by Martin Sheen
An enormous white revival tent had been set up on the grounds of the Ojai Foundation, the nonprofit educational organization sponsoring the event. Tucked away in the Upper Ojai Valley east of Santa Barbara with the Topatopa Mountains rising in the distance, the location is so picturesque that an aerial view had been used in the 1937 movie Lost Horizon to depict the utopian Shangri-La.
By the time we parked and walked up a gentle hill to the event site, the tent was packed. There must have been three hundred men inside. We took three chairs in the back and turned our attention to the far end of the tent, where Robert Bly and his colleague, Michael Meade, were sitting on a small elevated stage.
“We are leaving our time now . . . we are leaving our time now . . .” Bly began. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, in his midsixties with a shock of white hair, Bly wore a button-down shirt, a flowered vest, and an ascot. He strummed on a bouzouki, a slender-necked stringed instrument from Greece, as he spoke. “There are places where time moves more slowly than here.”
I felt a kinship with Bly’s coleader, Michael Meade, right away. He was younger than Bly, probably in his early forties, and communicated with us mainly through stories and myths. He broke his stories into segments and would pause after each one to ask questions of the audience and tap out rhythms on his djembe, a chalice-shaped African drum he gripped between his knees. He seemed genuinely interested in what the audience had to say. Many of the men in the tent had brought their own drums and most of the participants seemed to have come there alone.
“How many of you came here today with a son?” Bly asked at one point.
A few men in the audience raised their hands.
“How many of you are here with more than one son?”
My father’s was the only hand that went up.
“You’re a very brave man,” Bly said, and the tent erupted in laughter.
Bly told us that night that we men were not only grieving the loss of our fathers’ knowledge but also the loss of our male initiators, the older wise men who once guided a boy into manhood. “Something has to die for a man to be born,” Bly said. “What has to die is the boy, but that doesn’t happen anymore in our culture.” Without formal initiation rituals, he said, contemporary men were being left in a state of eternal childhood, like modern-day Peter Pans. Then Bly presented us with another idea: that the natural tension between fathers and sons makes fathers a poor choice for initiating their sons into manhood. This should be the job of tribal elders, he said, family friends, uncles, grandfathers, or other older, unrelated males. I thought of the men who’d helped and guided me along my way: my godfather, John Crane, whom we had lost only a year before; Mr. Thacker, the drama club director at Malibu Park Junior High; Mr. Jellison, the English and drama teacher at Santa Monica High; and film director Robert Wise. But these men had mostly given me artistic and professional mentoring. Who had taught me the fundamentals of being a father and a man?
Maybe my mother was right. Maybe my father hadn’t given me the male knowledge that I needed. And if he hadn’t, how would I be able to pass the proper teachings down to Taylor? He was only six, but already I knew that he needed things from me that a mother couldn’t provide.
That night, most of the men at the retreat camped in a grove of walnut trees down the hill. Ramon, my dad, and I had taken a room in a motel nearby, and we reconvened with the other men the next day at 9:00 a.m. Overnight, our group seemed to have grown exponentially. Word of mouth must have gotten around. There weren’t enough seats for everyone and the overflow spread onto the dry grass outside the tent. When Meade told his stories from the stage, he would pause for longer periods between sections as the men in the back row of the tent relayed his words to the men standing outside. It really did feel as if we had stepped back into an era of oral tradition, a place where time moved more slowly.
The night before, we’d been divided into three groups coded by color: red for fire, blue for water, and yellow for earth. I’d been assigned to the red group and as the day progressed and the groups splintered off for their own activities, I noticed my father standing apart from the other men.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I won’t be part of any group,” he said.
This again? I thought. Oh, give me a break. It was his old excuse of not wanting to align himself with a particular group or a label, dating back to his days as a caddy working at the exclusive Dayton Country Club.
“Well, you kind of have to join a group if you’re here,” I said. “You signed on for this. How are you not going to participate for three days?”
“No, I’m not going to be part of any group,” he said.
I suspected that, once he’d seen what the workshop was about, he’d decided it was a bunch of sissy men sitting around crying. Granted, the weekend did have moments of men breaking down, but for the most part it was about storytelling and connecting to ritual, and about the processes by which boys become men. At first my father’s response disappointed me. I thought he could have gotten something important from the workshop if he’d been willing to jump in. Part of the day was spent drumming and dancing around a bonfire, which was an incredibly freeing experience when I let go of self-consciousness and allowed myself to participate fully. If anyone there recognized me from film, they didn’t make an issue of it. I felt free to drum and dance like any other man at the workshop, and I tried to make the most of the experience for as long as I was there.
As the day wore on and my father remained on the sidelines, I found myself getting more and more irritated with him. Hadn’t this workshop been partially his idea? Wasn’t encouraging Ramon, Charlie, and me to accompany him just a newer version of dragging us to Ojai fifteen years ago to hear Krishnamurti talk endlessly in a hot room while he sat in awe of every self-important gesture? And now here we were, in the presence of two incredible, renowned storytellers and suddenly my father was above it all and relying on the lame excuse of not wanting to belong to a group?
