A Walk with the King

Gabriel Heilig

Gabriel Heilig is a poet, editor, and speechwriter to federal and corporate executives. He and his wife recently developed a multimedia CD for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that will help 70,000 young people trained each year by Job Corps to be hired by businesses across the United States. A former Vietnam-era conscientious objector, he is the founder of Action Resumes, the only resume service with an office in the Pentagon. “A Walk with the King” first appeared in Wingspan: Journal of the Male Spirit, Spring, 1990, and later in the book, Wingspan: Inside the Men’s Movement (St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

Fincastle, Virginia, October 1989. Southeastern Regional Men's Conference. Silent hour. Time to encounter the void.

I walk up an old trail by myself. In five minutes I’m gone from the group of over a hundred men. I'm looking for a treehouse I was told about: some temporary north-star to orient the rowboat 'of my life.

As the trail leads me on, I feel my uncomfortableness with the forest’s silence, my anxiety at having no map, no agenda. Yet I’m also beginning to feel at ease with the silence, and hush of the woods. It smells good. The privacy is refreshing. For a suburban kid like myself, who grew up without much in the way of city street smarts or country wisdom, trails into the woods hold a sense of foreignness and fear. I keep expecting something to happen, something I won’t be able to handle.

Soon I find myself calling out. At first, the usual self-announcements. Banal stuff. My hellos to the trees. But as I do it a few more times, I begin to feel more comfortable with the sound of my own voice in the woods.

I begin shouting. I’m alone in that there are no other people, yet the woods are alive. I feel an ancient part of myself begin to reawaken. The hunter, reentering his forest kingdom. I start getting into it. I shout more.

Before long I’m bellowing. "I’M THE KING OF THIS FOREST." Wow! Where did that come from?

No one’s telling me to shut up, so I shout it out again. "I’M THE KING OF THIS FOREST.”

I listen to the echo of my own voice thundering unrestrained through the woods. Its tone has enough authority that I believe these words myself. I don’t know where this king’s been hiding, but he sounds real. My body feels fantastic as his presence rumbles through me.

I try it again — I’m into it now. No doubt about it: Kings definitely have more fun. I spot a sign: "Treehouse this way.” I head off the trail, bellowing out every few yards. This king... I like him.

Snap of twigs as I leave the trail, following a sign pointing toward the treehouse. After about ten minutes of winding around, guessing at where the trail leads, I get to a clearing with two large treehouses. I climb a ladder and find mattresses and a roomy space. A few minutes there and I know I’m in the woods for something else. So I clamber down the ladder and begin walking back the way I’ve come.

Tonight there’ll be a poetry reading and I want to memorize a poem I’d written about my own "bucket work,” my effort to get down into the dark psychic swamp where the Wild Man lives, his power chained, like mine has often felt.

I get back on the trail, slowing down now that there’s no treehouse to find, no goal to reach. I start giving my poem to the woods, full throttle on the volume. What the hell — I’m king here.

“Muffled bubbles from below ...”

As I begin, the tone of my voice downshifts to something I’ve never heard before in myself—a low growl, carrying the force of my words in a way I didn’t hear even when I was writing them. I sound like a cement mixer or an old bull serenading the birds overhead. It dawns on me that I feel like a Shakespearean actor pounding out his soliloquy. And I feel old, at least twenty years older, like an actor playing Lear or some other aging king roaring his majesty across the forest stage.

I keep on giving the tone, loving it even more.

"... like angry raindrops falling upward ...”

I’m boiling with it. Probably I’m possessed by an archetype or some Jungian complex, but I could care less. I stand there for fifteen minutes or so, booming out my lines, bringing my poem off the pages of memory and back into my body.

A question forms: Why don't I talk like this all the time? Not a bad question. But I’m not in the woods for self-analysis. I’m here for selfexpansion. That much I can feel. An unexpected door down into an old castle room has suddenly blown open, and there’s a king down there.

Is he my king? I don’t know if he’s mine or not, but he feels good to me. Yet I have to ask: Where has he been all my life? Or, where have I been? Whatever the answer, he’s here now.

I roar on, back down the trail toward the gathering of men, and Robert and Michael, James and John, our teachers. As I come over the rise of the last hill before joining the road, I have another moment, another opening.

I’m not a large-bodied man, yet standing on that ridge, about to descend toward the lodge, suddenly I feel like Paul Bunyan. There’s a flowing extension across my shoulders and a spacious warm feeling around my body. I feel like Ulysses home from the wine-dark seas or a hunter back from the hunt. ^

I feel GOOD.

I stride into the hall where dinner’s already being served. Suddenly, I feel an animal wildness filling me. Suddenly, this gathering of men and the work of the past few days seem tame and forced, like we’re trying too hard, trying to get underneath opr trying. Yet for this brief moment. I’ve gotten beneath it. I feel filled with something primed: animal, ancient and unmistakably male.

I make my way to the food tables. I don’t want any silverware. I just want the food—and I don’t want to be nice about it, either. I grab a plate, pile some food on it and sit down. The man next to me tries not to look too startled as I bury my face straight down into the chow.

I munch away happily, like a famished horse. Who cares what I look like? I’ve been waiting forty-six years to feel like this, unthinking of what others think of me.

All right, you Jungians and therapists. Probably I’m inflated, right? Probably my archetypes are having a royal feast on my ego-state. But I’ll tell you what — I don’t give a sweet shit. These archetypes know how to have one helluva good time.

I spot Ed, one of my brothers from Washington, D.C. He smiles at me with a "go for it” wink. You got it, Ed. I’m gone.

Munching onward, I even get dessert down. It’s good to know how the animals do it. Not bad, either. Lots of contact here.

Eventually, the mood evaporates. The room closes back in, and I shrink back to my normal identity. The question is: Which one is actually mine?

My feelings feel like they're stuck in a crowded elevator No room to move their elbows or swing out. My ego-casing is back, securely around me again.

And then I see it. Out there on the trail I met some presence who lives far from the suburbs where I was raised and taught to live. The work in the lodge with the men and our teachers was preparation, coaxing the ego to let go a bit, so I could move toward the dark voice that waits beneath my trained politeness.

I feel the same roaring tone a few nights later, when Michael gives a toast to our final night’s feast. He raises his glass toward us; we raise ours toward him. His Irish blessing, "Slancha,” slices through the room like a thick spear of sound. Suddenly I feel like I’m in a medieval tavern with a band of soldiers, about to ride off to war. The toast rattling across the room is utterly male, without fear of death, and binding.

This is no longer a lodge in Virginia or a men’s conference. These are men. Period.

Thinking back on my walk with the king, I know that for a moment’s brilliant grace I released myself, initiating myself somehow on my own male ground. Some buried part of me rose up and claimed me. The tone in my voice touched it. My words carried it out of me, bucket by bucket, feeling by feeling. And the woods held me in it, a spacious container.

Whatever did it, whoever was down there waiting for me—God bless you, you furious old soliloquizing bull-king sergeant-major. You can sign me up.