It’s easy to be changed by a Minnesota Men’s Conference. Established in 1984 by renowned poet Robert Bly, the conference meets annually in a nature-based setting. Local psychologist Wayne Arnzen, M.S., has been attending the conferences for about eight years and hopes to share some of its spirit with a new group for men in Cook County.
According to poet and teacher Timothy Young, who has a letter to friends of the Minnesota Men’s Conference on its website, “The enduring mission of the Minnesota Men’s Conference is to help men heal their personal souls, and thus the souls of the families, communities and world around them, by collectively seeking deep, passionate, attentive, expressive and reverent lives.”
The conference uses storytelling, poetry, music, and ritual to help men break out of unhealthy patterns and discover new paths. According to Daniel Deardorff, a storyteller at the conference, “Because human beings are a kind of animal that require the forming of bonds to place and community, we inevitably experience feelings of alienation and exile when those bonds fail. Yet we continually make the great error of mooring our lifelines to ambition, achievement, status, influence, and possessions—aspirations which cannot anchor us to the rhythms of the living world because they are concepts, and concepts unlike images are not alive. Our relatedness to the world around us is lost because we no longer trust it.”
On the conference website, Deardorff talks of the restorative powers of relatedness and imagination and the importance of pursuing identity and meaning in life. “…The eyes of the living world are not those of a remote impersonal deity, they are the eyes of an imminent intelligence tracking and summoning us to the hidden path. The wellsprings of life await us—we have only to take the next step.”
Arnzen said the conference encourages men to be strong and fierce while also being caring and compassionate. They can be both, he said, and his new group will help men discover how this can be. The group will include suggested reading, exercises to get group members thinking about various life issues, and time to talk.
The conference website has a poem by William Stafford entitled A Ritual to Read to Each Other. Stafford says in the first verse, “If you don’t know the kind of person I am / and I don’t know the kind of person you are / a pattern that others made may prevail in the world / and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”
Arnzen’s property is very accommodating for a group of this sort, with a 24-foot yurt in the middle of a meadow overlooking Lake Superior on 80 acres of land west of Grand Marais.
The group will be time-limited and Arnzen will open it up to about 10-12 men. He plans to start the group by the beginning of June.
Arnzen is a provider for most insurance plans except Medicare. He can be reached for more information at (218) 387-1098.
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