#alternative masculinity

I don't mean this in a shallow, become a pretty boy sense, I mean it as a deep idea.

Speak yourself & your being to the world visually, in all the things seen of you, present the best & most powerful truth.

Express yourself with action, as can be seen by others all around you. Bring your being forth such that a moments observation fortifies a quality opinion of you. Present yourself to the world, become glorious!

Do not be cowed by the faint-hearted criticisms of the miserable. Revel in being seen for all that you are & can be!

Do yourself as art, as the most beautiful expression of your soul you can present!

Wear your heart on your sleeve, yes!

Look at her. I would die for her. I would kill for her. Either way, what a bliss.

There are two clear righteous forms of masculine ethic.

Paternal Masculinity, which is the gentle, loving, romantic, caring kind.

Fraternal Masculinity which is the honorable, jovial, competitive, combititve & risk taking kind.

Love & seduction are an interwoven pair. Beautiful, but edged with potential tragedy.

Much of that tragedy comes from the modern world being designed to be incredibly seductive. I blush to say it, but my frist & deepest love was reading. I blush, because it's a little odd to take this idea as deep as it goes. I loved to read stories, I would curl up & fantasize worlds as I read them for days on end. I think I loved reading deeper than I've loved any other thing or person in my life. Therefore, a tickle of awkwardness talking about this.

I would say I loved reading deeper than I've loved any woman. That's hard to say as a very adult man. But upon reflection I do consider it true. True Love is a reserved term, & of too great an import to waste, but if it is possible to say this straight faced, I had a true love for reading as a child. But that love died, & my heart is scarred, covered in the scars of nostalgia.

I think this is a more common feeling than we admit, as adults, just how deep our love grows for that which forms us as children. In particular I remember this one series of books, which I gaze upon up on my shelf as I write this. Arthur Randsome's Swallows & Amazons classics from the 1930s.

I remember curling up on the couch wrapped in blankets with my mother & sister, as she read it to us, so young I remember her explaining words we'd never heard nearly every page. Crackling fire, howling wind & the darkness of a winter evening outside the 4 walls surrounding us. As romantic a memory as you wish to ever imagine. This was my formative experience with reading.

I went from learning reader books directly into the Hobbit by Tolkien. My father was reading it too us, but going far too slow for me, I took matters into my own hands. I had to guess the meaning of a lot of words, but by the end I was reading silently. Hopefully this sets the stage, unveiling what sort of child I was & what relationship I had to reading. I was deeply immursed from the beginning.

I remember vividly the day my love of reading died. I believe I was reading the last chapters of The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis. I sensed a battle within myself & so perhaps within the author, but I was not quite cued into the idea of considering the author a separate mind to his work at the time. That battle was of how to bring the deeply wrot threads of emotional connection into completion within the story. If you know the story, know this, I found myself broken over the idea of destruction of all that I'd known being the gate to an eternity of happily ever after. I wanted more stories, dammit!

In the following days the realization that formed, grew & burst upon my mind to fill me with murky darkness was this; all stories must end. I felt true & utter heart break. I have never grieved anything with more furvor than I grieved that day. Not my own tragedies, or human life or the horrors of the world. I faced perhaps the most profound truth in this world head on, & it broke me asunder.

One beautiful thing with books is that you can reread them, the magic doesn't fade from the pages completely, perhaps no matter how many times you turn them. But this truth is little solice to me personally, as I am one who is ever exploring & so very curious what what is new. Knowing that new thing too is also fated to death, this is the greatest realized terror of my life & the mere consideration of its utter inevitable is truth is the catastrophe central to all my conception & action in the world.

Sustainability as a conceptual alternative, an different mode for reality, is the most beautiful belief I can conceive of. That we can tell stories that tell new stories, or reread our living stories over & over again each time with completely fresh eyes. This heals my soul & restores my faith in existence.

Heaven might be a beautiful concept, but it may also be a phantom. It is I think something we should not wish for in absolute or need, as the nature of our current world is such that if we form it properly, it is ever telling a new story unfolding before us, one of us, that is potentially evergoing.

There is a concept in eastern philosophy, especially the Yogic tradition & Hindu belief. Atman is Brahman.

"Yourself, is the Divine Self."

We are the eyes of God living breath wondering upon the world immursed in the stories of ourselves. Heaven on Earth is on us, it's not a perfected crystal palace, but the world in which we can live sustainably & tell each other & also live, the best & most beautiful stories of ourselves.

