leading cause of
death for males ages 16-24. Males are four times
more likely than females to take their own lives.
Today in the United States, we have twice as many
deaths from suicide than from HIV/AIDS.
A sign that all is not
well with young men is this shocking fact—in
the last decade there has been a dramatic rise in
suicides by males aged 10-14. The male nature of
both suicide and homicide is evident in the
following statistics.
Native American males aged
15-24 account for 64% of all suicides by Native
Americans. Of all homicide victims in the United
States, 86% are males. In Pennsylvania in a recent
year, with a total of 490 African American
homicides, 441 were African American
males.
The conclusion from the
data is clear. Young men are killing themselves
with increasing frequency and the problem has now
spiked sharply with the 10-14 year old males.
The other conclusion is
that young men are killing other young men with
increasing frequency.
Where do we go from here?
We have the Violence Policy Center which keeps good
statistics on suicide and homicide. But its main
focus is gun control and more regulation of guns.
But I believe we as a
nation must face up to the truth that the breakdown
among young men cannot be explained away by the
availability of guns in the culture.
Why are young men killing
themselves and killing each other with increasing
frequency. And why is suicide steadily rising in
the pre-teen male?
It can’t be explained
away by social class arguments. The Columbine
shooters were upper middle class suburban youth.
And many of the recent mass shootings by men
against the innocents were done not by poor men but
by middle class men with education and conventional
life styles.
Perhaps the answer is to
be found in the paralysis of feeling among young
males. The inability to open their hearts to the
pain of life in their own family and their
community. Men are taught not to feel. Men
don’t cry. Suck it up! Act like a
man!
Models of vibrant and
healthy masculine behavior seem to be in short
supply in American culture. Urbanization and the
disconnectedness of life in suburban America create
a sense of emptiness and aloneness. Loneliness.
“What do I have to live for” seems to be
the question more and more boys and young men are
asking themselves these days.
My experience is that
young males feel disconnected and alienated from
older males. Rather than seeing mid-life and older
men as “wisdom keepers” and mentors,
young men tend to view older males with suspicion,
indifference or scorn. Our dilemma as a society is
that boys and young men can’t fix their own
problem – nor is it realistic to expect them
to “pull themselves up by the
bootstraps.”
Perhaps it is time for
Rotary International to make this their number one
national priority. Maybe the bishops and clergy of
the Catholic and Protestant church in America need
to step up and make this their priority.
I would personally like to
see the American Psychiatric Association, the
American Psychological Association, the National
Education Association or the National
Association of Social
Workers make this their priority.
Why not have the Obama
administration create a czar for the “survival
of the young American male.”
We have an excellent
national mentorship program called
“America’s Promise” -- headed by
former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Maybe
saving the young American male could be their
priority? Will anyone step up? When Betty Freidan
wrote the ground-breaking book The Feminine
Mystique which ignited the women’s movement in
the United States in the 1960’s, she described
the plight of middle class women as “the
problem that has no name.”
Today, we again have
“a problem that has no name.” It is all
about boys and young men and our failure as adults
to give them what they need.
Reflections
on the transition movement: Confessions of an
activist Elder Facing Up to the Fierce Urgency of
the Now!
I was sitting in a first of its kind meeting in the
Louisville, Colorado library about six months ago
when Michael Brownlee, the presenter, from
Transition Boulder, began to talk about “The
Long Emergency” and “The Energy Descent
Plan.” He definitely got my attention and I
squirmed uncomfortably in my chair. What I had felt
intuitively for a couple of years was now being
confirmed by hard science and irrefutable data.
There’s a big hole in our lifeboat, and the
whole planet is in that one lifeboat!
Getting it right today has a fierce urgency in
virtually every aspect of our lives. Nowadays, the
margin for error and the cost of our individual and
collective errors carries a heavy price. Well now
I’m 65 and when I started driving, gasoline in
my home town of Gettysburg, Pa. was 28 cents a
gallon. I could go to a Saturday matinee for 50
cents and have enough money to buy a bag of popcorn
and a soft drink too! Talk about living in a
fantasy world of “more is better” and
unlimited industrial growth!
Throughout my adult life, my professional
challenge has been to cut through denial and
motivate people to give money to save lives
–like getting people to give money to six
million starving Ethiopians when it is the tenth or
so time we have had this issue to confront as a
moral and humanitarian issue.
