It's late. I'm tired. I'm hungry. At least the gym is playing Hozier on the speakers. I shrug. It is the end of the month, the last chance for any personal records in February. I'm already sore. The six plates of iron loaded on the bar are not going anywhere. To walk away would be abject failure.
"What are you training for," asks the occasional and wayward bystander. I blink, often unaware of how to answer. I have been trained or have been training in the gym since 2008 but pushing myself physically since I was 13, sometimes with obvious results, sometimes not. I was home schooled. My goals were, by nature, different. I did not train for an event or a season but instead a result. There was the hay bucking, naturally. But then there were the farmers’ walks (carrying big buckets of water until my hand gave out), the bear crawls (at 5 o'clock in the winter morning on the pond bank) and — my favorite — the barefoot hill sprints (four days a week before supper).
There are no trophies. No suburban dad stories of the glory days, although I still smile when I remember outrunning the town's basketball and wrestling star during a youth group game of tag in the city park. I was fresh meat and he was accustomed to accomplishment. Tagging me out of the game should have been easy, especially with me wearing jeans and cowboy boots.
Athletic performance has never come easy for me and I'm rarely a team player under the best of circumstances. Bookish and sensitive, my natural body type would be sympathetically described as "pear-like." My love of poetry, writing and history is no great secret. I would have been voted least likely to be an athlete — had my classes had even one other student. What has come naturally, however, has been an intense need to challenge myself, to lose myself in the darkness and pain of the struggle. That journey slowly introduced me to my better, darker self. These things should sound familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of Western literature. Such is the journey into the underworld.
For a long time, the underworld has been seemingly excised from polite society. Fear, rage, hate, sorrow, deep melancholy aren't really thought of as journeys to be explored but pathologies to be treated, either with pills or therapists or trite comments. "When one door closes...." "God never gives us more than...." Light and dark, sun and moon, wind and rain and snow and ice of the soul, life gives us all whether we ask or not. Creation itself reflects the turning, most of all in the moon and winter which have just begun to emerge from their own darkness.
"The moon doesn't affect things. That's just old superstition." Really? The moon affects the tides, the oceans of the planet. We are composed largely of water. You believe the turning of the moon cannot affect us, positively and negatively, as it moves from light to dark? Such thinking is the real nonsense; a modernity divorced from intelligence, childish rattlings in the modern dark. Creation itself reflects the magic of reality, each winter a long march in shadow. "As above so below," spoke the alchemists of old and in that, they were correct, they themselves echoing an earlier prayer. "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."
"Are you a Christian?" I blink again. The boy, one of my students, is earnest. "Yeah. Why?" I'm teaching a class on writing, a class filled to the brim with pop culture and sci-fi, fantasy and myth. My own biases — a love of Celtic folklore and exploration of Jungian archetypes — are on full display. It seems, however, that those biases — and my tattoos — have gotten others talking. "Is Josh a Christian? Is he some sort of pagan? Should we be praying for his soul?” Witch hunts take on a variety of shades, a hunt finally settled by the reality of my Christian faith, my many years of service as a Southern Baptist deacon, and a sometimes-encyclopedic understanding of theology. I don't mind. The world is messy.
Nonetheless, we continue to struggle, unwilling to accept the darkness or the nuance within and without. We want easy heroes, straw men of our own, straw men giving us strength to sally forth especially onto social media, cocksure, ready for false battle. Petulant surety is often the result when we refuse the reaper's call, the darkness asking us to journey into the underworld at our own peril. We instinctively know the treacherousness of the path. Little wonder we are fooled by the false light of modernity, thinking we can just bypass the whole messy affair, keeping our heads in the rainbows and sunshine.
The weights are still on the bar, Hozier still wailing on the speakers. I step onto the mat, take a deep breath, and shoulder the 315 pounds for three squats. Deep down I had missed this, the swirly feeling in my head, the crushing sense of earth and gravity, the unforgiving nature of the iron, the meeting of my own limits, a reminder of mortality. I rack the bar and I shake my head. The making of a man is much more than just picking up something heavy, but still, even after some 40 years, it's never a bad start.
Comments