When was the last time you witnessed a man weeping, with abandonment?
When was the last time you met a word you’d never heard, with wonderment?
Just a few days ago, I was posed a few questions I had never been asked before, by someone I had never met before. While a few dozen people watched and listened to the answers from around the world. My second Substack live was certainly an experiment in trust and an exploration of vulnerability.
But isn’t that what vulnerability means anyway? The wound. To let one in to tend to the wound? I found myself meeting the string of words with hesitation at first…deep inhales. And then, I found myself answering them from a place of deep abandonment…longer exhales as breath turned into syllables, which formed into sharing and stories of connection. Were these lessons or lost scrolls of belonging?
A scene plays out in my head, so often unseen, unshown and remaining relegated to the castaway island in my mind. A man breaking down, his hands like oak, shaking as tears streamed, sobs emerging over a long awaited dance with grief. "I just want to be strong enough to hold it all together, for all of them," almost unspoken, inaudibly whispered. In that moment, he was every inch a man, and nothing like what we're told masculinity should look like.
The Myth of the Single Path & Prime Radiant
It is Saturday morning, and I am watching a scene from the show FOUNDATION, based on Isaac Asimov’s novels. A five thousand year old robot speaks a word I have never heard: Unicursal. I had to back it up to hear it again. Unicursal. I walk to my etymology dictionary just below the mantle to delve into the realm of what a woman, playing a robot, on a screen, has ignited in me.
In Latin, unus means "one," and cursus means "course" or "path." Together they give us unicursal: a single unbroken line, a walk that cannot stray, a way toward the center without confusion. The image is clean, decisive, comforting in its certainty. Until it is not. Until I am remembering that so much of what we call masculinity in this world has been cast in this form. The straight line. The march forward. The road without diversion, without confusion. "Be a man," we're told, as if that were a course as simple and singular as geometry. The prime radiant.
But what if this entire framework is built on a lie? A figment collapsing in on itself. What if we are meant to branch and break from the single stroke and weave and wander along the tributaries of our inadequacies to discover our gifts, our purpose?
Language's Hidden Hierarchies Cast Shadows
Language has always had its shadows. Those shadows show up in our automations, our large language models and our eventual overbearing agents. Masculus in Latin, from which "masculine" derives, is tied to notions of strength and "greater-ness." Femina is rooted in "she who suckles," an etymology bound to care and nourishment. One defined by power, the other by relation and belonging. From the start, the impetus, the lexicon itself offered an imbalance, a hierarchy disguised as clarity. Have we confused certainty for clarity? I believe we have. And it is time to test our vision.
To imagine masculinity as unicursal—as if it had only one sanctioned expression—is a misnomer of the highest order. I feel that inflexibility increasingly, as I breathe toward my fifth decade as a man.
Living in the Labyrinth of Math & Memory
The truth is multicursal: multi (many) + cursus (paths). Masculinity, like humanity itself, is anything but a single course sketched or etched, but rather a maze of crossings, detours, spirals, and hidden doors. Portals even.
We know this in our bodies. The detours of grief and grace that refuse linearity. The sudden opening of tenderness in fatherhood or even bachelorhood. The winding corridors of creativity, doubt, sensuality. The man who stands an oak, tears streaming hidden over false dreams, feeling lost and free all at once, condemned to be walking but one of masculinity's thousand paths.
To flatten all that into one road is to deny not only men but the whole human family the fullness of expression and expansion.
The Cosmic Compass Comes to Pass
As an Edgewalker—someone who lives in the threshold spaces where binaries blur—I move between cultures, disciplines, even within the weave of what we call the sacred masculine and divine feminine. To walk between worlds is to hold opposites without collapsing them.
The masculine is not just structure, nor the feminine just flow. Each contains multitudes, each courses through us everywhere, all at once.
Think of the father who teaches his son to throw a punch and then holds him while he cries. The artist who builds disciplined practice around wild, unbridled inspiration. The leader who makes hard decisions with a tender heart. These are not societal condemning contradictions. These are completions.
Beyond the Narrow Gate & Fisted Grip
Society still clings to the unicursal script with a tight fist: masculinity as conquest, stoicism, domination. A narrow path patrolled by shame. And shame is the slow killer of men. To step off the narrowing path is to risk ridicule, exile, even harm.
But perhaps what is truly feared is revelation, not deviation. To illuminate that the centerline was never singular to begin with is but a bridge too far for some. To come out the other side and see clearly that the map has always been a labyrinth of crossings…we cannot unsee it. A glowing cube of infinite possibilities and sanctuaries. Of the cosmos folding in on itself to create a signature only you can trace by following your heart. The edges and spheres of possibility.
The Sacred Plurality & Poetry
The work, then, in our hands is not to erase masculinity but to let it breathe in its multicursal truth. To see courage in surrender and as a charge to follow. To honor discipline alongside tenderness. To recognize that the sacred masculine is but completed when it stands in reverence with the divine feminine.
Imagine the poet-foreman who finally gained the courage to submit three poems to a literary journal one month. They return rejected, but he's already writing new ones. The fear of the male writer hasn't left him—he still hides his notebooks like contraband, still feels his throat tighten when he overhears someone mock "sensitive men." But something has shifted. He's begun to understand that his tenderness isn't the opposite of his strength; it's woven into the very fabric of it. Roots before branches. That is how the oak stands tall and time tested.
Perhaps his latest poem begins again:
The Sky King stopped to hear the song Of those whose name carried the curse And stood in the waters of hope Tending to the tributaries and levies Of concrete and metaphor For both require a steady hand to pour And the patience of man to let them set
Maybe that's what we're really afraid of—that our hearts might be both harder and softer than we've been told they're allowed to be all this time.
Walking the Many Paths & Passions
To be human is to hold a compass and cradle together. We contain multitudes after all. Too complex to be bound to one path. Men feel both the pull of the straight line and the swirl of the maze. And at times we long for layers and labyrinths. Masculinity was never a road cut across the earth. It is instead a tangle of courses, sacred in its plurality.
And the task of the Edgewalker is to walk them—not with certainty, but with awareness. Not with conquest, but with reverence, revelation and regard.