Last night I hosted nine men at my home. This men’s group has been meeting monthly since 1986. Over those thirty two years one has moved away, four have died, and five have been welcomed in. We do not talk sports, cars, or work. We generally steer clear of politics. We talk about our lives, the good, the bad, and the ugly, the tough and the tender. Over the years our conversations have gotten deeper and more honest. Last night was one of those deep and honest nights. The host chooses the topic. I chose our experience of BEING. Not being something; a lawyer, a teacher, a business man, an accountant, but BEING itself. The mystery of BEING hidden from our intellectual understanding yet present in our ground of awareness. ‘Is’ – is the most used form of the verb ‘to be’. But what is ‘is-ness’.
Two weeks before the meeting I introduced the topic for the evening in this email:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Life is strange.
We are born into an unfamiliar world.
We have to learn to manage everything;
our bodies, language, relationships, everything.
Over time, we get used to the world and accustom ourselves to live in
the world as presented to us.
As we grow more competent through experience and practice, the original
strangeness of the world fades.
The mystery of experience diminishes,
not because the mystery lessens,
but because we pay less attention to the borders of life
where the strangeness becomes more apparent.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote:
“Do not let the familiarity of the world
blind us to the great mystery of existing.’
Throughout our lives there are those awesome and awful moments when we are struck with strangeness, the strangeness of just being alive? The question we are to address;
1) How do you experience the fundamental strangeness of life?
2) What experiences push you beyond the familiar: Love? Illness? Injury? Loss? Change of location? Vulnerability? Religion? Aging? Other?
3) How can we transform experience into wisdom and courage?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It was a beautiful evening. As a poet I was deeply moved by the self-disclosure so candidly and well spoken by the men in that circle. As the sharing continued, there was a palpable realization that we were participating in a masculine miracle. We had given each other the gift of listening to the rawest expressions of our very human experience. For me it was an evening of poetry, even though not a single poem was spoken. Poetry happens when we go to the very edge of life and talk about what we find there. Last night my friends and I spoke to each other, not from the comfortable center of life, but from the scary discomforts of the edge. It was an evening of male courage.