Turkey is truly a curious land with an interesting mix of East and West. Straight men hold hands and the custom of the cheek kiss is all the norm while men still do not sit with women on buses if it can be helped. Segregation in mosques remains, women praying in secluded areas usually tucked away from the ‘front’. Entering a mosque requires men to cover at least their legs (and the usual shirt shoes etc) and women their head (amongst seemingly everything else). Prayer time can’t be missed as all cities small and large erupt in blaring words of praise. There is still a barter, and word of mouth commission like system in place. This explains why the prices are never the same and always negotiable. Honking at people to let them oHthemthemfjksfdlksfdlsfdf know they’re coming, or about to run them over, is also as customary as chai and carpet salesmen. There seems to be a big influx of money into the country via tourism. Luckily the turks understand how to treat the tourist always looking to help. Needless to say this does take a while to get used to as there is no such thing as a quiet walk. Foreign investment seems abound especially along the Mediterranean coast where there is no such thing as a cheap ‘anything’. Farming has evolved to use tractors though sheep still run unfenced over the landscape. Amazingly everyone seems to speak English to some degree and those that haven’t learned just jet try their hardest to help in any way possible. People are warm and appear to be used to foreigners. The land is diverse and has lots to offer especially historically. These include Byzantine, Ottoman, Anatolian, Roman, and Greek cultural remnants. The East of the country is mostly unexplored by tourists and still has some Kurdish conflicts which are also felt in the West via the PPK bombings and other unrest. All in all, Turkey has to date been one of the most amazing, ‘funnest’, culturally rich, cheapest, and friendliest countries to visit and I can’t wait to return one day.
October 29th, 2008 | Category: Michael, Travel, Turkey | One comment
Aug 31, 2009
Aug 19, 2009
Michael Panzeca: The Quest for Manhood
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." - From Walden by Henry David Thoreau
A Friday. A moonless night. A dome of stars above. A light wind blows off the lake through the pines. A gathering of men is about to begin.
I'm late leaving my cabin. I walk briskly toward a dark building in the middle of the clearing. The other men are inside the building. I can hear them.
They're drumming.
The sound is loud, primal, frightening. I peek cautiously through the archway. Candles flicker from the middle of the floor. Fifty men are sitting, in a circle, around the candles.
Drumming.
Some of these men, these strangers drumming in front of other strangers, look as disconcerted as I know I must. Yet some look ecstatic. I find a place on the floor and try to pick up the beat. I lack a drum, but I have a tambourine, and I slap it across my thigh with false gusto.
A large, burly man - he must be 50 - howls at the ceiling like a Hollywood version of an Apache. Stands. Starts dancing. Hops around by himself, pounding his drum, grunting, whooping, screaming. A wild man in Rockports. He puts down his drum. Hugs the man to his right.
It cost $200 to be here, yet I want to run from the room.
I don't run, of course. I'm here to write about what happens during the next three days. Gatherings such as this, sponsored by the Orlando Men's Council, are taking place all over the country. Under the direction of psychotherapists and experts in American Indian rituals, men get together in the woods, commune with nature, beat drums, share their deepest feelings, dance with abandon, meditate, hug each other, read poetry, even purify themselves by sitting in 150-degree sweat lodges. What they are supposed to get out of this, I have read, is a spiritual reawakening and a new sense of what it means to be a man.
Participating in the shared emotion of such a gathering, for me, is a frightening prospect.
I was raised like most men. Be strong. Be the best athlete. Get the best grades. Whatever you do, don't cry. Feelings? Hell, real men hide them. Even as my father lay dying, we talked about baseball and fishing instead of our fierce love for each other. We kept secret our deepest emotions. As men do.
This is just one of my sorrows. Other sorrows are harder to articulate because they lurk in the subconscious. But I'll tell you what I think I think: In some regards, men have been as damaged as women by the way society has conditioned us.
The sorrow of women is that they have been devalued into sex objects and treated as second-class citizens. But during the last two decades women have taken action. They have faced their pain, shown righteous anger and are stronger for it. Men, meanwhile, have been socialized for centuries to be the great providers, to be stoic, to be soldiers, to kick ass. We've been conditioned to dominate women and our children, the workplace, other countries and the natural world. In the name of profit we are willing to poison the air and the water our grandchildren need for survival. Disconnected from nature, we have lost our ancient sense of wonder.
The modern work world has similarly taken us away from our families, as Robert Bly points out in his book about masculinity's mythic dimensions, Iron John. Our children are strangers to many of us. We work late, and on weekends, and seldom see them. Some of us, divorced, see our kids even less. Many of us never knew our own dads.
