on kingmaking and Return
ruminations on iron john, venus retrograde + elderhood
iron john, iron john, iron john.
it was my first and last thanksgiving while living in beacon. and my first thanksgiving spent alone. alone but not at all alone— because i was in the company of stories. it was the first time i listened to my teachers martin shaw and danny deardorff’s telling of iron john, in the presence of robert bly, at the minnesota men’s conference.
there were clues, there, that i wasn’t yet ready to see. i am reminded via the quotes i posted on instagram with the silhouettes of the dancer trees and the sunset from the top of the hill, wonderfully troubling things. things that have returned to me, especially now after listening to the story again over last night and today.
i spent a few days on the dreamtime mountain land where my ex lives up in canaan, NY. there are natural springs on the property and upon visiting, kneeling down to where one was being tended, the words came to my lips once more:
iron john, iron john, iron john.
when robert bly wrote his seminal retelling he categorized it as “a book about men.”
at this moment, iron john is a story about me.
**
there are certain parts of my journey that are told and retold, si cunta e si recunta like gioia timpanelli says; and then there are times i see and understand what i have told and retold from a new facet, a new depth. i’m learning, over and over— this is what we do. this is what it is to be an evolving, learning, engaged-with-life human. we return and return. and like i love to recall meggan watterson writing— we get the chance to heal “all the way down, and all the way through.”
**
we are just nearly completing venus retrograde in leo. i wouldn’t know what i know currently about astrology without sarah vrba who i am mentioning again on this substack. i feel following her has been reconnecting me to the natural cycles and rhythms our overculture has made it its business of beating out of us— of bending the curvy curlicues of natural inspiration into a straight, upward-travelling, line.
the last time venus retrograded in leo was 2015— the summer i say, over and over, that i called my engagement off and walked into the wild.
a day ago i travelled to woodstock where my mother mountain is, where the road my sister and i walked is, the place i went after i took my engagement ring off that summer— and i sat in the presence of that storytelling living legend whose name i mentioned moments ago: gioia timpanelli.
we’re coming to the end of a 7 week cycle. a cycle of going down and coming back up. a cycle that ends with Return. a cycle that is coming to its completion with me back in that place where my past, present, future selves meet— where, up on the ridge nearing the summit, i called in the presence of my true self, whose name came to be formed in my mind and heart: the green and white witch. where i sat in gioia’s presence, her nearing 90 years old— telling and feeling and quoting heart-felt passages in a way i felt i was touching the garment of Lineage. my lineage. this lineage of soul-making, earth-based storytelling, mystical and embodied learning— that adopted me. i feel i haven’t viewed it in this way quite yet— but that was the feeling. joseph campbell, whom i had encountered thanks to the ex who now lives in the wilds of dreamtime mountain. joseph campbell and gioia timpanelli and robert bly and danny deardorff and martin shaw.
and me. and Me.
**
i am the granddaughter of southern italian farmers. it feels strange to write that; like it wasn’t in the distant past, it wasn’t my great-great-grandparents— it literally was my father’s parents. the city house and the country house, they had [this is resonating, also, in a new way as i type this]. their life out there On The Edges of the adriatic sea. woven with the uncertainties of food and poverty and work. one baby who died a baby, whose grave i visited the one time i travelled to polignano in 2018. 5 surviving brothers and 1 sister, my father the youngest, so young he doesn’t remember, anything. they used to talk in dialect when my grandparents lived downstairs from us, in the apartment i live in now. we didn’t know anything about their context, their life. they were just the old ones we were afraid of sometimes, the ones who said the heavily accented words, who yelled and spoke loudly, the ones we couldn’t understand.
**
i think a lot, lately— as i am nearing another decade of life lived, god willing— about being orphaned. i think about francis weller saying that his generation is stuck in an adolescent mindset, having lost their way to elderhood. i think a lot about elderhood. about re-parenting while your birth parents are still alive. i think a lot about who has helped to parent me. and i circle back around, to the wolves. and to the stories. to that ragtag band of poets, singers, storytellers in love with mythology and revivifying the oral tradition— whose very existence gave me something to root my own existence into.
how can we become elders, how can we feel rooted enough to turn back and help the younger ones— if we are disconnected from our lineage? if we feel orphaned? if we are projecting our pain and avoiding our grief, fighting neverending wars against Who Wronged Us and What Went Wrong, bedding up with fear and bitterness, never having found The Safe Place To Go, afraid of our own inner worlds and still striving, in the model of the overculture, to externally Become Something instead of perceiving who we Really Are? {there is more duality than i’d like in this paragraph but i’ll leave it be;}
the stories are maps, for me. it started with the hero’s journey as a framework presented by campbell and then after encountering martin and danny, living breathing storytellers— it became story after story, individually. this one, Now, here for me. about a wild man who becomes a king.
