At the very moment when I was desperately wondering what it means to be a man, and did I have what it takes, my father checked out, went silent. I was about eleven or twelve at the time-a very critical age in the masculine journey, the age when the question really begins to surface. But like so many men of his era, my father had never faced the issues of his own wounds, and he fell to drinking when his life began to take a downhill turn. It was his father’s ranch that I worked on each summer, and my dad and I saw a lot of the West together as we’d make the long drive from Southern California to Oregon, often with fishing detours through Idaho and Montana. I still remember the fried egg sandwiches he would make us for dinner.

He introduced me to the West, and taught me to fish and to camp. Because they are subtle, they often go unrecognized as wounds and therefore are actually more difficult to heal.

The passive wounds are not they are pernicious, like a cancer. One thing about the assault wounds-they are obvious. Without some kind of help, many men never recover. This can get unspeakably evil when it involves physical, sexual, or verbal abuse carried on for years. The assault wounds are like a shotgun blast to the chest. Those are defining sentences that shape a man’s life.

“Do I have what it takes? Am I a man, Papa?” No, you are a mama’s boy, an idiot, a seagull.

Wild at the heart unbiblical book