Bly has been talking to men, and writing poetry about men's lives, for more than a decade. But it was about two years ago that he shoved the men's movement into the mainstream. Public television's Bill Moyers filmed a Bly-led men's gathering in Texas that was seen by millions of viewers. Iron John, the book that followed, has been on the best-seller list for 43 weeks. Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly - on Being a Man also has outsold the usual diet books and celebrity biographies. Men's groups are meeting all over the country. Florida has a half dozen, including one in St. Petersburg.
Men clearly want to know more about being a man.
So what is a man? Hell, most of us don't know. A man has to do what a man has to do, we have heard, but we don't know what and why that is. And if we do, for the most part we're incapable of talking about it, much less changing our ways. That's our sorrow and our confusion.
Men have shorter lifespans than women. We are four times more likely to take our own lives. We are three times more likely to be addicted to alcohol and drugs. More men than women are homeless. More men than women are in prison.
"I think we're at the end of an era," says Michael Panzeca, one of three South Florida therapists running this gathering. "Men have achieved as much success as we can with progress and technology. We've got jobs, and cars, and wives and kids. We've got VCRs and stereos. Yet we're empty inside."
So we drum. Who are these men?
The guy on my left has a large drum. He is the dominant drummer. We play his beat, which is loud, slow, primal. The guy on my right has a large drum, too. His beat is slightly faster, and gradually we all join him. It's not a competition. It's a stream that has met a boulder and changed course. After 10 minutes, I feel like a molecule in that stream, carried along for an exhilarating ride.
Panzeca, 29, introduces himself and his assistants, Mark Purcell, 30, and Joe Milisitz, 36. I'm a beginner when it comes to psychotherapy, which may be true of most men, who try to handle their own problems, but I'll say this: These guys don't look like Freud. They wear jeans and T-shirts. They wear their hair in pony tails. They wear fedoras and earrings. Milisitz, with his Jersey accent, sounds like Bruce Springsteen. Purcell, of American Indian ancestry, writes poetry. Panzeca, stalking the room like a caged wolf, shares his background: He's a former alcoholic and drug addict who went sober nine years ago in prison and studied psychology.
He tells us to introduce ourselves, one at a time, and looks at me. I give my first name, where I was born, where I grew up, and where I live now. Most of the men follow my boring example. But halfway through the introductions, halfway around the room, the atmosphere changes.
"I'm from nowhere," says an angry looking man named Roman.
The guy behind him, a man with long blond hair, says: "I'm from the void."
I feel the need to pick up my notebook, my shield against raw emotion. Instead, I wait for a pause and add a personal detail: I'm a reporter. The organizers know, but the participants don't, and they should if I'm going to write about them. Nobody objects. When I tell them I am also a participant in this adventure, some of them, men who have done gatherings before, yell out.
"Ho!"
It's a Native American expression. It means "I agree." There will be a lot of hoing this weekend.
So who are these men? Most of us could be your neighbor. Most of us are well-groomed. All of us are white. I'd say our average age i between 35 and 45, in our mid-life crisis primes. Most of us, I'll learn throughout the weekend, are professionals. At least five participants are psychotherapists themselves. There is one medical doctor and one psychiatrist. There are several stock brokers and real estate salesmen. There are men who work with their hands.
Several men have physical handicaps. One man is unnaturally small. One is blind. One has a lazy eye. One has twisted legs and limps. But most of our problems, our sorrows, our hopes, are hidden in our hearts. And the purpose of the weekend is to help get them out and become better men - for ourselves, our women, our children, our planet.
Panzeca tells us to pick out a walking stick from the corner. He says the sticks will represent our male power. The newspaper reporter in me listens cynically. The man in me listens with an open mind.
Panzeca invites any man 50 or older to stand. He says the older men will serve this weekend as our elders, our mentors, our initiators into manhood. Why not? He sends them into the woods to build a campfire. He next invites us to share our fears. The room explodes with so much emotion I almost jump.
"I fear being insignificant!"
"I fear responsibility!"
"I fear my father!"
"I fear women!"
"I fear death!"
"I fear fear!" Returning to Mother Earth
Saturday. Dawn. A stiff breeze.
I'm exhausted from a sleepless night. I couldn't get the drumming out of my ahead, and my fears about today out of my heart. Today's schedule includes something called "ceremony of the wounds," a "power dance" and a "sweat lodge."
We're going to be using a lot of rituals to help us overcome our inbred white man's reluctance to talk and to feel. Some are Native American in origin; some are staples in psychotherapy. All will be new to me.
