Today is Father’s Day and it is the longest day of the year, the official start of summer in the northern hemisphere. Looking ahead, we know it is all down hill from this point as days get begin to get shorter. In spite of that knowledge, of that premonition of endings, we typically enter fully into life through our relationships. In the spring time of our life, we entered into our first relationships outside of family as though drawn to buried treasure, to the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow – we fall into love. Now, in the summer we are cultivating those early promises of spring into our own families, becoming fathers and mothers. The relationship of man with woman is overshadowed by building relationships with children and the communities in which our children are forged.
I think of my relationship with my father, my grandfathers and uncles, and other adult males who added their own voices and presences into my life. Out of that swirling mass of masculinity, i navigated unconsciously fashioning my own unique presence as a male as each young boy must do. We talk of absent fathers, but there is no such thing when one looks more deeply into one’s life. Even absence works powerfully on development – there is no vacuum. Other men, related biologically or simply related only by presence become fathers as well regardless of our need or their intention. Each of them offers us some sort of template for being a man; each of them combined shows us the breadth of what the archetypal father, a image that lets us find a grounding in our masculinity if we could dare to explore the depths of that image, of the archetype.
That masculine archetype is not limited to fathers. All males find their essence and infinite variety in the archetype – king, fool, lover, magician, warrior, sage, villain, and so much more. It isn’t simply about being born a male with a penis and testicles, it is about the surging life force that wills itself to become conscious of self and other.
Now, today, I realise that I am a father, a grandfather, an uncle and one of those other adult males that takes his place in the pulsing archetype of “man” in which today’s and tomorrow’s boys will connect with as they make their own personal journeys to become men. I find that I am related to all other men in my senior years – their simple presence in life as males is all it takes. Each male I get to know, and those who exist in various degrees of distance – all are part of that fabric of what it is to be a man, the good and the bad. We cannot deny our relationship to each other in spite of our protests, our hatreds, our wounds, our longings, and our hero worship. We are all one.