Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
Sam Keen
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0553351370
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Written for both men and women, this groundbreaking book takes the reader on a journey to discover new routes to authentic manhood and create alternatives to definitions of masculinity that no longer work in today's world.
Books by Sam Keen Your Mythic Journey (with Anne Valley-Fox) To a Dancing God Faces of the Enemy Especially for: James Donaldson Bill Jersey Richard Ruopp Earl Scott Heartful men. Friends for three decades. Jananne Lovett-Keen With whom irreconcilable differences have stimulated the growth of love. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Dr. Ofer Zur and I have shared ideas for three years about war, gender and the changing ideals of manhood. Leslie Meredith, an editor with a
fallow time. The right name for manly restlessness and inability to enjoy fallowness is mistrust. The male wound is ontological distrust, a vote of “no confidence” in the universe. Women, even the high-powered types, know innately about gestation. From the moment of their first menstruation they learned about the seasonal quality of the body and soul. Through a lifetime of waiting, expecting, courting, conceiving, feeling the quickening in the womb, growing large with child and giving birth,
no awareness of the disease of which he might be healed. And no mensch worships the status quo. When we become spiritual warriors, it must be with the knowledge that the battle is never to be won either intellectually or politically. The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers once said that “evil is the rock on which every system shipwrecks.” There is no answer, no theodicy, no way of understanding that eliminates the insult evil poses to the human spirit. We are not in a world that satisfies
Psychologically, the husbandman is a man who has made a decision to be in place, to make commitments, to forge bonds, to put down roots, to translate the feeling of empathy and compassion into an action of caring. At the moment it is not where we live but how we live that prevents us from being husbandmen. The story is told about Flannery O’Connor, a novelist from a small southern town, who came to New York City to receive a prize for one of her books. At a literary cocktail party in her honor,
our depression can turn into a sense of empowerment when we begin to look carefully at the way men and women interact in a codependent way to maintain the system. When both sexes feel the fatedness of our separate but equal existence, when we both feel the rage and impotence of being victims, the scales inevitably begin to tip and we begin to feel the other half of the truth—our freedom and potency to change. Only unconsciously chosen systems have the face of fate. We have this advantage over