"A lot of psychotherapy with men is about their lack of being grounded," says Mark Purcell, who has practiced psychotherapy in Fort Lauderdale for six years, as we drink coffee at breakfast. "They don't connect with people, especially with other men. What we do at these gatherings is help them get grounded."
A drum is grounded in the earth. It's made from wood and animal skin. Beating it is primal. The raw ingredients of a sweat lodge ceremony are earth, air, water and fire. "A lot of what happens here is about nature," says Purcell, of Creek and Cherokee ancestry. So-called primitive men once drew upon Mother Earth for material and spiritual sustenance. They honored the Earth. Modern men fear it and exploit it. On this weekend, we will return to roots that some of us have forgotten.
We will hear much about "Wild Men" and "Warriors." These terms are sprinkled through Bly's Iron John. As Bly sees it, the wild man part of a man's personality is the spontaneous part, the funny part, the vulgar part, the sexual part, the passionate part, the part that feels comfortable in nature. A man needs some wild man in him to be whole. But the wild man part of personality, if taken to extremes, is also dangerous. It can be self destructive and violent, a drug addict or an alcoholic, a game of Russian roulette.
"Jack Kerouac's mistake was trying to become the wild man," Bly says. "He ended up vomiting his liver."
Some men fear even the good qualities of their wild man, or had it beaten or socialized out of them when they were boys, and they are passive, predictable, soft adults. They're sensitive, all right, but they lack energy. Their warrior is undeveloped.
The warrior is the competent part of a man, the part that gets things done, the determined part, the part that makes decisions. The warrior in a man loves himself and his family. The warrior in a man has the courage of his convictions. The warrior is willing to defend both his physical and emotional boundaries.
A warrior has another important component: the so-called nurturing side. This is the ability to teach. To listen. To feel empathy. To be interested in another man's soul. To be so secure in manhood that he can touch another man. Into the woods
Michael Panzeca sends us into the woods. Our mission is to confront our demons, the things that have wounded the wild man and the warrior in us, things that we are afraid even to think about, much less discuss with a stranger. Panzeca has even given us rags to represent our wounds. We tie them where we hurt.
I walk through the palmettos and look for a place to confront - what? I'm unsure. I squat at a fallen pine. In the distance I hear a shriek. Someone else yells, "No! No! No!" This is heavy stuff. Somebody curses with all his might. I look through dead branches across a field and see a man writhing in the sand. I hear someone battering a tree with his walking stick and condemning a father who is not there, who was never there. I think of events of my own childhood.
Tears fill my eyes. Their stories
We return to the fire. Some men are sobbing. Others are taking deep breaths and looking around with wild eyes. I sit on a bale of hay and finger my notebook and try to control my emotions. I'm afraid of letting go.
Panzeca tells us to separate into small groups and to talk, if we want to, about what happened in the woods. Joe Milisitz, the therapist we all call Joey, will lead my group.
So.
What are things that have kept some of us from realizing our potential as men?
One man says he never had a relationship with his dad. He loved his dad, wanted to learn from his dad, but his dad seemed to be dead inside. His dad never had a moment for his son. His dad loved television more than his own flesh and blood.
He stands among us and sobs. That may seem shameful to some of you reading this, a grown man weeping about an absent dad after so many years. But it is among the bravest, most moving things I've ever heard.
The rest of us stand and embrace him. We take the role of his father. "I love you just the way you are," Joey, the therapist, says gently. Someone says, "I'm turning off the television, Andy. Let's talk."
What else?
One man says he was raped by his father. He says he hates to be touched by men. He even hates when a man stands behind him. Sobbing, he asks for help. We stand behind him and embrace him. We honor his pain by sharing his tears.
One man, choking with emotion, says he has never been able to tell anybody, until now, just how angry he is with his domineering mother, who made him feel inadequate when he was a boy. Another man says he was regularly disciplined by his mother - with enemas.
One man was abused by a teacher. Another, by a nurse. One man weeps because he can have nothing but sexual relationships with women. He says he feels only emptiness. Another man calls his wife "that bitch." He's so tired of trying to make her happy.
Back at the fire, we pick up our drums and our percussion instruments. We beat them. We chant. We howl. Then, at Michael Panzeca's invitation, we leap, one by one, into the campfire circle and dance our pain away. We jump, we beat our sticks against the ground in rage, we swing them over our heads in triumph.
The power dance feels as natural as brushing my teeth. In the sweat lodge
Saturday night. Breezeless. Hot and sticky.
I have been drinking water continuously for three hours at the suggestion of Kirk Fenner, who is serving as a medicine man of sorts for the sweat lodge. Kirk, 43, is a South Florida electrician who has studied the traditions of American Indians for decades. He's also a former Vietnam veteran who has wrestled his own demons for his warrior soul.
