Michael's Musings - Leadership

February: Is the month of my birthday. Even though I will be seventy-seven (usually on the last day of the month, but not this year), I have not retired. I have advanced. I am still pregnant with possibilities, and I have tried to adopt a new way of imagining my Spirit, because we are in urgent need of a new and vital form of Spirit that will lead us out of the dreadful dangers we are in. You and I must rise up and become the leaders we need. Let’s do it together. Happy birthday!
Leadership in the face of Dragons, Warriors, and Other Dangers

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. –Rilke

Rage and fire and dragons may be transformed by the loving feminine into a masculine Spirit that protects and makes safe rather than one that conquers and kills. Young boys are often snatched too early from the maternal (and sometimes paternal) Soul that would have taught them softness. Instead, thrust into the arena of competition that judges them winners or losers, and admires marines and other terror-mongers that breathe fire and death, they learn to become warriors who are feted as heroes. What causes us to make monsters out of men? All too often, marines and other warriors return home so very much alone, and discover that their brutalized Souls have forsaken them causing love to pass them by. Many are suffering from Post Traumatic Soul Derangement, and, like Narcissus, some kill themselves while others take pills and potions in a desperate attempt to fill the void. Others act with beauty and courage, and only in the face of beauty and courage will love reappear.

For our survival, we need a new paradigm for the masculine Spirit. We need a Spirit—a leader—that acts with beauty and courage and makes us safe for love. The age-old winner-warrior may promise security and appear to be powerful, but this Spirit creates legions of losers and coffins full of the dead who will haunt us.

In the umbra of a disastrous and untrustworthy US Presidential leadership wholly lacking in beauty and courage, we crave a new leadership that will inspire us to rise up and channel our energy into a powerhouse of love. We need a hopeful and inspirational alternative to the hunter-gatherer leaders or the heroic warrior leaders who are violent Spirits from the dark side of history that still repeats itself as we fight each other and consume ourselves to death. We need not wait for the coming of a new political Spirit. We may adopt this new paradigm of masculine Spirit that will love our feminine Soul, and then our Mortal nature will feel safe and well prepared to live the loving life. Then and only then will the world be transformed. --Michael Murphy