What an amazing weekend at the 16th annual Mentone Mens’ Gathering.
We discussed many things. One issue that came up numerous times is elegant endings as this was the last Mentone conference.

John Lee did a great job helping us feel instead of just think during the weekend. John’s opinion is that movement creates emotion. We did a few different exercises to help us move and feel.

Doug Von Koss was amazing as usual leading us in song. Singing with a group, feeling the vibration is causes, hollering the words, has always been a great joy of mine. A simple chant of “we will remember” helped me to get out of my head and into my heart with my feelings about this change at Mentone and with Robert Bly.

Jeffery Duvall has a way of creating a safe container that is rare. My thanks to him for helping us to move in the direction we needed even if that was not comfortable.

Robert Bly is such a force in this world. He read many new pieces that were striking. Something seemed different about many of them. It is difficult to explain. There was a plainness, bluntness, a sense of strength. He was funny as usual. He made comments about tits, he was a smart ass with John, a couple times he said he didn’t believe something he had written.

Here is something I wrote inspired by the weekend.

Movement Creates Emotion

Squeeze my fingers and see if
the snaggle toothed demon will come out to play.
Or perhaps the time has arrived for your angel
to step from the shadow of shame
and bless you.
Stand up, take the arm of a man
you do not know and walk in the sunshine.
The piercing siren of fear will only
Grow quiet in the face of courage.
What passes between mens’ arms
could make it all the way to
the molten place at the core.
Then there will be no end to the tears.

Hello Gents,
It has been some time since we have had a new posting.

The organizing work for the 15th annual NC Spring Mens Gathering has started and we are very excited that this event continues. We will be gathering again in April of 2010 in Eflin NC.

Next week, John Lee will be hosting the Mentone Men’s conference in Menton AL. I will be attending. John says that it may be the last year for this conference. It is sad to think that such a wonderful event will stop but as Dr. Seuss said, “smile because it happened, don’t cry because it is over.”

Finally, under the category of “In the News”, I saw today that there is a new book being released regarding men. Here is a link http://www.projo.com/books/content/artsun-goodmen_11-01-09_DMG60RP_v34.12ea666.html.
“The Good Men Project,” a collection of stories by men, for men, about men.
Here is quote from Bryan Rourke, the author of the article.

“Sometimes when men share their feelings they’re regarded with variations of ” weakness. People will say, ‘You (insert epithet here).’
Horwitz shared anyway. And the book did get published, eventually.
“It was a hard sell,” says James Houghton, one of book’s three editors. “That was the message that publishers made very clear very early.”
So organizers of the book organized themselves into the Good Men Foundation, and published the paperback ($14.99) and a companion DVD ($14.99) themselves, with an official release date of Nov. 15.