**
martin and danny discuss how many, many men who originally read this story years ago in bly’s book, upon hearing the tellers present it again— completely forgot or blocked out the ending. The Return. how, because of the initiatory journey the young man takes, the enchantment is lifted from the wild man and he returns again as the king.
i don’t know if i wanted to hear this detail either, when i first listened to the story last november, nearly a year ago now. i had just made my big move to live closer to the wild— to leave my city of origin and my family. to be closer to what mattered most to me.
don’t make a marginal life out of a marginal experience, martin said. we’re so attached to the image of the wild man in the woods.
what does it say about us— that we cannot hold in our consciousness the resonance of the return of the king?
**
8 years ago, i left.
but i actually didn’t leave.
i took the ring off but my ex and i continued to weave our lives in and out of each other’s— for all the years after, including this one. i was also weaving with my previous ex-boyfriend, and for years, each new year, with someone new.
i grew the masculine inside me, during this time. i grew the king. and it was because he started as a wolf— the black wolf who came to me the year after i took the ring off, in a story that poured out of me, leading me Down, and In.
it’s a strange thing i am still continually understanding— how this story, my own personal life-saving mythos that at first i had no idea what to make of, runs alongside archetypal themes, teachings, ancient wisdoms found in the old stories i’ve now begun telling, more formally, in the past few years.
si cunta e si recunta. i will tell this story over and over. just like we tell the old stories. i will tell of the wolf who took me into the underworlds of myself, who grew the healthy animus from the place of the false king. who became anthropomorphized and full wolf again, and back. who is the one i finally came to trust, to sit with, in my dysfunctional, codependent, sometimes genuinely toxic or chaotic relationships with human men. the one who appears in the doorway of the shared apartment or the plains during initiation, telling me without judgment or dramatism, you must go.
and he is the one, here, Now. the one i Must call on, upon my Return. i am still thinking of a previous post, about the story ivan and the grey wolf, “trying to make the return and getting slaughtered.”
**
maybe this has something to do with why there are so many adolescent-minds and not as many entering or embracing elderhood. because we lack rites of passage in our overculture. we lack the visibility of initiatory frameworks. and as danny and martin speak of— we don’t put enough emphasis on the Return. yes, we’ll go to the retreat or the pilgrimage or the festival or the plant medicine journey; but how are we integrating? are we integrating? Are We Even Returning? or are we Staying Out There, refusing to return to our communities, or places of origin? who is standing there ready to confirm us from our bizarre and mythopoetic travels? who is reminding us that the pilgrimage begins when you leave the holy place? who is affirming for us that the overculture doesn’t have any place for those who have lived through an initiatory or mystical experience— in fact, it is often out to ostracize, suppress, other, or annihilate them.
what do we do? what do we do? what do we do?
iron john, iron john, iron john.
**
there is a point in the story that reminds me of other cinderbiter tales i’ve heard— where the boy is given a limping nag instead of a proud horse and sent off to battle outwardly unequipped, as a joke. and he meets The Impossible Situation, the impossible battle, the thing that would Absolutely Destroy him, if, if— he didn’t have that relationship with something greater i referred to in a previous post. the wolf that comes to cry over you, to retrieve the elixir of life and elixir of death, to reconstitute your dismembered body. the wolf woman in the desert, the old one of my heart and soul, who is searching for your soul bones to sing you back to life.
and Here— the boy who has been sent out in shame, outwardly entirely unequipped for the raging battle, the outnumbering invaders— is the same boy, that Because of his journey, his relationship with the wild, the ancient, the imaginal and Greater force— has the magicks to call out to iron john and receive the sheer impossibility of another way of meeting that situation, the sheer impossibility of protection, of Help.
would this make us elders? would this make us rooted, unorphaned adults? would this remind us that we are not trapped, disempowered adolescents stuck in reactivity and sticking it to The Man? would we remember that maybe we are kings?
**
in the storm the other night this poem emerged from a paper of martin’s i found in one of my mythological research sprees.
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by—
you wonder at their calm.They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”“a story that could be true,” by william stafford.
it has stayed and stayed with me. and i walked around in the dark in my apartment at 4 or 5am in the flashing lightning repeating those words, “maybe i’m a king.” “maybe i’m a king.”
**
when i returned yesterday from my sojourn to see gioia storytelling in woodstock, i allowed myself to be slaughtered. i called my mom on the ferry on the way home, showing my gold too soon and not even allowing myself to enter the house or land— the bombastic assertion of wandering life and no adherence to what my father wants for me; adolescent-minded, without the surety of the king. i was shaken and overwhelmed by the rest of the evening— about talks of california/west coast trips, ways to make money, seasonal jobs, wondering if i’ll be paid in two days, overwhelm, overwhelm. laying on my back in a youtube hole that went from david bowie on conan o’brien to music videos of my brother’s piano-playing ex-girlfriend and old interviews i had done in my jittering late-twenties. pasta cooked and eaten on the floor in the dark, even though i wasn’t hungry but my emotions were. iron john, iron john, iron john. what happened to all the clarity i had felt on the road, on the bus, in the woods, listening to gioia? all the inspiration and grounded expansiveness, the heart-centered plans and curiosities. the unapologetic Wholeness?