I’m writing this to you to beckon you
forth. I’m impressed by the transition
movement –as the most hopeful and rapidly
growing social movement in the world. I say this as
an activist who was deeply involved in the peace
movement, the women’s rights movement, the
nuclear weapons freeze and peace movement and the
environment movement. I’ve also written about
these movements professionally for 30 years as a
fundraising copywriter. I say all this to you so I
cannot be accused of suffering from naïve
bliss and enchantment. Brothers and sisters, this
is the real thing! Check it out!
Other movements wax and wane over time. But not
this time. Not with transitions. How come? Because
history is breathing down our backs at every
moment. Here’s my gut truth -- If we are to
have life, we will be in transition as far as we
can read our collective future. As the comics like
to say: De-nial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Americans in cities and small town are getting
blasted –like inhaling ammonia accidentally!
It shocks you, it penetrates your body, and it is
very unpleasant, and if you’d done it, like
me, you don’t do it again!! We need to get
over and get beyond our small ego selves!
Remember Small is Beautiful from the 1970’s
and the mantra “Live Simply So Others May
Simply Live”? Smallness and living simply have
shifted from theoretical values and principles into
hard, practical necessities. History, rather than
our personal whims, is clearly calling the agenda
and will do so for coming generations after us.
So what I know from being involved with the
transition movement in Colorado is that the social
and economic context of this movement is right on.
And the grassroots, from the bottom up, open-ended
approach to change and constantly adapting the
movement are also right. Transition is
post-partisan, trans-religious, local/global,
inclusive and inter-generational – and fun!
Refreshingly, for once, it is clearly not an
American thing. But it is a very local thing and it
is also a movement built on volunteer time, vision,
money and energy. But most importantly, it is built
and runs on heart.
Because I’m a “Curious George”
type of guy, I went to the internet and did a key
word search of “peak oil” “climate
change” and “economic collapse”, the
three pillars of the transition movement. Each of
these phrases has tens of millions of listings on
the web. So it’s clear to me knowledge is not
our issue.
I lived in Detroit just 12 blocks from where the
riots erupted. I had just left the U.S. Army and
Fort Bragg, North Carolina and settled into an
apartment. Shortly thereafter, I saw my own 82nd
Airborne Division on West Chicago Boulevard in
front of my home in armed personnel carriers with
machine guns and all the rest. Talk about a wake up
call! As bad as that experience was, I believe what
we experience today is much more complex,
troubling, insidious and pervasive.
James Baldwin in his book The Fire Next Time
quotes scripture: “God gave Noah the rainbow
sign. No more water but the fire next time.”
Then Baldwin, being a poet, coins a new term
–“historical vengeance”. Sometimes
we reach a point of no return. This is where all of
humanity stands today – literally on the brink
of historical vengeance. We act – and act
boldly – or history will solve the problem
brought on by our stiff-necked denial and refusal
to act.
In his noted “Letter from Birmingham
Jail”, Martin Luther King, Jr. first used the
now historic and compelling words “the fierce
urgency of the now.” And so, my brothers and
sisters, we come full circle. I am an elder
confessing to you it took me a long while to wake
up from the trance of industrial growth culture and
my addiction to affluence. Now I humbly bow my knee
before the cosmic realities of peak oil, climate
change and economic collapse. History has a claim
on me – and on you too.
My life is different because of the wonderful
men, women and children I’ve met on the
journey of transition. I’ve been cared for by
witnessing the truth-speaking and simple living of
my transition comrades in arms. I invite you to
come along. Have fun with us, learn, and serve with
us and your neighbors near and far. The prophet
tells us “For everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
Now, most certainly is the season. A season of
being in this world that never ends! Ours is a
Journey of Endlessness. And so, I bless you on your
journey. Until we meet in person, I take my leave
from you with these inspiring words adapted from
the English poet, Christopher Fry:
“Dark and cold we may be. But this is no
winter now. The frozen misery of centuries --
cracks, breaks, begins to move. The thunder is the
thunder of the floes! The thaw! The flood! The
upstart spring! Thank God, our time is now. When
Wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to
leave us until we take the longest stride of soul
folk ever took. Affairs are now soul-size. Our
enterprise is exploration into the human heart.
Where are you making for? It takes so many thousand
years to wake. But will you wake for pity’s
sake? But will you wake for pity’s
sake?”
©2009, Forrest
Craver
* * *
Man becomes great exactly in the degree to which
he works for the welfare
of his fellow man. - Mahatma Gandhi
Contact
Us |
Disclaimer
| Privacy
Statement
Menstuff®
Directory
Menstuff® is a registered trademark of Gordon
Clay
©1996-2009, Gordon Clay
|
