“What Happened to Icarus?”
I want to know what happened to Icarus
after his wings melted away,
When he fell into the fathomless sea.
This is where the story begins.
The Greeks, as is their tendency, tell a good tale, of the boy, Icarus, who, in a quintessential act of hubris, flies too close to the sun, but they tell only part of the story. Icarus falls. We know this much. We know that his wings melted because he wouldn’t listen to the wisdom of an elder, because he was too enraptured by the joy of his flight. Because he thought he could be a like a god. And most of us, eventually, come to know what this is like. We all, at some point, fly too close to the sun. We all fall. And we assume that Icarus dies. Indeed, his father, Daedalus, mourns him. This is treated as the end of the story. But perhaps we’ve missed something here. Perhaps, Daedalus mourns something in ourselves that dies when we fly too close to the sun, when we fall. We are forced—and we are all forced, eventually—to enter into the depths. The sea is ourselves. And, perhaps, Icarus’s story truly begins when he goes below the surface.
I am thinking of all this, perhaps, because the recent years of my own life have been something like this fall. I am like Dante, in those famous first lines of the Commedia, embarking on “il mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—the middle of the journey of our life. I have entered, as Dante had, the “selva oscura”—the dark wood. Dante writes these lines in exile, a forty-year-old man without a home. In his great work, he writes these lines as he enters the inferno. Dante understood that the most important work happens after we fall. It happens when we enter the depths—call it the sea or the inferno—and confront our deepest fears and longings, pain and joy.
Our ancient ancestors knew this when they crawled deep into caves and created masterpieces on the walls. They could have painted on the side of a cliff, or a tree, but they chose to crawl deep inside of the earth. Their pictures were at once cosmic and psychic, maps of soul and world, of womb and sky. I suspect that they intuited the significance of interiority, of going into the depths to find the answers to life’s biggest questions.
My own challenges have been both personal and professional, of family and of community. I’ve lived through a pandemic, through streets on fire in protest and despair. Personally, I’ve had to confront my own greatest fears. For some of us, it takes until we reach middle age, until our wings have melted and we fall, in order to confront those demons. But however we get there, this is the real work of life. It’s not the sort of stuff that shows up on a resume, or if you google yourself. But it’s the most important work we’ll ever do.
Much has been said, lately, about the crisis of mental health that corresponds to the physical health crisis (the pandemic, among other things) and the planetary health crisis (climate change). We are not only suffering from having sick bodies and on a sick planet. Entangled in all this is the sickness of our inner lives. We are a depressed and lonely species. But we are beginning to see, finally, that we have to begin to be vulnerable with each other in order to see one another and in order to heal and grow.
This is important for us as individuals. We work through our trauma and heal only when we have the courage to travel to those depths. And this is especially important for boys and men. I can recall, at some point in my life, believing that to be a man meant that I wouldn’t cry any more. It’s really the opposite, of course. What we need, so desperately, are men and boys who know how to feel, how to love and to be loved. How to cry. As a parent and as an educator, I have come to believe that this is perhaps the most important thing we can teach our children.
And ours is also an age of collective trauma. Confronted with myriad challenges and despair, from climate change to the pandemic, we are at a moment of apocalypse and transformation. The old stories are dying; new ones are waiting to be born. And this requires nothing short of a shared shamanic journey, a death—like Icarus in the sea—and rebirth. But our new stories can only be birthed if we learn how to enter into the depths together, if we, like Daedalus, can learn to mourn authentically for what we’ve lost.
We have to learn to share our stories, our pain, our tears with one another because this is the only way we can take care of each other.
To learn more about how I am engaging in this work with individuals and organizations, click here.