REMEMBERING THE CROOKED WAYS

Apprenticeship to Love: April 7, 2026

TODAY'S MEDITATION

It's the season for me to remember foolish wisdom. To consider sacrifice, and what is both lost and won in the trip to the fires of my personal hell, and back.

...

The lessons of sacrifice and surrender. Hard lessons for me, a man schooled as a masculine-identified man. This is a school of purpose. Goals. Striving. Conquering. A preparation for a culture and an economy of winner/loser, where there is no abiding the loser. So I've done what I can —I've done everything I can— to control all that is within me and all that is beyond me, all that is beyond my awareness, and especially the great tide of the always-changing (aka the feminine) that washes over and through everything.

Even though I strive with great effort and talent, my efforts to arrest this tide will always fail. Whether in this moment or this decade or this life or beyond, failure. Even knowing this, I continue to resist what can help me know myself and this life and this love more deeply.

What do I resist? It's almost too simple to name it. That something is women’s wisdom.

It's a wisdom born of the body. Born of blood and pain. A body pushed beyond what few –any?– of us embodied as men would endure. It's a body that knows the necessity of surrender, and also the necessary sacrifice of notions of freedom and self.

The words are abstractions. One thing I have learned, in the company of women, is that pain and suffering are, for her, real. Concrete. Embodied. Impossible to escape from. Experiences that must be acknowledged. Surrendered to.

Still, my history with women –and especially the women I've loved– is a history of avoiding the wisdom that comes from this surrender. Avoiding. Or, as I am realizing, actively resisting.

...

What is the fruit of this resistance? A juvenile superiority. The worst kind of foolishness. The kind that persists in winning pyrrhic victories.

Unfortunately, the more I "win," the greater my suffering, the greater the suffering I inflict on those near to me, and the greater my uselessness to myself, the women, children, our families, our communities, to this culture I could be building.

I, with all of you men who share this resistance to feminine wisdom, we are the fathers of this culture. It is not, today, a flourishing culture. It is a culture that, at least as I read the news today, is struggling to emerge from the playground of winners and losers where we are all losers.

I am the father of this culture.

Am I ready to sacrifice myself, to surrender to the wisdom of endless tides and storms and silences?

...

If spending time with my children and my grandchildren tells me anything it is this: there is still so much for me to learn about fathering, and now, grandfathering. And, perhaps more important: my fathering and grandfathering is the most important work of this life.

I am beginning to understand a different way of winning, where there are no losers. It begins with my surrender.

...

Who am I? What am I doing with this life? With this love?

...

Whatever answers lie ahead for me, they will be revealed to the extent that I am committed to walking the crooked ways. Wandering and wondering. Being in the world without a set of instructions. No right or wrong. Just the inevitability of things and their always-changing nature. What I bring to these crooked ways: a growing capacity to be aware.

...

Recent words from a man that resonated: What is true reveals itself in our surrender, in the sacrifice of who we think we are, what we think we are about. This, he said, this is the hardest thing for us as men who identify with the masculine, to surrender.

...

A lesson from my life (given me several times because I am so resistant to learning): The times when I have been most focused on purpose and goals, and most successful in work, business, community, family —these are the times when I am most impervious to gentle reminders to attend to the crooked ways. It is no accident that these gentle reminders are feminine reminders. It is no accident that, to my success-in-the-world way of knowing, these feminine reminders are experienced as nonsensical. Not of the consequential world of money and power and etc. These feminine reminders might even be viewed as borderline crazy, or at least worthy of some sort of psychological labelling.

I will persist in ignorance/not-awareness. I will not be reminded. I will crucify myself on my own success.

Eventually, however, I do surrender. It's too much, this tide of life and love. Too much for the illusory bulwarks of success I think I am building. Eventually, surrendering, I become aware of something more.

...

Sometimes I think I am some kind of special idiot. Maybe. But, as I listen to all the men and women who speak to me, I realize my affliction is shared.

...

There are ways to become more than I am, more able to experience the subtleties of love and beauty and distress. They're not complicated. But these ways require regular, daily practice. For me that practice looks like yoga, tango, meditation, being in the woods, being alone. It's looks and sounds like listening more deeply, and especially to the silences. To learn how to feel more, and especially to the wisdom of my body, and hers.

...

I test you, she said to me, not so long ago. Then she withdrew into the middle-distance of silence. I know, I replied.

Sometimes that feels good, I continued, before she disappeared. And sometimes it doesn't. But I'm still here, ready for more.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀…‘She’ demands the death of all my control..
I surrender to Her, Divine madness, Pure in heart,
Who demands nothing but Truth.
It is so painful.. but it is the portal, infinite Love,
The nectar of Freedom… (Pantherrre)

🌀I appreciate you. (My beloved, my oracle & siren)