Uniting the worlds of technology and spirit
by Steven Vedro
I have always loved communications technology.
As a child, I sat content for hours in front of the big short-wave set in my uncle’s living room, searching for voices from far away. As a ten-year-old, I learned Morse code. As a teenager I operated a pirate radio station, regularly ruining the neighborhood TV reception whenever I started my home-brew broadcasts. In college, I spent most of my time at the campus FM station. My summer job as a TV film cameraman paid for much of my tuition.
Into the wild
by Johnny Fontaine
During the waning days of summer last year, I was leaving my church’s social ministry office after a few hours of volunteer work. I stood by the front door, looking at the fingerprints smudged across the glass, distracted by the sounds of people talking throughout the lobby.
The ManKind Project’s 25/25 Anniversary in 2010 will be in Louisville, Kentucky
The challenge of changing the world one man at a time began in 1984 when three men — Rich Tosi (a former Marine Corps officer), Bill Kauth (a social worker, therapist, and author), and Ron Hering (a university professor) — created an experiential weekend for men called The New Warrior Training Adventure.
Poetry: A good shattering
by George Daranyi
If the choice is:
Receiving
An old platitude
Or
A comfortable lie
Or
A good shattering
From the truth
Of your life
Choose the shattering
When life delivers
The Big Cut
You could live in
A state of perpetual
disappointment
Of
Pathos
Of
Weakness
Or
You could choose
A good shattering
Choose the shattering
An initiation by fire
by Spencer Sherman
The fire that started in the ninth floor records room became the largest commercial building fire in Philadelphia’s history. When 1,500 of us were evacuated, the city’s firefighters poured more than 12 million gallons of water onto the blaze.
Getting by on the sly in LA
by Ray Olvera
Jaded, cynical, bitter, ready for a change, I met Randy at a job I was completely unprepared to fulfill.
I’d graduated from a network admininistration business program and passed the six Microsoft exams necessary to call myself an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer). Unable to land a job after countless interviews in the tech industry, I began to tell employers that I could handle and excel at just about any position.
Want to move mountains? Move father first
by Michael Marlin
As a child steeped in mythology, I learned how the gods could be benevolent, tricksters, demons, and furies to be celebrated and feared. Like a primitive man, I sought to appease the gods that were my parents. I thought everybody’s parents were the same.
Children don’t know what parenting is supposed look like, so they accept it, regardless of their circumstances or treatment.
How a greeting card saved my life
by Mark Bruskiewicz
I was sitting in my living room “celebrating” the finalization of my divorce, drinking a bottle of wine in solitude. I felt alone and miserable.
The day’s mail sat on the table. Seeing an envelope that wasn’t a bill, I picked it up. The envelope contained a card from my father. Stunned, I opened it,
What, me a dad?
by Lex Woodbury
My wife, Jessie, and I lived back then in a two-story, two-bedroom cottage in a nice part of town near a California beach. A nature boy at heart, I spent most of my free time backpacking, mountain biking, and surfing. Jessie would accompany me on my sports’ travels only if it meant “camping out” in a decent motel. I would join Jessie on her jaunts to the new, must-see hotel from the travel magazine if she picked one with a nature zone nearby.
My reverse mid-life crisis
by Roy Biancalana
The most life-changing moment of my life occurred when I realized that nothing needed to be changed.
I call this realization “my reverse mid-life crisis” because it is the opposite of what typically happens to men. Usually, when a man reaches middle-age, he becomes dissatisfied with his professional path and/or his partner, then he makes changes to find “it.”My life has been the exact opposite of that pattern. Ever since I was a kid, I have been dissatisfied with my life and chasing the illusive “it.”
The forgotten language of fathers and sons
by Peter H. Putnam, Jr.
In April 1998, my father is lying in a South Carolina hospital with a ventilator plugged into his throat. He has no voice. He once sang “Impossible Dream” in an impossibly deep bass voice, now this man has no voice. He lay prone, a child. He is no longer 6 feet tall, no longer the frightening, booming, hair-cutting, wisecracking, story-telling giant of my childhood. He is a a dying man in a hospital bed with no voice.
The Big Lie: How the truth changes us
by Peter Clothier
I had just lost my job, the third in a multi-year succession of academic positions with increasing status and responsibility from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. To be utterly honest, I had been kicked out, as I had been from my two previous jobs. I had refused to conform to academic standards and expectations.
Acceptance is not approval
by Mike Hernacki
I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery nearly all of my 64 years. This journey has been most intense for the past 15 years, during which I’ve learned many valuable life lessons, including the difference between acceptance and approval.
I have a niece whose father died when she was a toddler. I’ve always felt fatherly toward her and stepped in when I felt she needed paternal advice or protection.
Dark waters and the dark night of the soul
by Brad Nixon
I’m eighteen, working in the British Columbia bush with a bunch of guys. Wild and carefree, full of crazy and adventurous energy, we worked hard and played hard.
Late one evening, following a trip to the local bar, on our way back to camp someone suggested a swim — skinny-dipping. Being the height of summer in the interior of BC, despite the lateness of the hour, everyone agreed this was a truly excellent idea.
Little Wings: Realizing I’d become a man
by Wayne Lee
I’m lying on a padded table, watching while Dominic tattoos little Mercury wings behind my anklebones on both feet. It’s a few days before my sixtieth birthday, and this is my present to myself. I’ve earned these wings. I deserve them. I’ve wanted to do this since I was 21, back when I was a dancer.
Compassion and truth saves a relationship
by Alan Huyshe
A relationship that had gone stale and distant suddenly changed one day. She said she’d met another man, had been seeing him for more than a month, and she was in love.
I used the new-found courage and “warrior energy” that I had found in myself. I called her to face me and talk about this in person, not do it over the phone. She came and we sat down to talk.
A Man’s Call to Man-Making
by Earl Hipp
My wife and I met the Sudanese refugee Ojulu Agote and his family in 1993 through the sponsoring organization that brought them to the United States. Ojulu had experienced the horrors of tribal warfare and then the abuses of refugee life. After making his way through countless bureaucratic barriers, he was without any material resources. He and his family, living in a cockroach infested one-bedroom apartment, were facing a mountain of practical needs.
Poetry: A knowing heart
by Eric Diamond
Be thankful for the grief in autumn,
rust on weathervanes, sour plums, and
soothing words for the sad, four-leav’d heart.
I let bygones be bygones, then
went after bigger fish to fry.
Try my speckled perch with artichoke heart.
Numbed by news, dark grey overcoats
of despair huddle in doorways
The night that changed my life
by Jean-Marc Bouchard
In January 2004, when I was 42 years old, I spent my first night in an empty two-bedroom apartment I’d just rented. The place had no furniture, no oven, no table, no couch. At three o’clock in the morning, I was alone and freezing in my sleeping bag.
Thanks for cheating on me
by Jeffrey Wilson
By January of 1994, I had achieved my vision and had a “perfect” life – a beautiful wife, two young sons, a house in the suburbs, and I had been named to the management succession plan of the Fortune 500 company where I worked. Everything was just right.
-
The ManKind Project® is an international nonprofit educational organization making the world safer by helping men become better men. Our flagship training is the
New Warrior Training Adventure.
