Like so many humans of my gender, there was a time not long ago if someone had told me to be a mountain, I would have snickered and rolled my eyes and found a way to run away. I was allergic to most, if not all, of those woo-woo solutions to life’s problems in my life, in health care, in the spiritual realm.

I can’t speak for all men, but I think most of us have not grown up with fathers and brothers and uncles who teach them how to be open and nurturing and spiritual.

We haven’t often seen how men can love one another and others and we don’t always know how to do it. If you watch the politicians and the way the speak, you can see how destructive this can be.

I always have craved a spiritual life and worked for it, but I was not self-aware and open enough to understand fully what it meant. As God was once quoted as saying, love is the point, not conquest.

Life is great teacher, and living is a great lesson in itself. There is no better way to get a man’s attention than to tie him to the back of a truck and drag him up and down a rocky hillside.

It was good for me.

I always say the  only men I love and can bear to be around were either tortured as children or humiliated as adults, These men make the best friends, and they have either died or been  blown open to feeling and awareness. They know what it means to love and be loved.

I have survived being a man and am lucky.  I don’t snicker at powerful spiritual notions of peace and healing any longer, they have, in some ways, saved my life, and there is no more satisfied customer in the world than a middle-aged man who been opened up like a ripe cantaloupe.

I once listened to a meditation tape – meditation has helped me in my life – about  being a mountain . It was guided and the instructor – this program is an App – asked me to picture a mountain, and think how steady and strong and grounded the mountain is, even as life rages all around it, with its ups and downs, frights, storms, changes, challenges.

Be the mountain, the instructor said, and find the grounded and peaceful part of yourself that is steady and confident, even as life taunts and surprises. I like this idea, I believe there is a strong, steady, peaceful part of me at the core, it is my mountain. When I am angry or fearful, I imagine the mountain, its steadiness and strength, it’s peacefulness. The idea settles me, strengthens me.

I like to see myself as a mountain, I guess, it seems a bit vain to me sometimes.

But it is a soothing image.

I believe we are stronger than many of the things we fear, stronger than we have been  led to believe we are. I believe fear is a geography, a space to cross.

For me, the role of the man is not to conquer or demand or dominate, but to be a source of steadiness and encouragement, we are, beneath it all, nurturing creatures, we are drawn to nourishment and protection. Before they forced us from our homes and into factories we cared for our families and home and were not, as we so often are, strangers to them.

Mountains are beautiful and peaceful and inspiring. In another life, I might like to be one.

Women can just as easily be a mountain as a man. But I would no longer laugh at the idea or make it small. That is part of being a mountain also, it helps me to see what it means to be a real man.