num_pages: 442
description: "When generativity, creativity, generosity, and the capacity to embrace life dry up, the Water of Life has gone underground. At such times, the earth becomes arid, life becomes devoid of meaning, the ground of culture cracks and splits, and gaps develop among peoples and between people and nature. Only water can bring the piece back together, awaken seeds hidden in the ground, and enliven the parched Tree of Life." One of the most important ways to call forth the water of life is through story. For years Michael Meade has been steeped in stories, some from the ground of his own life, others from the ancient rivers of Celtic, European, and African myth. Still others emerge from years spent as a teacher, listening to the stories that both men and women carry. From these stories he derives medicine for healing individual wounds and uncovers rituals for the remaking of community. Through stories that explore and illuminate the lives of men, Meade examines the wounds that often arise between father and son and the spells that can exist between mother and child. These "troubles" are investigated from psychological and mythological perspectives in order to uncover the layers of meaning embedded in life experiences and to discover the seeds of healing. At the core of the book are stories of initiatory events that mark a man's or a woman's soul over and pull a person deeper into life than he or she would normally choose to go. Seen as tempering through fire and water, these events decide who a person is, cause some power to erupt from inside, or strip everything away until all that remains is one's essential self. Attuned to our modern needs - the wounds of divorce, addiction, and loss, the moral abandonment of children, the gap between the genders - and our mythic inheritance, Men and the Water of Life offers narratives that reflect and resonate with the oldest parts of the human psyche - the place where things began and the place where things can begin again.
language: English
title: Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men
titlecomplete: Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men
genres: Philosophy, Spirituality, Psychology, Nonfiction, Mythology
ratings_count: 69
publisher: Harpercollins