An Excellent Piece & a Pause

tldr: Summer pause and REMARKABLE  article!

Brothers, please forgive the late notice. I am writing because I will be overseas on vacation this coming Monday. The night of our scheduled call. I will also be unavailable on the first Monday of August. So I’m calling a pause on our coming together this summer. I trust I will see most of you on the evening of Monday, September 4.

I am excited to share “what men can gain from Removing the shackles of sexism and misogyny,” a piece by Lawrence Barriner II, one of my dear friends. It is a beautiful piece on care and intimacy and the importance of growing our ability to experience and express these.

Lawrence does a beautiful job of explaining how patriarchy can keep us from fully experiencing these essential parts of our humanity. I expect that we will spend some time with this piece once we close our study of “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.”

Lawrence does a very good job of reminding us of the fluidity of sex and gender, and of the ways these exist along a spectrum inside each of us. I value this perspective, which is a learning for me and for many of us who have been socialized to see the world through binary lenses.

I also want to say that I find it important to continue to honor those of us who experience sex and gender along what feels to be a masculine side of the polarity. We should of course investigate how much of this is socialized. We should find out if we just “think” we are masculine-identified men. We need to see whether we are afraid of experiencing a broader spectrum of our own selves.

And it is also true that for some of us, there is something powerful and sacred about knowing ourselves along the masculine edges of polarity. It should not be made wrong. It should be honored, embodied, and brought into greater and greater consciousness. We should rid it of socialized patriarchy and breathe into it as the sacred masculine.

And we should always honor those of us who know themselves differently.

I’ll miss seeing your faces. Have a GREAT summer.