The forge of becoming.

March 2025

At the beginning of each year, I ask the men who gather for The Way—an annual pilgrimage designed for men to return to soul—to contemplate a single question:

What does it mean to be a man?

There are the usual answers—provider, protector—roles inherited from culture, family or personal ambition, but there is always an immediate sense among the group that the question demands something deeper, something beyond mere function.

Some men wrestle with the question in silence, feeling the weight of its history, the secrets not spoken, the burden of expectation, the quiet longing for something more true than the only words they can muster.

For others, it may be the first time they have looked beneath the surface of their own lives, beyond external achievements or social masks, and into the deeper currents of identity, initiation and soul.

The idea is not to arrive at a single destination, but to step into the mystery of the question itself.

In a letter my mother wrote to me just before her death, she invited me to “learn to live as the river flows, constantly surprised at its own unfolding”. Her words remind me that to be a man is not about imposing my will upon the world, but to adjust, to remain teachable in the face of change. A river moves, yielding and carving in equal measure, reshaping itself as it meets the world.

This is a lesson I have had to learn again and again, through grief and loss, through the slow and humbling work of becoming myself.

Man’s task is not to master the current, nor to resist its force, but to learn how to bear both flood and drought, to deepen his course without becoming stagnant. And yet, it seems many men today drift in more shallow waters, floating through life as husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and colleagues, without ever asking: Who am I beneath all of this?

Often, the question does not arise until life shakes us. We lose a job. A marriage collapses. A parent dies. The illusory world we built no longer holds, the centre collapses and we stand at the threshold of the unknown.

Ancient stories of manhood remind us that real initiation does not happen through external achievements but through descent—into grief, into the unknown, into the places we have not dared to look.

Robert Bly spoke of this as an apprenticeship to sorrow. A man must be willing to lose his way, to feel the weight of grief pressing into his bones, so that he might emerge not hardened, but tempered. There is a big difference. The man who resists his own breaking remains rigid—brittle in his certainty—yet the one who allows himself to be shaped by suffering learns how to carry both grief and joy.

Bly’s twin titan of the mythopoetic men’s movement, psychologist James Hillman, said that a man does not find himself—he remembers himself. Beneath the layers of conditioning, the soul already knows its own path. But without grief, without solitude, without presence or deep listening, he moves through life ruled by unconscious forces, mistaking duty for destiny, mistaking what the world has given him for what he actually desires.

Carl Jung saw this clearly:

“To be a man is to know what you want and to do it.”

Not in the grasping of a boy chasing prizes, but with the understanding that what calls him forward is his own and no one else’s. It comes from the inside out and not the other way around.

So how does a man know what he truly desires? Not by striving upward, but by growing downward. Wisdom is not found in escape but in embodiment, in sinking into the roots of one’s being. This is the necessity of returning to the soul’s deep ground. A man must leave behind surface distractions and sit in the dark with his questions, remembering the old voices, the old songs.

For those who refuse the call, life eventually demands it anyway. Psychologist James Hollis warns that a man who does not examine his depths will be ruled by them. He will be driven by hidden fears, by wounds he does not acknowledge, by an inherited and unconscious script.

The unexamined life does not free a man—it enslaves him to forces he cannot name.

Poet Stanley Kunitz understood this well:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

The slow work of becoming a man may never be complete, but if we pay attention, we come to see that beneath the layers, something substantial abides.

Something ancient and uniquely ours.

We learn that a man’s strength is not in his ability to endure, but in the willingness to be fully present, to pay attention—to himself, to others, to the vast and unfolding river of mystery into which he has been invited.

This year, a poem of my own arrived, which I have tentatively titled The Forge of Becoming.

The hammer and the anvil,
the molten river of hardening iron,
the ache in the arm of the smithy,
and the silence between strikes.

To be a man is to carry the stone,
not to conquer it but to know its shape,
the cold bite of its truth
and the warmth of its endurance.

To be a man is to kneel
in the dirt beneath you,
knowing it will one day claim you.

It is to hear the whisper of ancestors
echoing in your marrow.

To be a man is to fall in love
with the questions,
while the Trickster’s grin mocks
your need for answers.

It is to hold the flame of your own longing.

To be a man is to walk the labyrinth
and meet yourself in the centre,
offering the only thing worth owning

A heart that dares remain open.

References:
Bly, R. (1990) Iron John: A Book About Men. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Hillman, J. (1996) The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random House.
Hollis, J. (1994) Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Jung, C.G. (1969) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage.
Kunitz, S. (2000) The Layers: The Collected Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Meade, M. (2010) Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul. Seattle: GreenFire Press.

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