Walk into a recent renovated & cleaned stain glass cathedral. It's not a foreboding Gothic place of oppressive reverence, but rather a bright, airy & joyous place. The man made cathedral mimics the nature of the true inner sanctuary. An old growth forest. Stained glass filters light much as leaves in the breeze do. Arches & columns mimic the towering trunks & arching branches of formidably ancient forest giants. Incense even mimics the musky & heavy scent of life roiling in vibrant decay upon the dampen earth. The alter a hilltop, blessings & purification rain. All that is symbolically important has its origins deep in the evolved world around us, life itself, all that has been upon the earth thus far, gives us this depth of experience & wonder.

I say this, because I do not despise the world. I see some in my feeds who do, with furvent religious zeal, & it saddens me. Suffering in this world doesn't bring heaven closer to us, only deepens the grip of hell upon the threads of our souls. Wishing it upon others, as if to purify them in some grand cosmic sense is a pitifully shallow black mark upon your own, & does nothing for the merit of what words & ideals are wrot upon your inner, deepest self.

"The greatest of these is love."

Discard faith if it challenges love, discard hope even. Cling to love more dearly than life itself. That was the lesson. The correct lesson in its own terms, but also the lesson I in myself learned across time. Some might say it leads astray, but I feel more found than anyone else I know. What is faith bonded in hate? Hope in the absence of compassion?

I grew up deep in the Christian tradition, & so have always felt a strongly engrained cultural connection to what considers itself the trad community on this site. But I'm not exactly of it. I care deeply about traditions as a living thing, not 'the tradition' as set in stone.

To truly save the world we need to question everything we consider unquestionable, but without losing ourselves along the way, & end prematurely in the journey. My sense is I want to engage more directly in consideration of belief, deep truths & the true nature of things in this world.

This was wonderful to write, as a personal essay & contemplation of self. I want to use lovely in regards to this as something of a philosophical manifesto, as to me it's a lovely summation of the root & ground of my own emotive journey in regards to fundamental philosophical & metaphysical truths. This blog is my own self & sanctuary where I speak from my inner being with gravitas & melodramatic intregue, but little sense of appealing to expectation or norms as set by culture or other people around me.

I wish there were more places in the world curated to be that for people, a grand & potent opening of the mind, not a wallowing in the dark recesses or a pretense of socially satisfactory & curated intellectualisms, but a careful, yet open unfolding of one's own truth. I hope that you, dear reader, value that in the nature of this blog as much as I do, & so enjoy the journey as much as I have so far, & will continue to, as I go forward.

You have no idea what it was to be a teenage boy with a lot of self loathing who was always bullied for "not acting like a man" and just catching this movie one day and be absolutely destroyed on the spot by this scene

I think about many things, as I have many questions about the world that lack answers I find compelling. One I've been seeking an answer to for at least a couple years now, is; what happened to both yoga and pilates in their translation into mainstream western fitness that broke the fundamental tradition of both methods?

This may seem an odd question to find important enough to wonder about year after year, but in the way I saw it, the answer was a deep conduit into an understanding of Eastern versus Western philosophy, culture and I hope you guessed it, (given my blog) tradition.

You see Pilates is a Western methodology developed from studying fitness science, the human body and "gymnastics." I believe J. Pilates was also inspired by Eastern martial arts, but I could be mistaken. However, the whole approach was couched within a Western, rational, conceptual framework. Yoga in contrast is a truly spiritual endeavor, and the true practice is quite different from anything easily understood in the western mind.

Both became bastardized in the mainstream into fad fitness monstrosities, with almost no resemblance to their original forms, but to my specific interest, loosing the impact on the body that true pilates and true yoga have. Both are best characterized as healing practices, taking broken disfunctional bodies and restoring proper movement and muscle alignment in posture. However, the mainstream practices have none of the healing benefits, and just amount to fitness of any kind workouts.

It's been said that yoga was bastardized because the west couldn't understand or adopt the spiritualism of the Eastern approach, however the same can't be said for Pilates, which too was bastardized in the same way. What happened?

I'm writing this because I think I've found the answer. I'll say it straight, but this will take a bit to unpack. The most fundamental western fitness mindset values "muscles that do more-harder" whereas pilates and yoga value "muscles that do better-softer." Said another way, the western mindset fetishizes the sensation of effort.