"The sweat lodge is a Native American ritual," he says. "It's a purification rite that represents cleansing and rebirth."
There will be two lodges tonight, each lasting 90 minutes. I'm scheduled for the second. The lodge, built from pine saplings, is covered by blankets, tarps and a sheet of thick black plastic. A dome about 15 feet across and 5 feet high, the lodge resembles an igloo. About 25 of us will be stuffed into it at a time.
We're going to pray, according to Lakota Sioux traditions, and we're going to sing. We're going to talk, if we want to talk, and we're going to moan, if we want to moan. Some of us may be blessed with visions. All of us will sweat more than we've ever sweated before.
"Some people won't go into the lodge," Fenner says. "And that's good. You don't want to do this until you're ready. Some people come in and leave early. That's fine, too. You do what you need to do. That's one of the things about the lodge: It gives you exactly what you need. The lodge tells you to look at something, to look into your heart . . ."
My heart is pounding. I want to do this, but I'm also terrified. I'm slightly claustrophobic, and my lungs are scarred from an old illness. I'm one of those people who gets a flu shot every fall. A doctor here told me he did a sweat lodge last spring and got a lung infection.
We shed shirts and shoes. We remove rings and other jewelry. In the heat of the lodge, metal can burn skin. We line up single file. At the lodge door, we fall to our knees, bow to the earth, and say: Mitakuye oyasin. It's Lakota for "All my relatives" or "All my relations." All of us, men and women, animals, plants and rocks, living and dead, are related and watched over by Wanka Tanka, the Great Mystery, or what white people would call the Great Spirit.
It's warm in the lodge, but not stifling.
Kirk explains what we'll do. There will be four ceremonies, or endurances, honoring the west, north, east and south. We will invite in the spirits and ask them for courage, knowledge and healing. Each endurance will last a little more than 20 minutes.
A boulder, glowing red, is hauled in on a pitchfork and dropped into the pit in the center of the lodge. The temperature leaps by at least 10 degrees. Some of us giggle. Six more boulders, and almost unbearable heat, follow. Giggling stops.
Kirk closes the door flap.
It's as black in here as oblivion.
He ladles water onto the boulders. I hear the hiss before the suffocating steam covers me.
Kirk sings in Lakota. We do our best to follow along. I'm so anxious I have a hard time. I press my face to the earth in hopes of finding cooler air. My lungs feel like they're cooking.
Now Kirk begins a long prayer in English. He's inviting the spirit world into our lodge to help us.
A few of us try praying along. Others moan. My mind is centered on my fear. I want to leave, but I'm afraid to admit it. I don't want to wimp out. Kirk finishes the prayer.
I say: "I have to leave now."
Kirk says, "That's good, brother." Someone else says "Ho!" I crawl, clockwise, among my brothers toward the door. Touching me, they offer unspoken support. Kirk says, "The biggest lesson is knowing when to leave."
I stand outside the lodge and fill my lungs with cool air.
I feel only shame. Courage was all around
Sunday. Dawn. Sandhill cranes, squawking like rusty gates, fly in front of me as I meditate at the lake. What went wrong last night?
I seek out Joey Milisitz, the therapist, who was the hero of last night's ceremony. Joey did both lodges.
I tell him I lost my courage after 10 minutes. How did he last three hours?
Joey says, "I tried to do a sweat lodge last spring. After 10 minutes I had a panic attack. I had to get out of there! This time I was determined. So when I went into the first lodge, I announced my great fear to everybody. I told them I needed their support and their courage."
Joey's wisdom hits me like a thunderbolt. There I had been, sitting in a sweat lodge with 25 of the most supportive people I'd ever met. Yet I had been unable to express a simple, human emotion that surely is shared by all men: fear.
I felt alone in a roomful of friends.
The lesson of the sweat lodge. Harnessing the power
The rest of the morning goes too fast. We gather in the parking lot and line up. One by one, we're going to hike through the woods to the campfire circle, where the elders await to initiate us as men. If you had told me last week I was going to be "initiated" as a man, I would have laughed at you. But now I have to keep wiping my eyes. It's real.
So I walk into the woods. Alone. Someone lunges from behind a bush and blocks my path. He says he is my fear. Am I ready to accept him? I am. We embrace. I walk on, and meet my grief, and my anger, and, finally, my power.
At the campfire circle I step through a doorway constructed of saplings. Six elders welcome me. One ties a chain of beads around my neck. The beads represent earth, fire, wind and sun, components that celebrate the wild man and warrior in men. Kirk Fenner, medicine man, breaks out a ceremonial pipe.
