Been thinkin’ about…The warrior poets

The sun was hot that late afternoon and bits and pieces of the moment still float somewhere in my memory. We were parked out back behind the old high school — now the junior high, a red brick monstrosity augmented by appropriately boring brick cubes added to expand learning over the decades. I only got to go inside once, in my memory, holding my mom's hand, admiring her leather jacket with all the fringe, as she voted for Reagan. That junior high school was also our polling place.

But in my hot afternoon of memory there were students running about and white short shorts seemed to be the order of the day (it was the early 1980s after all). Pickup door slammed and my beautiful older sister hopped into the truck, long hair flying. I slid over the hot vinyl seat to make room. More students ran by. My sister rolled her eyes. We were not a sports family. With barely a word shared, I began to learn the unspoken rules of society. There were jocks. There were nerds. The social rules were hard and fast.

I was an anomaly, the only boy of my family in two generations, as well as the youngest. A constant contradiction — read, frustration — to my older sisters. I was rough-and-tumble enough to accidentally break my crayons, and sensitive enough to burst into tears when I did so. In short, a royal pain in the ... well, you get the idea. As later years and the need for responsibility and a desperation to shape myself into something resembling acceptance, I re-framed into a strong, albeit lanky, version of male stoicism, complete with blue jeans even on the hottest of summer days, as well as cowboy boots and matching cowboy hats. I didn't fit in any better with my peers, but my grandparents liked me better, even approving of my giant USA belt buckle. My voice was dropping and my size 10 boots matched my now six-foot frame. Too bad the over-arching sensitivity remained. A walking, praying existential crisis, I remained too smart for my own good. It was good I was home schooled. I might never have made it through otherwise.

In between barefoot hill sprints and barefoot endurance runs and seeing how far I could shoulder 100 pounds of grain, I was reading constantly, worrying excessively, and taking an eight-year break from all TV because I thought that mainstream media was bad for my brain. In short, I may have been right. Also in short, I was weird.

More than weird, I was desperate to find myself as I grew, fitfully, painfully, emotionally, into manhood. Adolescence is an almost universally and creatively awkward experience. It is never fun to be caught between two worlds and not fitting in either. It is even harder without the guiding light of meaning. "Career" was a trivial finish line. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The question was simple, too simple, and always filled me with existential dread, like I was about to jump out of an airplane with no parachute but everyone watching. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had not had the experience — experience that only comes with age — to answer the question. "Doctor, lawyer, engineer, astronaut." Those words were placeholders, nothing more.

Weirdly but not surprisingly, I found profundity in strange places. Running hill sprints was one. My sister's Loreena McKinnitt album was another and I played the Quinlan Road record over and over, strangely, profoundly impacted by the ancient Celtic rhythms. My fundamentally Calvinist teachings told me I was listening to pagan music with dangerous undertones. My heart told me the truth — I was reaching back to my own inescapable past, my heartbeat a bodhran's throbbing cadence. And to be fair, we worship a God of truth not socially appropriate make-believe. I am listening to McKinnitt's “Parallel Dreams” even now, tonight, in honor of the memory, even as I type this, even as I prepare my devotional for tomorrow's Sunday school service. Life doesn't always have to make sense to still keep meaning.

America is a young nation but we have endured many great resets. The industrialization of education, guaranteed to churn out millions of homogenized young minds was, perhaps, the greatest and most successful. That reset was complete some 70 years ago. Good Americans all, we were told we were immune to propaganda. That spooky brainwashing stuff was for the evil Russians. It was all free will and no social engineering that built us into a convenient army of white collar versus blue collar, of dutiful nerds and athletic jocks, or whole worlds organized around the escapism of beer and sports.

We abandoned any ancient wanderlust in lieu of responsible social conditioning. The most obedient, the most dutiful, the most easily shaped were rewarded with merit badges in false virtue. The real reward? To become the gatekeepers, shaming the strange, the eccentric, the esoteric. It is true that human beings are made mostly of water. It is also true we are mostly just herd mammals. There is soft safety in remaining inconspicuous, in keeping the status quo, maintaining the programming.

And just like that, there was no place left for the shamans, druids walking between worlds and calling down the heavens betwixt warring clans, or of the warrior poets of old, bards with heroic strength and ancient way songs deep in their thick chests. No places left, save those domains we create ourselves.