Good Friday morning,
I’m up early writing today’s scrapbook-of-my-life post.
And for the last hour I’ve been staring at a blank line.
Not because I have nothing to write about —
but because I have too much.
Too many threads, none of them obviously connected.
Whenever life feels random, I remind myself:
It’s never random.
The thread is always there —
it just hasn’t revealed itself yet.
So when things feel murky, I don’t force clarity anymore.
I just write whatever is coming up, even if it makes no sense.
Later, it always does.
And the thing coming up today?
Northern Courage.
This old ancestral idea from England and Northern Europe.
The kind Tolkien breathed into the Riders of Rohan.
That moment at the Pelennor Fields where Théoden’s men look down at an impossible sea of orcs and know — with absolute clarity —
“We cannot win.”
And yet…
They ride.
Not out of stupidity.
Not out of self-destruction.
Not out of blind heroic nonsense.
But out of meaning.
This worldview that says:
There are things worth dying for.
And there are fates worse than death.
This is masculine transcendence.
Not bravado. Not chest-pounding.
A clear-eyed recognition of the cost —
and the willingness to give everything anyway.
A man becomes larger than his life by the way he meets his death.
It’s the same thing I teach inside the Sacred Rebel Masculine:
Death is coming.
So live in a way that makes it irrelevant.
And then… the contrast.
Remember Upham, the trembling translator from Saving Private Ryan?
He argues for “mercy” when they capture a German soldier at the windmill.
Not out of wisdom.
Not out of soul-depth.
But out of idealism.
Out of fear of getting blood on his hands.
Out of the desire to be moral rather than to do what reality required.
And later…
that same man returns and murders one of Upham’s companions.
While Upham freezes on the stairs, sobbing, unable to move.
That scene hits me viscerally every time.
Because that freeze —
that paralysis —
is every man’s nightmare:
“When the moment comes… will I act?
Or will I fold?”
This is encoded in us.
Ancestral.
Archetypal.
10,000 years of protector instinct waking up in the spine.
But here’s the part people forget:
Upham finds his courage.
His naïve mercy shatters.
His innocence burns away.
He awakens.
He steps forward.
He confronts the very man he spared.
He acts — calmly, clearly, not in rage, not in collapse.
This is the masculine initiation arc:
Innocence → Collapse → Awakening → Responsibility.
The same arc as Théoden’s ride:
“You will likely die.
But if you do not ride, you are dead already.”
Masculine courage isn’t the absence of fear —
it’s movement through fear.
Action despite fear.
Clarity in the teeth of fear.
**And now… the part that actually matters to me today.
The personal part.**
I’ve been wrestling with my own anger lately.
The protector in me.
The father in me.
In today’s world, it’s not “acceptable” to feel violent toward someone who hurts your daughter —
but that instinct is ancient and holy.
It’s not weakness.
It’s not immaturity.
It’s the Protector realizing he wasn’t there in time.
It’s love with nowhere to go.
And inside this emotional terrain I realized something:
Upham’s early mercy is NOT real mercy.
It’s fear wearing a halo.
False mercy is the desire to avoid conflict
while looking virtuous.
True mercy is something very different.
Because Frodo also spares a dangerous creature — Gollum —
but his mercy is cut from another cloth entirely.
Frodo knows Gollum might betray him.
He knows it may cost him everything.
He knows danger intimately —
he carries the Ring.
His mercy is not naive.
It is chosen.
True mercy comes from power, wisdom, and soul-depth.
False mercy comes from fear and innocence.
False mercy is self-protection.
True mercy is self-transcendence.
False mercy collapses.
True mercy bears the weight of consequences.
This is why the heart of a father breaks so violently:
because the question isn’t vengeance —
the real question is:
“Will I harden my heart?
Or deepen it?”
And this is where all the threads come together:
Northern Courage.
Upham's collapse.
Frodo’s mercy.
The father-protector’s rage.
The masculine initiation arc.
It’s the same truth expressed from different angles:
A man transcends himself in the moment he chooses courage over collapse —
and wisdom over fear.
Some things are worth dying for.
Some things are worth forgiving for.
And knowing which is which…
that’s the real initiation.