We smoke and we pray.
"How do we translate what we have learned this weekend into the real world?" Michael Panzeca, the head therapist, had asked us earlier. "That's the important thing. Once we are in touch with our power, where do we go from here?" Home again
Three hours later, I pull into the driveway of my St. Petersburg home. Eager to begin my work, I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morning. I almost run into the house, where I gather into my arms my wonderful wife, Suzanne, and my precious children, Kristin, Peter and Katie. I hold them and tell them how much I love them, and how hard it is for me to even say those words, but how I'm going to try and say them a whole lot more from now on.
I'm not ashamed of my tears.
I feel their power. Do you understand me? I feel their power.
St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg, Fla.
Author: JEFF KLINKENBERG
Date: Sep 22, 1991
Start Page: 1.F
Section: FLORIDIAN
Text Word Count: 3838
A Friday. A moonless night. A dome of stars above. A light wind blows off the lake through the pines. A gathering of men is about to begin.
I'm late leaving my cabin. I walk briskly toward a dark building in the middle of the clearing. The other men are inside the building. I can hear them.
They're drumming.
The sound is loud, primal, frightening. I peek cautiously through the archway. Candles flicker from the middle of the floor. Fifty men are sitting, in a circle, around the candles.
Drumming.
Some of these men, these strangers drumming in front of other strangers, look as disconcerted as I know I must. Yet some look ecstatic. I find a place on the floor and try to pick up the beat. I lack a drum, but I have a tambourine, and I slap it across my thigh with false gusto.
A large, burly man - he must be 50 - howls at the ceiling like a Hollywood version of an Apache. Stands. Starts dancing. Hops around by himself, pounding his drum, grunting, whooping, screaming. A wild man in Rockports. He puts down his drum. Hugs the man to his right.
It cost $200 to be here, yet I want to run from the room.
I don't run, of course. I'm here to write about what happens during the next three days. Gatherings such as this, sponsored by the Orlando Men's Council, are taking place all over the country. Under the direction of psychotherapists and experts in American Indian rituals, men get together in the woods, commune with nature, beat drums, share their deepest feelings, dance with abandon, meditate, hug each other, read poetry, even purify themselves by sitting in 150-degree sweat lodges. What they are supposed to get out of this, I have read, is a spiritual reawakening and a new sense of what it means to be a man.
Participating in the shared emotion of such a gathering, for me, is a frightening prospect.
I was raised like most men. Be strong. Be the best athlete. Get the best grades. Whatever you do, don't cry. Feelings? Hell, real men hide them. Even as my father lay dying, we talked about baseball and fishing instead of our fierce love for each other. We kept secret our deepest emotions. As men do.
This is just one of my sorrows. Other sorrows are harder to articulate because they lurk in the subconscious. But I'll tell you what I think I think: In some regards, men have been as damaged as women by the way society has conditioned us.
The sorrow of women is that they have been devalued into sex objects and treated as second-class citizens. But during the last two decades women have taken action. They have faced their pain, shown righteous anger and are stronger for it. Men, meanwhile, have been socialized for centuries to be the great providers, to be stoic, to be soldiers, to kick ass. We've been conditioned to dominate women and our children, the workplace, other countries and the natural world. In the name of profit we are willing to poison the air and the water our grandchildren need for survival. Disconnected from nature, we have lost our ancient sense of wonder.
The modern work world has similarly taken us away from our families, as Robert Bly points out in his book about masculinity's mythic dimensions, Iron John. Our children are strangers to many of us. We work late, and on weekends, and seldom see them. Some of us, divorced, see our kids even less. Many of us never knew our own dads.
Bly has been talking to men, and writing poetry about men's lives, for more than a decade. But it was about two years ago that he shoved the men's movement into the mainstream. Public television's Bill Moyers filmed a Bly-led men's gathering in Texas that was seen by millions of viewers. Iron John, the book that followed, has been on the best-seller list for 43 weeks. Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly - on Being a Man also has outsold the usual diet books and celebrity biographies. Men's groups are meeting all over the country. Florida has a half dozen, including one in St. Petersburg.
Men clearly want to know more about being a man.
So what is a man? Hell, most of us don't know. A man has to do what a man has to do, we have heard, but we don't know what and why that is. And if we do, for the most part we're incapable of talking about it, much less changing our ways. That's our sorrow and our confusion.
Men have shorter lifespans than women. We are four times more likely to take our own lives. We are three times more likely to be addicted to alcohol and drugs. More men than women are homeless. More men than women are in prison.
