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July interview with Kevin Ray Cook
Whether it is cultural or just growing up in a small farm town, I have a conservative nature. But looking back I now realize that as a child and teenager and adult I was very emotionally dysfunctional. Intelligent, but a train wreck at the heart level. Fortunately for me emotional intelligence can be learned. As DH Lawrence relates in a poem "Healing"... And it's not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance, long difficult repentance, realization of life's mistake, the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify." Ten years ago, I wouldn't have understood that poem, but today I know exactly what Lawrence was getting at. My father took the mechanism approach. But in view of James Hillman's thesis in "The Soul's Code" it's hard to say if the wounds I absorbed are what cracked open the shell of my soul or delayed the process forty five years. But that is a red herring for me, and I suspect for most. To analyze what would have happened is a moot point when what happened has been "repented". The bottom line is that my healing was a long
process of releasing the wounds, and thereby my
emotional body's attached to them, and thus they no
longer distort the self-energy, which is ever being
born. It didn't happen all at once, it took place
in fits and starts over decades, and the residual
effect still echoes within me, but the heavy
lifting is done. The primary source of my demons
has been beheaded. The war with shadow is over. The
mistake which mankind at large has chosen to
sanctify, is seen for what it is, pure and simple:
ignorance. just words The trouble with a hard hearted man, Never to stay (lyrics) I don't need to own these words, as if they were
ever mine. I don't need to hide my gold, 'cause I got it
from the sun, Time is nothing if you're living for the day I don't need to make up stories or be living any
lie I don't need to understand if every miracle is
true Life gets easy if you're living for the day Born, September 27th, 1952, youngest child of 5 to a very poor farmer in south western Ontario, Canada. I was a left handed child in right handed family, a black sheep, then and now. As they say-the story of my life. I was deeply fond of folk and country, poetry and lyrics well before I was a teenager. I was raised, after the farm went broke, in a very small town just north of the Lake Ontario. I ran away from home at 13, was found 3 days later. I left home, more like ejected, at the age of 16, like my three older brothers before. I was more or less homeless for about a year or more. I hitched through the US at 16 and finally got deported. I got arrested at 17 in Vancouver, Canada, and sent home on probation. Since my education was boring, frustrating, and interrupted, I learned most of what I know by reading and by listening to my heart. I discovered Kahlil Gibran at 14, he opened
my heart. I started the practice of transcendental
meditation at 24, it saved my life. I started men's
work at the age of 42, it saved my soul. From my
healing work with men and with the mentoring of
boys, at the age of 50, I found my way back through
a terrorized and troubled childhood, past the
wounded little boy, to recover a golden child who
had been waiting for me. Not everyone gets to be
born twice in one lifetime. It's been a trip. I'm
surprised I made it through. © 2005 Reid Baer The fame you earn has a different taste from the fame that is forced upon you. - Gloria Vanderbilt
Reid Baer, an
award-winning playwright for “A Lyon’s
Tale” is also a newspaper journalist, a poet
with more than 100 poems in magazines world wide,
and a novelist with his first book released this
month entitled Kill
The Story. Baer has been
a member of The ManKind Project since 1995 and
currently edits The New Warrior Journal for
The ManKind Project www.mkp.org
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.
He resides in Reidsville, N.C. with his wife
Patricia. He can be reached at 
