Where you get your permission, is where you get your power.
MY FATHER’S SON I am my Father's proud son. I am His legacy. I have every reason to stand tall. I will not lower my eyes. I will not tread gently in the face of weakness. I am my Father's noble son. I am his promise to the world. I choose to honour him. I will honour vulnerability no less mine own, and treat it with courage and care. I pledge to no man, except my brothers and to no women except my sisters and my wife. I will live for my children. I will live for my Father. For my neighbors on this earth, I will live and treat you how I would wish to be treated if the boot sat wholly on the other foot. I am my Father’s bright son. My heart is a god shaped hole that burns like the heart of the world. My mind is like no other, bright and canny and quick. My purpose, as is yours, laid out before us. I am my Father’s proud son. I will not sully his name, I will not squander his legacy. I will not be pressed to say ‘yes’ And I will not be silenced by threat of shame. I am that. When I forget who I am I follow the way. And when I remember who I am, the way and I are the same. —Rocco Jarman
I never knew my own father, and I also never pined for one. I am not a religious man either, not out of laziness, but out of an unshakable sense of dignity. Every male role model I ever encountered I was disappointed to discover them ultimately to be weak or disingenuous. Perhaps the worst portrayal I encountered was via Christianity, for whom God is precisely a weak man’s idea of a strong man. But the world works in a magical way and enough essence of ‘The Father’ archetype is preserved in Stories, and simply reading Rudyard Kipling’s “If” gets us more than halfway there, so there is plenty to aim at in the world if you listen right.
Men like Fred Rogers, Carl Sagan and David Attenborough taught me more about nobility, leadership and pure class than any sportsman, celebrity, politician or business “leader”.
Simply by sitting in sacred conversation with the profound longing of what I was searching so earnestly for in the world and could not find anywhere, taught me more about what it means to be a man than any podcast bro or internet alpha male could ever hope to stand in the shadow of. I am who I am today not because of great direct example, but rather despite the poor examples which I refused to accept. I live with the question of what it means to be a husband, a father, a leader—a man in this world—because it is my authentic calling to do so. There is no outer voice of reproval or condemnation that will make me feel ashamed for how I feel in my heart. I am simply my own self.
Our more confused expressions of feminism and political correctness like to blame white men for all the ills of the world. Wokeness and identity politics want men to be meek and apologetic. The spiritual community are gagging for the Divine Masculine but ‘shit-scared’ of what a real man is, all gushy and eye fluttering over what the divine masculine is—a young girl’s fantasy of the perfect daddy—with no shadow and who never holds an uncompromising edge in the world against them. If a thing is insubstantial it will have a weak shadow. They just haven’t realised yet that the thing they are looking for is the very thing they are trying to wash off the table: the human masculine—with its all too human animal heritage.
Show me someone looking for the divine masculine and I will show you someone who doesn’t understand vulnerability and the reality of what it means to have the psyche, hormones and appetite of an animal, crafted by millions of years of evolutionary biology that you don’t extinguish and patch over with two decades of spiritual idealism or identity politics.
A real man has nothing to do with status, muscle mass or height. A real man is simply someone with a Y chromosome who chose vulnerability as the source of their power and real love, the source of their conviction.
A real man is not someone with a strident voice—they are simply someone with enough courage to speak up, even when their voice trembles, rather than say nothing in time of need.
Smallness, I learned, has nothing to do with stature—it has only to do with integrity, vision and courage. To be bold, is to be vulnerable. If we wait for the permission of the crowd, we all remain small.
If we want to actualise as a species, men need to actualise as men, women as women, and we need to yield to the truth that men and women contain both masculine and feminine polarities.
If you want men to step up into their rightful place as the leaders we want, the husbands, partners, fathers we want, that better version of themselves we all benefit from, they have to be allowed to fail and get things wrong.
If a man is committed to their own growth and evolution, open to feedback, coming from love not fear, respectful of boundaries and willing to sometimes be wrong, it has to be okay to fail. Mistakes are how we learn. Men and women, and society have all played their part in normalising the ridiculous sets of expectations for men to be strong providers and safe bedrocks of stillness, but not allowed to struggle to authentically find their way there.
I am so grateful to my wife and daughter for helping me find mine.
There is no greater treasure on this earth, than to be loved truly for who you truly are. And to be thus loved for who you truly are, one of course has to have the courage to be vulnerable enough to let people see who you really are.
Authenticity cannot exist without Vulnerability.