"I think we're at the end of an era," says Michael Panzeca, one of three South Florida therapists running this gathering. "Men have achieved as much success as we can with progress and technology. We've got jobs, and cars, and wives and kids. We've got VCRs and stereos. Yet we're empty inside."
So we drum. Who are these men?
The guy on my left has a large drum. He is the dominant drummer. We play his beat, which is loud, slow, primal. The guy on my right has a large drum, too. His beat is slightly faster, and gradually we all join him. It's not a competition. It's a stream that has met a boulder and changed course. After 10 minutes, I feel like a molecule in that stream, carried along for an exhilarating ride.
Panzeca, 29, introduces himself and his assistants, Mark Purcell, 30, and Joe Milisitz, 36. I'm a beginner when it comes to psychotherapy, which may be true of most men, who try to handle their own problems, but I'll say this: These guys don't look like Freud. They wear jeans and T-shirts. They wear their hair in pony tails. They wear fedoras and earrings. Milisitz, with his Jersey accent, sounds like Bruce Springsteen. Purcell, of American Indian ancestry, writes poetry. Panzeca, stalking the room like a caged wolf, shares his background: He's a former alcoholic and drug addict who went sober nine years ago in prison and studied psychology.
He tells us to introduce ourselves, one at a time, and looks at me. I give my first name, where I was born, where I grew up, and where I live now. Most of the men follow my boring example. But halfway through the introductions, halfway around the room, the atmosphere changes.
"I'm from nowhere," says an angry looking man named Roman.
The guy behind him, a man with long blond hair, says: "I'm from the void."
I feel the need to pick up my notebook, my shield against raw emotion. Instead, I wait for a pause and add a personal detail: I'm a reporter. The organizers know, but the participants don't, and they should if I'm going to write about them. Nobody objects. When I tell them I am also a participant in this adventure, some of them, men who have done gatherings before, yell out.
"Ho!"
It's a Native American expression. It means "I agree." There will be a lot of hoing this weekend.
So who are these men? Most of us could be your neighbor. Most of us are well-groomed. All of us are white. I'd say our average age i between 35 and 45, in our mid-life crisis primes. Most of us, I'll learn throughout the weekend, are professionals. At least five participants are psychotherapists themselves. There is one medical doctor and one psychiatrist. There are several stock brokers and real estate salesmen. There are men who work with their hands.
Several men have physical handicaps. One man is unnaturally small. One is blind. One has a lazy eye. One has twisted legs and limps. But most of our problems, our sorrows, our hopes, are hidden in our hearts. And the purpose of the weekend is to help get them out and become better men - for ourselves, our women, our children, our planet.
Panzeca tells us to pick out a walking stick from the corner. He says the sticks will represent our male power. The newspaper reporter in me listens cynically. The man in me listens with an open mind.
Panzeca invites any man 50 or older to stand. He says the older men will serve this weekend as our elders, our mentors, our initiators into manhood. Why not? He sends them into the woods to build a campfire. He next invites us to share our fears. The room explodes with so much emotion I almost jump.
"I fear being insignificant!"
"I fear responsibility!"
"I fear my father!"
"I fear women!"
"I fear death!"
"I fear fear!" Returning to Mother Earth
Saturday. Dawn. A stiff breeze.
I'm exhausted from a sleepless night. I couldn't get the drumming out of my ahead, and my fears about today out of my heart. Today's schedule includes something called "ceremony of the wounds," a "power dance" and a "sweat lodge."
We're going to be using a lot of rituals to help us overcome our inbred white man's reluctance to talk and to feel. Some are Native American in origin; some are staples in psychotherapy. All will be new to me.
"A lot of psychotherapy with men is about their lack of being grounded," says Mark Purcell, who has practiced psychotherapy in Fort Lauderdale for six years, as we drink coffee at breakfast. "They don't connect with people, especially with other men. What we do at these gatherings is help them get grounded."
A drum is grounded in the earth. It's made from wood and animal skin. Beating it is primal. The raw ingredients of a sweat lodge ceremony are earth, air, water and fire. "A lot of what happens here is about nature," says Purcell, of Creek and Cherokee ancestry. So-called primitive men once drew upon Mother Earth for material and spiritual sustenance. They honored the Earth. Modern men fear it and exploit it. On this weekend, we will return to roots that some of us have forgotten.
We will hear much about "Wild Men" and "Warriors." These terms are sprinkled through Bly's Iron John. As Bly sees it, the wild man part of a man's personality is the spontaneous part, the funny part, the vulgar part, the sexual part, the passionate part, the part that feels comfortable in nature. A man needs some wild man in him to be whole. But the wild man part of personality, if taken to extremes, is also dangerous. It can be self destructive and violent, a drug addict or an alcoholic, a game of Russian roulette.
