Welcome to Rose and Sword

Rose and Sword is a publication about masculinity, identity and the struggle to live consciously in modern culture. It began with a question that sounded simple and became less so the longer I examined it: what does it mean to be a man now?

Older answers often reduced a man’s value to provision, hardness or authority. Many contemporary answers define masculinity mainly through its failures. Neither gives men a sufficient path. Rose and Sword looks for a model in which strength can coexist with tenderness, sexuality with responsibility, and individuality with service.

In brief

• The central subjects are masculinity, false identification, relationships, spirituality and modern society.
• The perspective is shaped by more than 17 years on a tantric path and over a decade teaching and working with men.
• The aim is inquiry rather than ideological loyalty.

Masculinity in relationship

I frequently write from a male perspective because that is the life I know and the field in which I have worked. But men cannot be understood in isolation. Masculinity develops through relationships with women, fathers, mothers, other men, institutions and the wider culture.

For that reason, the publication also examines femininity, polarity, intimacy and the ways men and women misunderstand one another. The purpose is not to restore a rigid division of roles. It is to ask what may be lost when difference becomes unspeakable and what becomes dangerous when difference is turned into hierarchy.

Identity and the things we mistake for ourselves

A second thread is identification. Human beings attach themselves to professions, politics, wounds, achievements, nations, communities and social roles. These attachments can organise life and provide belonging. They can also become cages when we confuse them with the whole self.

My book Give Us: How We Got So Far from Who We Truly Are grew from this subject. Despite the subtitle, the deeper question is not how to define one final “true identity”. It is how to recognise false identification: all the temporary stories we defend as though our existence depends on them.

The spiritual foundation

Much of my background comes from yoga and Tantra. Here, Tantra does not mean a collection of sexual tricks. It is a worldview concerned with consciousness, energy, polarity, disciplined practice and transformation through direct experience.

Not every article is explicitly spiritual. I also write about politics, culture, cities, books, health and ordinary encounters. The spiritual perspective appears in the questions beneath those subjects: what shapes our consciousness, what governs our choices, and whether transformation is possible beyond changing opinions.

Why the rose and the sword?

The sword represents discernment, courage, boundaries and action. The rose represents love, beauty, tenderness and receptivity. Each becomes distorted when separated from the other.

A sword without a rose becomes cold power. A rose without a sword becomes unable to protect what it loves. The title expresses the central practice of integration, particularly for men who have been told they must choose between hardness and weakness.

What you will find here

The preferred form is the long essay because difficult subjects need more than a caption or slogan. The archive also includes interviews, personal stories, cultural criticism, book-related writing, shorter observations and occasional videos.

I do not expect every reader to share my spiritual assumptions or conclusions. Agreement is less important than serious engagement. Challenge is welcome when it addresses what was actually written rather than the tribe to which it appears to belong.

What this publication is not

Rose and Sword is not a grievance project for men, a campaign against women or a promise to recover an imaginary golden age. It is also not an attempt to flatten the differences between people in the name of safety.

The work is exploratory and sometimes personal. Some conclusions will develop. Others may prove wrong. The standard is to examine experience honestly, distinguish belief from evidence and remain open to correction without pretending to possess no convictions.

An invitation to think more slowly

Public discussion increasingly rewards instant judgement, outrage and certainty. Rose and Sword makes room for the opposite: context, ambiguity, contradiction and the possibility that an idea may change while being written.

Browse the essays, disagree where necessary and add your own experience. The purpose is not to build a room in which everybody thinks alike. It is to create one in which difficult questions can remain present long enough to teach us something.