| Sunday, April 30, 2006
The lonely mountains |
| This beautiful place in which I live is grand and beautiful and lonely. Lonely can be wonderful. For me it often is; I luxuriate in long expressive runs in the failing light of a long summer's evening and I love when I don't encounter another soul. My more difficult lonelinesses have always been underlined and reinforced when i'm in large groups of people. In those times my 'tangent universe' seems so palpable I wonder if I'm even visible to the others there on anything but a purely physical level. Not so my lovely mate Bagley. The same mountains that I run amongst resound for her, at times, with a deafening empty silence. In it she hears the absense of the life and vigour of her home and the friends and connections she has left to be here. Loneliness is said to be one of the most anti-social of afflictions. No-one talks about being lonely. So they say. I have friends and strong connections too, but I've created such an island of myself that a physical dislocation can lead to an almost insoluble disconnection. Sometimes I can be so of the moment and the place in this way that it must be desperately difficult to care about me. I was thinking about (and wrote below about) boys and the boy in me and I am also not ignorant of the job that women have in the life of we boys. If men hold the hope for boys, it is certain that women hold the heart. The women in my life have allowed me access to my heart in ways that are made of such deep levels of acceptance and love that I could never have fallen off the precipice at which most boys stand at some point in their growth. But for these girls, these women. Who catches them should they fall? |
| woman wandering
responded:
The kiwi chick wants to write: 'but they were asking for it' ... which seemed like the prevailing belief back when I was growing as a girl then a woman. Did you notice it or are things changing in the world of the girl children you teach? |
| Saturday, April 29, 2006
Boy's Boys' Boys |
| Last week I went to Auckland for a conference on the education of boys. Aside from the fact that my colleague Hamish and I cast our eyes around the room with discomfort at all the 'schoolteacher' types that surrounded us, it was a really worthwhile event. We spent three days being regaled with definitions of masculinity and statistics defining the challenges boys face in the school education system and naming the characteristics that make boys great (but which are all-too-often named as the ones that make boys such a 'problem'). All this talk of boys made me think a lot about the boy in me. As adults, for boys, more than anything, we carry the hope. We see the man they will become. We know they will turn out okay. We show them we know. I am thinking about the ideas about what a boy is, the degree to which I am a boy, and the things about me that made me feel ashamed because they didn't match what a boy was meant to be... and now finally i'm reclaiming them and realising they're some of my greatest strengths. Boys are purposeful. Boys avoid shame. Boys are emotional. Boys are wonderful dreamers. Boys focus. Boys are practical. Boys enjoy boundaries... and pushing them. Like my desires as a gay man. I'm probably the baddest kind of gay guy in that my desires are so much about men and masculinity that they undermine every historically-conceived definition of masculinity we can access. And yet at the same time I make not such a bad bloke. I know enough about machines.. I'm a reasonable athlete. My voice is deep enough, my body masculine enough. I can all-too-easily be mistaken for an ordinary man. Wanting to be liked, accepted, wanted, I once suppressed some of the most important parts of myself - my desires. These days I carry my own hope; I am very excited about the man that I will become... |
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You can also read my old journal that I wrote in 2001 when I threw everything up in the air and did a road trip of New Zealand to help me make some decisions. |
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