"Jack Kerouac's mistake was trying to become the wild man," Bly says. "He ended up vomiting his liver."
Some men fear even the good qualities of their wild man, or had it beaten or socialized out of them when they were boys, and they are passive, predictable, soft adults. They're sensitive, all right, but they lack energy. Their warrior is undeveloped.
The warrior is the competent part of a man, the part that gets things done, the determined part, the part that makes decisions. The warrior in a man loves himself and his family. The warrior in a man has the courage of his convictions. The warrior is willing to defend both his physical and emotional boundaries.
A warrior has another important component: the so-called nurturing side. This is the ability to teach. To listen. To feel empathy. To be interested in another man's soul. To be so secure in manhood that he can touch another man. Into the woods
Michael Panzeca sends us into the woods. Our mission is to confront our demons, the things that have wounded the wild man and the warrior in us, things that we are afraid even to think about, much less discuss with a stranger. Panzeca has even given us rags to represent our wounds. We tie them where we hurt.
I walk through the palmettos and look for a place to confront - what? I'm unsure. I squat at a fallen pine. In the distance I hear a shriek. Someone else yells, "No! No! No!" This is heavy stuff. Somebody curses with all his might. I look through dead branches across a field and see a man writhing in the sand. I hear someone battering a tree with his walking stick and condemning a father who is not there, who was never there. I think of events of my own childhood.
Tears fill my eyes. Their stories
We return to the fire. Some men are sobbing. Others are taking deep breaths and looking around with wild eyes. I sit on a bale of hay and finger my notebook and try to control my emotions. I'm afraid of letting go.
Panzeca tells us to separate into small groups and to talk, if we want to, about what happened in the woods. Joe Milisitz, the therapist we all call Joey, will lead my group.
So.
What are things that have kept some of us from realizing our potential as men?
One man says he never had a relationship with his dad. He loved his dad, wanted to learn from his dad, but his dad seemed to be dead inside. His dad never had a moment for his son. His dad loved television more than his own flesh and blood.
He stands among us and sobs. That may seem shameful to some of you reading this, a grown man weeping about an absent dad after so many years. But it is among the bravest, most moving things I've ever heard.
The rest of us stand and embrace him. We take the role of his father. "I love you just the way you are," Joey, the therapist, says gently. Someone says, "I'm turning off the television, Andy. Let's talk."
What else?
One man says he was raped by his father. He says he hates to be touched by men. He even hates when a man stands behind him. Sobbing, he asks for help. We stand behind him and embrace him. We honor his pain by sharing his tears.
One man, choking with emotion, says he has never been able to tell anybody, until now, just how angry he is with his domineering mother, who made him feel inadequate when he was a boy. Another man says he was regularly disciplined by his mother - with enemas.
One man was abused by a teacher. Another, by a nurse. One man weeps because he can have nothing but sexual relationships with women. He says he feels only emptiness. Another man calls his wife "that bitch." He's so tired of trying to make her happy.
Back at the fire, we pick up our drums and our percussion instruments. We beat them. We chant. We howl. Then, at Michael Panzeca's invitation, we leap, one by one, into the campfire circle and dance our pain away. We jump, we beat our sticks against the ground in rage, we swing them over our heads in triumph.
The power dance feels as natural as brushing my teeth. In the sweat lodge
Saturday night. Breezeless. Hot and sticky.
I have been drinking water continuously for three hours at the suggestion of Kirk Fenner, who is serving as a medicine man of sorts for the sweat lodge. Kirk, 43, is a South Florida electrician who has studied the traditions of American Indians for decades. He's also a former Vietnam veteran who has wrestled his own demons for his warrior soul.
"The sweat lodge is a Native American ritual," he says. "It's a purification rite that represents cleansing and rebirth."
There will be two lodges tonight, each lasting 90 minutes. I'm scheduled for the second. The lodge, built from pine saplings, is covered by blankets, tarps and a sheet of thick black plastic. A dome about 15 feet across and 5 feet high, the lodge resembles an igloo. About 25 of us will be stuffed into it at a time.
We're going to pray, according to Lakota Sioux traditions, and we're going to sing. We're going to talk, if we want to talk, and we're going to moan, if we want to moan. Some of us may be blessed with visions. All of us will sweat more than we've ever sweated before.
"Some people won't go into the lodge," Fenner says. "And that's good. You don't want to do this until you're ready. Some people come in and leave early. That's fine, too. You do what you need to do. That's one of the things about the lodge: It gives you exactly what you need. The lodge tells you to look at something, to look into your heart . . ."
