The Thief Left it Behind

A meditation on loss and some thoughts on sexuality.

I am going through a season of some personal turmoil and loss. Things I clutched to my heart as essential to my purpose have been ripped out root and stem. I won't give details, but I will only say that the past month has felt like a spiritual apocalypse. I feel lost at sea, struggling to find the old familiar footing that is no longer there.

As my friend Gareth reminded me recently on a walk in the woods, an apocalypse is a revelation — it is a day of judgment that reveals the buried truths. This apocalypse has devastated me. I've barely slept for about a month. but it has also left me with an unveiling of my deepest values, personal flaws, and truest friends.

The Zen Buddhist monk Ryokan, who was poor and lived in a rugged hut, came home one day to find that a thief had stolen what few possessions he had. He wrote the following haiku:

The thief left it behind:

The moon

At my window.

This is perhaps the encapsulation of a graceful, mindful response to an apocalypse. The tragedy left Ryokan with an unveiling of the moon at his window: a symbol of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism.

What is the moon at my window? The friends who have demonstrated themselves to be true through my calamity; my partner, who loves me and unfailingly supports me; my day job, which is mercifully quotidian; my meditation practice, which reveals the true nature of my consciousness; my principles, which guide me even when I fail to live up to them.

The thief left all of this behind. He was a horseman of the apocalypse, ripping away the veil, revealing the moon that was always at my window.

I am grateful for this unveiling, even as I struggle with the pain of loss. I remind myself that — and here is another great insight from Buddhism — I am not exempt from pain, loss, and deconstruction. The thief comes for all of us, and yet we all labor under the strange delusion that we should be exempt from his terrifying visitations.

Being alive means confronting the thief and what he leaves behind. I don’t get to only opt in to the good-feeling stuff while turning off the bad stuff, as if it were a TV channel that upsets me. A mindful life means being present in the whole spectrum of existence.

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Of tigers and werewolves

Last week’s article Embracing The Tiger explored our cultural disgust of male sexuality and the challenge I and many other men face in coming to terms with male lust. It got an incredibly thoughtful response from my readers.

Clare Ashcroft (subscribe to her Substack!) had this to say:

This was super interesting to me as a woman, who really has no experience of this. The only thing I would add regarding the cultural disgust aspect is that we also have to acknowledge, I think, that it's mixed with a lot of fear. In male/female relationships there's a lot of fear when men express not feeling in control because there's a physical power imbalance. Nearly all men are stronger than me, so if a man confided in me that he felt there was a separate beast he wasn't yet in control of I would be a little concerned (of course depends on the relationship I have with the other person) because I would be the one in the vulnerable position when they don't feel in control. Even if everything is consensual I think after that I would question if they can stop and read my body language, etc.

This is a helpful reminder for me because gay men tend to be on equal footing with each other physically. This doesn’t mean there aren’t body size and strength discrepancies between men, but gay sex is a much more equal playing field. It is masculine strength against masculine strength.

The average differences between male and female strength are enormous. I can understand how being aware of the masculine werewolf can be frightening for some women. This is further proof to me that men need to be taught to mindfully embrace their werewolves and learn to cooperate with their lust.

I am also having second thoughts about the werewolf metaphor. As my friend David Livingstone Smith points out, dehumanizing rhetoric involves a blurring of human and inhuman, evoking fear and disgust in a deep part of our brains. The werewolf is a classic example, blending man and beast into a frightening amalgam. I’ve personally committed never to dehumanize other people. While I like the werewolf metaphor, I fear it can spark alarm by enabling dehumanization. Male sexuality is human, and it is that fundamental humanity that needs to be embraced.

TJ Radcliffe (buy his book!) gave his male perspective:

How we embrace our lust, our aggression, our proclivity for risk-taking, and in general our extremes--and the data show that men tend to extremes more than women, across the spectrum--while not letting them run away with us is the fundamental challenge of being a man.

Suppressing all that is a non-starter. Sublimating is better. But embracing and acknowledging and accepting without excusing or condemning is the dream. Finding ways to experience ourselves *as men* without leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in our wake is as heroic as it gets.

I have a theory that a huge component of a healthy society is teaching men how to handle their impulses. Young Man Syndrome — the ugly fact that the vast majority of crime, rape, and violence is perpetrated by men between the ages of 16 and 35 — is a perennial challenge for any culture. I believe that if men don’t have positive role models in their lives, then they will go looking for them in the dark corners of the internet.

I’m interested in helping men confront their extremes and cooperate with their tigers. This might be surprising: I’m gender non-conforming, weird, and so flamingly gay that I’m like that little girl who spontaneously combusts in Stephen King’s Firestarter. Many guys are put off by me, and that’s ok. Others are drawn to me as a friend. We all play a role — even weird, gender-non-conforming guys like me.

Arthur shared his own struggle with his sexuality:

I am currently where you are at in terms of living a healthy lifestyle and embracing/integrating my lust/sexuality into my conception of who I am as a normal human/animal. Like you, I have gone on strange journeys with my sexuality throughout the years (including periods of religion-inspired asceticism/shame, SSRI-influenced impotence, and an encounter with infidelity in college that left me questioning everything about myself because I couldn't account for how I seemingly transformed into someone capable of committing such a sin/transgression). I think the key, for me, was to stop looking at it as something foreign to myself, like a demon that would occasionally come to possess me. Instead, I now look at it as a core and primal part of me, always present, like hunger or thirst. Now it doesn't surprise me out of nowhere, and I'm more aware of when it seems to be in the driver's seat (and, thus, if I can push the metaphor a little further, I can help navigate the car and not act like a hostage tied up in the trunk). By the way, your tiger metaphor reminds me of "Life of Pi" (the film in particular; I never read the book)

I appreciate this vulnerability, and especially the story from college. Your encounter with infidelity and the ensuing identity crisis is the sort of battle I think a lot of people go through with their lust. We do surprising things when we are horny, and the post-nut clarity often brings a mortifying feeling of shame.

The most helpful advice I have ever heard regarding this has come from the sex therapist Dr. David Ley: think about sexuality when you aren’t horny. Too many of us only think about our sexuality when we are in the throes of horniness and falling down a sissy hypno-porn rabbit hole at three AM. But sex is such a powerful force that horniness will handicap our reasoning.  

Reflecting on sexuality during the cold light of day transforms how we engage with sex when we are horny. Contemplating our yearnings, kinks, porn use, and values makes us more noble and responsible people when the horniness sets in. But this requires a radical level of honesty and courage, especially when we have grown up in repressive and shaming environments.

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Wild Geese

Last week, I shared a snippet of Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese. It is a stunningly beautiful poem and has been a personal source of consolation for years. When I feel the shame from my conservative Christian days building up, I speak it to myself. Here it is in full:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

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