How many times have we been told to run harder as children, meaning with more effort and power, presumably to create more speed. Compared to how many times we've been told to run lighter, with more spring and better efficiency of movement that stresses the muscles less to perform the same runtime? Our fundamental idea of fitness is to "force adaptation," throwing the word hypertrophy around quite a lot.

Technique is something mechanical, postural, taught and imposed from the outside. Unless of course one is gifted and "a natural." But in truth anyone can learn to be a natural at movement, our bodies are meant for movement, born for it, millions of years of evolution give us the tools of beautiful movement, inside of us.

Pure movement is felt. It feels good. The aim is for us, adults, to reconnect and reattach to that sensation of happy movement we felt as kids. The challenge is to swallow the ego and start way, way smaller than we think or feel is appropriate. Our bodies are broken, our posture is in a dysfunctional pattern. We're trapped in bodies that won't move right, as they don't feel movement in its correct set of sensation. We've been taught to think, and feel fitness wrong.

Effort is the enemy. Everything, even the most intense attempt, should feel easy, at least, the goal should be ease and comfort in every movement. Pain, discomfort, a negative experience during exercise of any kind indicates a place in the body that is not functioning properly. Pleasure indicates something proper and good. But it's not that simple, as we've learned through repetitive training to cross our wires. Unlearning this is up to each of us.

This was the original goal of J. Pilates. To develop a fitness program for proper health and movement. The origin of yogic physical practice was to restore balance in the body. The origin of what I'm calling western fitness is the machismo of sports coaches pushing their protoges to exhaustion. This is why I'm writing about this on this blog. Our negative relationship with our bodies, movement, fitness and the carried bodily pain from childhood trauma and injury is born, it seems, of Excessive Masculinity.

This has been long, and yet I still feel there is a continuing of this message to be done. However it is time to end this.

To strive to become more is fully noble. But to break from one's true self to do so means one never truly achieves the more one aims to reach, no matter how far one goes, or what ones does. If you aren't one in and with yourself when you do what you do, you are as much a bystander as the crowd watching.

Spend more time feeling your body from the inside, savor your life and the vessel you came to it in. Stretch your experience into every muscle. Draw more depth of feeling from your body. Be alive. Let the moment fill you. Act with full force, but also with relaxation and ease, with grace. Gracefulness in Greatness is Masculine.

Be strong, but be better in that strength, not "more." Let your strength guide you to softness in your body, ease, elegance & lightness. Don't be hard or repellent or brutal, unless a singular moment calls for these traits, then be what you must for that moment.

Hopefully this approach to physical fitness is enlightening & of benefit to some of you in your growth as men!

My love, be it for myself and others is well represented in media. But when you want to deconstruct and make your own identity separated from these standards then you can tell that no, I actually don’t want that, I am not that. 

It is important to mention that of course I can’t stop being privileged. The best I can do is question said privilege and act against it. So then it becomes a very personal work this construction of my masculinity and my love. And of course, the personal is political.

I can name a few stories that have been shown to make a very good or at least close to good representation of what I would rather be my identity and love. Pride and Prejudice, The Black Corsair, Lord of The Rings. None of these are perfect examples but anyone that has read them can probably tell what I’m talking about. Loving and caring cishet couples that fully respect each other. But the majority of cishet love in media and unfortunatley in our own lives is quite the contrary. I don’t like the love and masculinity that I see in media, it doesn’t represent what I want for myself, for this identity and love that's honestly been with me forever, I just have been ashamed of working on it.

Anyone that’s been in tumblr for a while, or has listened to Hozier, can see and admire all the very profound ways in which LGBTTQI+ folk write and talk about love and romance. It feels inspiring and makes you feel, well, it makes you feel intensively. This of course is not only very beautiful to see but also very much necessary. If they won’t rep themselves who will? Certainly not mainstream media.

So I find myself much like I was as a kid and a very depressed teenager. I want to love, so deeply and intensively, and I see people not only doing so but expressing said love in so many ways. In words that just take my breath away. But when I turn my gaze at mainstream media I almost despise what I see. I don’t want to be that, I don’t want to be that man nor do I want that cheap and damaging act that they pretend is the way I’m supposed to love, much less how to love women.

I want to give myself wholly, to admire almost to the point of worship, to make a life in which we both care, cherish and respect each other. Where we can talk, laugh, cry, rely on each other and understand each other. To, as Hozier sings, “Be felt by you, held by you, fuel the pyre of your enemies”.