My heart is pounding. I want to do this, but I'm also terrified. I'm slightly claustrophobic, and my lungs are scarred from an old illness. I'm one of those people who gets a flu shot every fall. A doctor here told me he did a sweat lodge last spring and got a lung infection.
We shed shirts and shoes. We remove rings and other jewelry. In the heat of the lodge, metal can burn skin. We line up single file. At the lodge door, we fall to our knees, bow to the earth, and say: Mitakuye oyasin. It's Lakota for "All my relatives" or "All my relations." All of us, men and women, animals, plants and rocks, living and dead, are related and watched over by Wanka Tanka, the Great Mystery, or what white people would call the Great Spirit.
It's warm in the lodge, but not stifling.
Kirk explains what we'll do. There will be four ceremonies, or endurances, honoring the west, north, east and south. We will invite in the spirits and ask them for courage, knowledge and healing. Each endurance will last a little more than 20 minutes.
A boulder, glowing red, is hauled in on a pitchfork and dropped into the pit in the center of the lodge. The temperature leaps by at least 10 degrees. Some of us giggle. Six more boulders, and almost unbearable heat, follow. Giggling stops.
Kirk closes the door flap.
It's as black in here as oblivion.
He ladles water onto the boulders. I hear the hiss before the suffocating steam covers me.
Kirk sings in Lakota. We do our best to follow along. I'm so anxious I have a hard time. I press my face to the earth in hopes of finding cooler air. My lungs feel like they're cooking.
Now Kirk begins a long prayer in English. He's inviting the spirit world into our lodge to help us.
A few of us try praying along. Others moan. My mind is centered on my fear. I want to leave, but I'm afraid to admit it. I don't want to wimp out. Kirk finishes the prayer.
I say: "I have to leave now."
Kirk says, "That's good, brother." Someone else says "Ho!" I crawl, clockwise, among my brothers toward the door. Touching me, they offer unspoken support. Kirk says, "The biggest lesson is knowing when to leave."
I stand outside the lodge and fill my lungs with cool air.
I feel only shame. Courage was all around
Sunday. Dawn. Sandhill cranes, squawking like rusty gates, fly in front of me as I meditate at the lake. What went wrong last night?
I seek out Joey Milisitz, the therapist, who was the hero of last night's ceremony. Joey did both lodges.
I tell him I lost my courage after 10 minutes. How did he last three hours?
Joey says, "I tried to do a sweat lodge last spring. After 10 minutes I had a panic attack. I had to get out of there! This time I was determined. So when I went into the first lodge, I announced my great fear to everybody. I told them I needed their support and their courage."
Joey's wisdom hits me like a thunderbolt. There I had been, sitting in a sweat lodge with 25 of the most supportive people I'd ever met. Yet I had been unable to express a simple, human emotion that surely is shared by all men: fear.
I felt alone in a roomful of friends.
The lesson of the sweat lodge. Harnessing the power
The rest of the morning goes too fast. We gather in the parking lot and line up. One by one, we're going to hike through the woods to the campfire circle, where the elders await to initiate us as men. If you had told me last week I was going to be "initiated" as a man, I would have laughed at you. But now I have to keep wiping my eyes. It's real.
So I walk into the woods. Alone. Someone lunges from behind a bush and blocks my path. He says he is my fear. Am I ready to accept him? I am. We embrace. I walk on, and meet my grief, and my anger, and, finally, my power.
At the campfire circle I step through a doorway constructed of saplings. Six elders welcome me. One ties a chain of beads around my neck. The beads represent earth, fire, wind and sun, components that celebrate the wild man and warrior in men. Kirk Fenner, medicine man, breaks out a ceremonial pipe.
We smoke and we pray.
"How do we translate what we have learned this weekend into the real world?" Michael Panzeca, the head therapist, had asked us earlier. "That's the important thing. Once we are in touch with our power, where do we go from here?" Home again
Three hours later, I pull into the driveway of my St. Petersburg home. Eager to begin my work, I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morning. I almost run into the house, where I gather into my arms my wonderful wife, Suzanne, and my precious children, Kristin, Peter and Katie. I hold them and tell them how much I love them, and how hard it is for me to even say those words, but how I'm going to try and say them a whole lot more from now on.
I'm not ashamed of my tears.
I feel their power. Do you understand me? I feel their power.
St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg, Fla.
Author: JEFF KLINKENBERG
Date: Sep 22, 1991
Start Page: 1.F
Section: FLORIDIAN
Text Word Count: 3838
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