His was the most recognizable face in the tent and we were obviously father and son, which made his refusal to participate all the more embarrassing for me. Even worse, whenever the men clustered in their color groups to perform tasks, my dad repeatedly told the volunteer organizers—and anyone who’d listen—why he didn’t want to belong to a group. I shook my head in frustration.
Come on, I thought. These red, blue, and yellow groups are hardly exclusive or elitist.
He was completely missing the point. By refusing to identify that weekend with an exclusive group, didn’t he realize he was actually representing the pinnacle of elitist snobbery? We all possess oppositional forces within ourselves, but sometimes, when my father stubbornly digs in and then offers an explanation for doing so, his explanation seems to be at odds with the reason why he dug in in the first place. I suspected that, beneath his stubbornness, was a shyness about letting go of inhibition in front of other people, especially as a publicly known figure, but if that was the case I wished he’d just been honest with me about that. Or was he too embarrassed to let me know?
The irony of my situation wasn’t lost on me. Hundreds of men at the gathering were trying to understand and forgive their fathers and there I was, so damn angry at my father for being who he’d always been.
In the tent that weekend, Bly introduced us to the myth of Iron John, a story based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm that has ancient roots in many other cultures. As Bly tells it, the story takes place in a troubled medieval kingdom. Every time the king sends a hunter into a mysterious forest, the hunter vanishes, never to be heard from again. This goes on until all of the hunters in the kingdom have disappeared and the king and all his people have shut themselves up in the castle, isolated by their fear. One day a young hunter shows up with his dog, looking for adventure, and asks for and receives the king’s permission to explore the forest. After walking a short distance through the trees, he comes to the edge of a pond, where a hand reaches straight up out of the water and snatches h
is dog.
Very calmly, the hunter says, “This must be the place.”
He returns to the castle for more men and some buckets and together they drain the pond. At the bottom they find a naked man with long hair the color of rust—Bly called him the Wild Man—who goes by the name Iron John. He’s taken back to the castle and imprisoned in a cage, until the king’s son sets him free and accompanies him back to the woods, where the prince learns the male secrets of survival in the world. Mishaps ensue, and a beautiful princess is involved, but the important point is that Iron John remains the boy’s protector and, at the end, we learn he’s really a king himself whom the mature prince has freed from an enchanted spell.
The Wild Man, Bly told us, represents the primitive male energy deep inside the psyche of all modern men that connects us to the earth. The Wild Man is the warrior, the leader, the iconoclast who resists corporate America’s attempts to mold us into replicas of one another. The chanting and drumming, whooping and hollering we did outdoors that weekend helped us connect with that source of primal energy. When we drummed together, we were communicating without words, using a rhythm we all intuitively understood.
If a Wild Man lived inside me, I thought, he was being nurtured that weekend. But as I watched my father standing quietly on the sidelines, refusing to dance or chant with the group, I couldn’t help wondering, was he completely out of touch? Or was he actually more in tune with the Wild Man than I gave him credit for? When he took risks as an activist railing against corporations and military establishments and shouted lines from Tagore’s poem as police officers led him away in handcuffs; when he steadfastly refused to suck up to studio heads in favor of befriending only people he knew he could trust—my father might say these were acts of social justice, or merely the response to his fears. But were they not also peaceful acts of conscience against what Bly called “the civilized world” that the Wild Man opposes by nature?
It was worth considering.
This must be the place. That line, when the young hunter sees the hand reach out of the pond and take his dog, made a lasting impression on me. Not just because of the surprise or because of the poor unlucky dog, but also because of the calm, knowing way that the hunter responds to such an unexpected, unwelcome event. That type of deep inner knowledge has always appealed to me. I’ve met Vietnam vets who talk about walking through the jungle and knowing exactly when to step to the left or the right to avoid an incoming shell that otherwise would have taken their lives. This must be the place I need to move away from or This must be the place I need to move toward, they would know, just in time.
Several times I’ve found myself standing still, filled with a similar awareness that I’m suddenly in a place of great personal importance that will affect me for the rest of my life. I try to keep my high beams on all the time so I don’t miss those moments, which signify a kind of deep, calm knowing, a connection to the spiritual that keeps us aware, alert, and alive. When we get thrown off our personal axis by the distractions and noise of daily life, we get disconnected from everything that keeps us grounded and from knowing whether this is the place or not. Because This must be the place can be referring to the right place or the wrong place, and we need as much clarity as possible, as often as possible, to be able to discriminate between the two.
That line in the myth has been so memorable and so poignant for me, I’ve been trying to find the right place for it in a film ever since. For Bobby I wrote a scene for Elijah Wood’s character, a high school boy staying at the Ambassador Hotel that fateful night with a young woman, played by Lindsay Lohan, who had offered to marry him to keep him out of the draft. The camera was following Elijah closely through the hotel. He turned one way and the camera revealed Tony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte sitting in the lobby. He turned another way and we saw other characters in the lobby. When he stopped walking, the camera pulled back and he whispered to himself, “This must be the place.”
