Dear Friends
I was named David, after my father. For me, it seemed somewhat of a burden, adding weight to what was already a daunting journey into manhood. My name felt important, but as a child I often joked that “maybe my parents just made it up.”
I felt so much more than just a facsimile of my father. I had no desire to emulate him. That is not shaped as an insult, it appears quite right-minded. I deeply wanted to become myself.
As I grew into a teen, I overtook my father in height, but by then I had acquired the family nickname Little David in order to differentiate us (he was Big David). This was quite a label for a young man standing two metres tall and only served to amplify my discomfort.
I remember taking this up with my mother and having her gently tell me to think about it in a ‘Little John’ kind of way, the whimsically-titled giant who served as ‘chief of staff’ among Robin Hood’s Merry Men.
Somewhere in the arc of my childhood, I also came to understand that the name Asher had been offered as an alternative around my birth. It stirred something deep inside me and I began to use it as a nom de plume in my imaginative writing. I also remember scrawling ‘Asher’ in an early attempt at a signature. Interestingly, when the time came to actually require one, I just tried to copy my father’s as best I could.
I somehow couldn’t find any originality as David.
Decades later, I was on my way to the airport and got snarled up in traffic, resulting in a missed flight. Eventually, with new tickets in hand, I boarded another and took my seat. A rabbi shuffled in next to me.
The conversation that ensued was a veritable string of synchronicities. We were even born on the same day. As we raced across the sky, he told me a story which I still use today as a centrepiece of our year-long men’s program, The Way.
It led to a discussion about names and by that evening I had ‘landed’ as Asher. This was confirmed a few months later via ceremony and ritual with my infant son cradled in my arms.
As I reflect on the story of my name, it seems to me that an essential component of the journey is about edging ever closer to who you are — to finding your true name — the one that is indelibly etched upon your soul.
We first enter the world with a name given or imposed by others. It appears upon birth certificates, medical records, academic papers and all those things which identify us or signify possessions and achievements in the material world. However, we were born with a second name — connected to nature and the sacred. We were not conscious of this in childhood other than in strange glimpses of something long forgotten. Almost like a melancholy. A longing.
This soul name recognises your potential, that which is indigenous to you. It is your mythopoetic identity, the innate spark of genius you were born with to give as a gift to others.
There will come a time when this name calls you to step out into the world and remember, recover and reclaim it through living myth — metaphors, symbols, images, dreams and nature-based archetypes.
It starts with a burning question that may arise from a reflection in the mirror or on the surface of a shimmering lake, but it appears to come from the inside out:
Who are you really, wanderer?
This catechism is contained (if one can contain such a thing) in the final stanza of a poem called ‘A Story That Could Be True’ by William Stafford. It begins:
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name.
We are being presented with an invitation to enter a period of separation where we are mythically nameless, a weary traveller on the road — pilgrim, stranger, wanderer. Still very wet behind the ears, and with little by way of money or plan, I dumped university and left for Europe in a vague bid to follow ancestral trails.
I remember sitting in lonely train stations, sleeping rough, wandering through empty streets late at night — moments when being without a name seemed entirely appropriate, connecting me to some ancient idea of transformation and discovery.
Poet David Whyte calls it a time of finding the one line already written inside you.
This is the experience of losing a sense of fixed identity. It shakes up your known world. It no longer matters what school you went to, who your parents were or the neighbourhood you grew up in. This state of namelessness is about entering an initiatory space where your previous identities no longer define or limit you. It’s an opening to uncertainty, where nothing — not even your name — is assured.
It gives rise to an unbridled kind of freedom.
I am engaged this year with a mentor exploring the epic of Moby-Dick. Of course, it contains the immortal opening line, ‘Call me Ishmael’. This in itself is an enchantment of names. Herman Melville is asking us to immediately drop his name and call him by another before we enter his world — but as soon as we read the line, we are at once also ourselves asking to be called by another name. Call me Ishmael.
We each — reader and writer/narrator — begin the journey on the great sea of the unconscious having left our names behind.
For me, these ‘times with no name’ were katabatic, marked by broken dreams, deaths in the family, a blood cancer diagnosis, a marriage breakdown. Passages through the underworld where having no name is essential.
During Odysseus’ own epic voyage (here we are upon the wine-dark sea once more), he becomes trapped inside Polyphemus’ cave. When the fearsome Cyclops asks him for his name, Odysseus responds by saying, “Nobody”. When he later confronts Polyphemus in a bid for freedom, the Cyclops is asked by his brothers outside who is attacking him, to which he responds, “it is nobody.” They do not come to his aid and Odysseus makes good his escape.
So we return to the beginning, awakened to who we are inside ourselves. In a well-functioning society, our name would be recognised, confirmed and blessed by the elders.
The current men in The Way have now reached the stage of conscious descent, entering the forest at the darkest point where there is no path. It’s now that they become, simply, Waymaker.
Let me close with a secret. My inner critic sometimes calls me David. It still catches me by surprise. The beauty of forgetting is that remembering is such a joy.
Oceans of love.
Asher
‘Too Many Names’ by Pablo Neruda:
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the whole week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your exhausted scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it has no name.When I lived amongst the roots
they pleased me more than flowers did,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang like a bell.It is so long, the spring
which goes on all winter.
Time lost its shoes.
A year lasts four centuries.When I sleep every night,
what am I called or not called?
And when I wake, who am I
if I was not I while I slept?This means to say that scarcely
have we landed into this life
than we come as if new-born;
let us not fill our mouths
with so many faltering names,
with so many sad formalities,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much of yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.I have a mind to confuse things,
unite them, make them new-born,
mix them up, undress them,
until all light in the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous, vast wholeness,
a crackling, living fragrance.
‘A Story That Could be True’ by William Stafford:
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by—
you wonder at their calm.They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
Notes:
On Tuesday, June 4, we begin a seven-week journey called ‘Return of the Maiden King’ with myself alongside Kristina Dryža (and special guest filmmaker Haydn Reiss). Together, we will re-animate a workshop series hosted in the late 1990’s by poet Robert Bly and Jungian psychologist Marion Woodman, based on the ancient Russian folktale of The Maiden King. This event is available at no cost to subscribers of The Fifth Direction. Public tickets can be purchased at the link above.
The name I was given by my parents was “JENNY” Fernanda. I remember noticing the voice of my name when I was Around 4 or 5 years old. I had a strong call to sit in front of the mirror for a while and call my name many times: Jenny, JENNY, Jenny. I was kind of finding a shape, a rhythm maybe an answer like an embodiment through my name. I did it till my voice was not mine, and what I saw was not my face but big letters that carried a sort of power and mysticism. I saw the letters floating in my head: J~~E~~N~~N ~~Y. It struck me to hear and read the words of William Stafford: Who are you really, wanderer? Maybe I'm king.
Because the final voice I heard was a queen—a queen calling my name! This message is so deep and meaningful to me, as I have so many stories behind my name. I just wanted to share one, too. I hope this is okay.
Thanks so much, dear Asher 🙏🏼♥︎👸🏻