Story Tenders and Fire Keepers
This deeply meaningful collection of blessings supports a vision of reimagined, renovated, and re-enchanted masculinity.
The crisis in masculinity is a crisis of storytelling. In his new book, writer, activist, and storyteller Gareth Higgins encourages men, and anyone who cares about them, to revise the story and find a new place in it for themselves through fifty-two blessings that will help men support one another, challenge and transcend patriarchy, lead with love, and more.
Blessings are encouragements—for courage is both about bravery in the face of danger, and the heart that cares about the people facing it. With his rich and powerful voice, Higgins offers blessings that evoke new ways of thinking, but also better ways of being by nurturing a new facet of the transformative men’s movement: spiritually grounded, actively engaged in the needs of others, and boundlessly creative. The subjects of the blessings range from inherited conflict, hope amidst despair, oneness with nature, and art and creativity, to peacemaking, elderhood, and more. These blessings do not evoke a traditional triumphant hero’s journey; instead, they are offered in the spirit of a spacious, poetic, life-giving re-imagination not only of how to be a man, but how that manhood interweaves with the incomparably essential identity of how to be human.
Praise for How Not to Be Afraid:
"Higgins points us toward tenderness, empathy, and gentle encounter with each other and with our deepest and most relentless fears." ―Englewood Review of Books, starred review
"In a world in which everything seems to be imploding around us, I don't find it particularly realistic or helpful to be told that I should really be transcending fear. But I totally trust Gareth Higgins when he writes about his own fear and how it's actually possible to transform it into something powerful, something capable of healing us and the world." —Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of Shameless; Accidental Saints; and Pastrix
"Through his brilliance as a storyteller, Gareth Higgins has allowed us simple but deep insights into the possibility of managing the debilitating emotion of fear. By bearing his soul-exhausting experience with fear, he allows us to take our own hero's journey to find our way through." —Dr. James McLeary, former CEO of Inside Circle Foundation and executive producer of the award-winning documentary The Work