It was meant to be a magical moment of self-awareness, where the boy couldn’t quite put his finger on what it all meant but knew something important and profound was taking place. But in the editing process the scene came across as too self-conscious, and I had to take it out.
I tried to insert the line again at the end of The Way, when Tom and his three traveling companions arrive at Muxia, along the coast of Spain, to scatter the remainder of Daniel’s ashes. As they stare at the crashing ocean waves before walking down to the rocks by the shore, I had the character of Jack say, “This must be the place.” Again, it felt too self-conscious when I saw it on film. Eventually, I found a place for the line to live organically on The Way’s soundtrack. I gave track 6 the title “This Must Be the Place.” It’s the piece of music playing when Tom’s character finds the cross in the Pyrenees marking the place where his son has died.
Saturday’s workshop schedule alternated between outdoor activities with our groups and storytelling sessions in the tent, with a break for lunch spread out on long tables in the shade. At one point Michael Meade shared an African story with us called “The Hunter and His Son.” Meade’s method of teaching through story had been resonating with me as a writer, and I leaned forward in my chair to make sure I could hear him clearly.
“The hunter and his son went into the bush one day to pursue their occupation,” he began. “They hunted all morning and found nothing to sustain them but one small rat.”
He paused while the men in the back of the tent relayed the opening lines to the others standing outside. In the past few hours, our group had grown even larger. Men must have been driving in from miles around.
“The father gave the rat to the son to carry,” Meade continued. “It seemed of no consequence to the son, so he threw the rat into the bush. The rest of the day they saw no other game. At dusk the father built a fire and said, ‘Bring the rat to roast, Son; at least we will have something to eat.’ When he learned that the son had thrown the rat away, he became very angry. In an outburst of rage, he struck the son with his ax and turned away. He returned home, leaving his son lying on the ground.”
The son, Meade went on, went home later that night, packed up his belongings, and traveled to a nearby village where the local chief had recently lost his son. The boy and the chief devised a plan by which the chief would pass him off to the villagers as his son returned from battle, and the boy went through various tests to prove his authenticity, all of which he passed. He lived in the village as the chief’s son for years thereafter, until one day his real father came looking for him. In a final test of loyalty, the king, the hunter, and the son rode off into a clearing with three horses and a sword.
“The king gave the sword to the son,” Meade continued, “and said, ‘We are here unarmed. You hold the sword. Either you must slay me and return to your village with your father, or you must slay your father and return with me and live in my village as we have been.’ The son did not know what to do.”
There was a long pause as the story was passed back to the men outside, and as the men inside the tent considered the son’s dilemma.
“What would you do?” Meade asked us.
The tent was filled with the silence of four hundred men thinking. What would we do? Choose the real father who had struck us and left us lying on the ground, or choose the false father and place material riches ahead of blood ties? These were matters of loyalty and fidelity that probably any man in the tent could imagine facing, maybe had even faced at some point in his life.
What would I do? It was a good question. Blood being thicker, I would have struck down the false father, I thought.
It’s easy to interpret “The Hunter and His Son” as a simple tale of loyalty, but Meade encouraged us to interpret it in another light. He brought us back to the beginning of the story, when the father and son were hunting and caught the rat. The son, he explained, who was young and full of potential, believed more game would be caught that day and that he and his father would share in the outcome. In his confidence he t
ossed away what seemed like an inconsequential catch. But the father, in his maturity, understood that some days brought good hunting and others not and had been trying to teach the son something about the uncertainties of life and the practice of accepting what is given. If they were to catch bigger game, they would celebrate. If not, they would at least have the rat to eat. The expectations of father and son were at odds, and each had wound up disappointed in the other.
“If we look at this story one way, the father is seen as a very limited and limiting person,” Meade explained. “But look at it another way, and he can be seen as the king who gives royal gifts. Where are each of you with your fathers?” he asked. “Do you feel limited by him or do you feel that you’ve received some gifts?”
I looked over at my father, sitting attentively on his folding chair. He, too, was listening to the story. Was he thinking of his own father, who’d raised him mostly on his own while working long days in a factory? Or was he thinking about how he’d raised his three sons and his daughter, and what he did or didn’t teach us?
That night after dark, in a field beside a massive oak tree, Meade and Bly created an altar out of a pile of rocks and set up a wooden doorway nearby for the men to pass through. This was based on a Sufi tradition of building a doorway without walls in the middle of the desert as a reminder that even the most adverse environment contains a threshold to another world, whether it’s the world of imagination, the world of art, the world of spirit, or the world of the soul. We were asked to each select an object from nature—a small bunch of dry grass, a flower, a rock, a piece of fruit, a clod of dirt—to represent something in our lives that was keeping us from moving forward. Then we were to carry it through the doorway while imagining the next steps of our lives and lay the item to rest at the altar on the other side.
I found a stone in the field and got in line. In the stone I held in my hand I felt the weight of a burden I’d been carrying for the past six years: the guilt I felt for not having married my kids’ mom. The line inched forward toward the door. There must have been a hundred men ahead of me and just as many behind. I couldn’t see my father in the crowd but it didn’t matter. He would participate or not; it was his choice, not mine.