**
i listened to the end of iron john today.
and when danny and martin came to the end and the wedding feast halted as the wildman-restored-to-king entered the celebration hall, i found myself face-down, crying, cheek to floor.
i was reliving the wounding from my trips last year— that all the holiness is stripped upon return to the city from the wild. that it can only exist Out There. that it is always A Fight to prove the validity of one’s dreams to the overculture, to your angry or terrified parents, awash in the who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are that is the Impossible Situation, all the riders and warriors in that impossible battle, trampling right over your young and unequipped body, your limping nag of a horse.
it is forgetting about iron john.
it is forgetting about kingship.
it is forgetting the importance of Who Is Protecting the gifts brought back from the wild, and that the gifts brought back, and Not Destroyed, Is the Return.
**
i’ve been shaken, suffice to say. with another layer of this wild masculine resonance. with what it means to continue growing out of the reactive adolescence always escaping or running away.
what it means to make grounded, informed decisions. to provide the safety and loving structure in which the creatrix energy can dance, move, proliferate. to not need to make your impossible dreams palatable or possible in someone else’s eyes— to Just Know. you have the words. the words that make you a king integrated with your own wondrous, fearsome, wildness. to know you are Growing Up. parented, not orphaned. ecological. Belonged.
***
i will end this missive with some questions i wrote to myself now 7 weeks ago at the beginning of venus retrograde in leo.
what happens if i lean fully into my own truths and not renegotiate them based on “safety,” the other person, another perspective, etc.?
what happens if i don’t do things “because i need money”?
what happens if i keep centering myself in my own narrative/Home?
what happens if i don’t follow the “next paths” i thought i wanted?
what if i butt up against the fears of death and running out of time, like IF I DON’T DO THIS NOW… etc.
what happens if i don’t let fear and scarcity drive my decisions?
what happens if i move further into life and less into “making something out of life”?
what if i dropped even further into my particular energetic signature?
what if i remember where i was 8 years ago and how it was agony to meet my naturally changing self? sometimes we say No to beautiful things because they don’t fully feel right. it doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path. it means you want to explore something else.
what happens if i accepted realities about myself like eating on the floor, wanting less stuff, needing lots of space, needing to walk and think?
what happens if everything is open to change and questioning?
THE QUIET ALLOWANCE FOR THE THINGS I BELIEVE TO BE TRUE, FEELINGS THAT ARE VALID, DESIRES THAT ARE HONORED. emotions, softness, that is honored.
and some of the core values/truths that have emerged as venus will soon station direct.
YOU KNOW THAT THE WILD ISN’T ONLY OUT THERE. you know that you are not imprisoned. you know that you are not trapped here. YOU KNOW WHAT COMES TO MEET YOU WHEN YOU CALL.
WHAT CAN I BRING TO THIS EXPERIENCE THAT IS DIFFERENT? that i am not a flippant rebellious boy that needs to overprove or make threats.
the courage to stand as i am without needing to prove or defend
trust in my body
trust in my capacity to make true, grounded, informed decisions
the solidity that what matters is not always visible to other people— the interiority, internal process, space and time required, is valued and prioritized
i don’t have to fight anymore, i don’t have to “figure out”
all the things i realized yesterday— they’re not going to be taken from me. that was a GLIMPSE— of what is MOST TRUE
as sarah vrba offered as affirmation: “I AM SAFE TO MOVE IN MY OWN UNIQUE WAY AND TO FIND MY OWN UNIQUE PATH”
<3
from part 4 of iron john 25th anniversary retelling:
one of the participants:
“up until i was in my 30s all i ever saw was a shadow king. and so therefore the king has to be destroyed, or rebelled against, or something. because if that’s it, then i don’t want it. i’d rather be the wild man stuck in the woods forever, than that.”
martin shaw:
“when we return from our experiences of deep soul work, the clothes we wear— what makes us a baronial king— the clothes we wear are the art we make out of our lives. that’s what we turn up with that shows the strange pedigree of our beautiful failings.”
“our association with the king is very ambivalent. and our association with the vegetative wild god of the forest is a lot more uncontaminated.”
“i think we feel ambivalent about kingship, and we want in some way to stay in the margins and stay in the forest and be wild and loose forever. but the king is the energy in you that gives your art form and boundaries as well as its wild expression.”
“think about what he says. this is the initiating deity, this is iron john, and he says: without the work of the young man, i would not be free. amazing.”
***
fotos:
dancer trees last thanksgiving in beacon; gioia timpanelli + steve gorn at the mothership; woodstock juncture at night with my mother mountain in the background; salamander in the woods at dreamtime mountain; banners outside the church i found in times square across from port authority that i had never noticed before, despite being there hundreds of times— it marked a sense of protected solace i literally didn’t know existed in a chaotic area of the city that consistently overwhelms me, especially when returning from the restorative wilds.
Deep and resonant as always.