I WANT POWERFUL MEN AROUND ME

I want powerful men around me.

Who find true power in the radical affirmation of their humanness.

Unafraid to embody their endless capacity to love. Knowing their limits by experience.

Power of the coming world.

Not a power-over to rule and control. But a roaring longing to serve the One Life on this planet.

Heroic in their willingness to be part of the world, to rely on others, to witness their brokenness and see the dark places within them.

With nothing to prove, no well-being to pretend, no functioning to perform.

Calm, decisive, clear. A reassuring look, while being taken by Life. Power.

I want men around me whose pounding fear brings them to their knees - and who are doing it anyways.

Whose rage over idle neglect and planetary destruction rips open the matrix. Men who fuck things up and take full, passionate responsibility.

Who know they will get aroused by going to shameful places.

Whose dcks, clts, npples get erect when they encounter truth.

Who offer spaces of relaxation and nourishment to each other. Who embrace competition as a path to mutual growth, not as an extinction race.

I want you around me, all of you: ball-bearers, pussy-gazers, menstruators. Musk-fetishists, satyrs, pans and potheads. Sweating devotees of Eros.

Whose desire can move mountains inside them. Whose mysticism consists in the full affirmation of reality. Who don't need an afterlife or other distractions to make sense of all this.

I want common men around me, regular guys: like pregnant trans men, like barbershop owners, like hulks and sissy boys, like tech nerds and craftsmen. Vikings and violinists.

Unapologetically unspectacular men. Fathers, repairers, caretakers. Builders, healers, dancers and crafters.

Earth-diggers with their noses covered in soil.

In awe by the feminine within and around them.

Unthreatened by queerness in others and themselves.

I know such men.

And I am nothing without them.

I am crazy in love with you, brothers.

I want you close and I want to learn how to trust you.

I want you to trust me.

Drop the masks. Leave the backrooms of false power. Leave the comfort of subcultural identity prisons. Come to the moss, the lightning, the waterfall instead.

This love can melt the system.

A GOD IS A COLLECTIVE DREAM

As a perpetually horny 16-year-old, I went to Vienna once. First time travelling without my family, visiting a friend who started to study acting there and who got me a standing row ticket for the Ancient Greek tragedy „The Bacchae“ by Euripides at the famous Burgtheater. A play about what happens when the great god of wine and transformation, Dionysos, is not treated with due respect: Furious women take to the forests, lead by the entrancing presence of the god. Of course it was a hormonally activating, lush summer night full of promises and of course I checked out the infamous public toilets in front of the theater before and after the show, taking some deep, anxious breaths of sexual freedom – just by imagining that there could, potentially, be something going on there. But the real epiphany happened inside the theatre.

When I left the show, I had no idea what I had actually witnessed. My cheap spot was too far from the stage to see anyone’s face and I also didn’t really get all of the text, content-wise, but, boy, did I feel …it. Something seemed to pull me right from within my guts, trying to pull me further, further into this electrified summer night. An insane longing had been born, „the Pull of the Soul“ (Seelenziehen) I used to call it. It told me what I had already known: There must be more to life, so much more than I had known so far. It didn’t wait for me in the afterlife but right here, in this tragic, ridiculous, riveting human experience! The enigmatic god in his calm state of ecstasy had lured me onto his path, leading into my inner wilderness.

„There must be more to life“, this is what this „Pull of the Soul“ has been telling me ever since, whenever my surroundings and my inner world had become too dull to bear, too stuck, too sticky, my guts would ache like this. For example when only a handful of the theatre shows I produced in the following 20 years could live up to this initial pull, the wish to rip the fabric of consensus reality apart and unveil the most unspeakable truths in clear light of day. The wish to see people leave my shows with a similar sensation, a sense of remembrance of how alive one could be. Sometimes I could see it in people’s eyes or in my own eyes, when I looked into the mirror after a show. But, yeah, there is so much more to life – and so much more to myth than what „the classics“ could encompass and what most stages can endure. This is why I am now taking myths to other spaces, curious to see what happens when I make use of myth.

The liberating thing about myth, tale and tragedy is that the greatness they are telling about is not transcendental, from another world, but more „of this world“ than anything else. Each godx, hero, mythical figure stands for another archetypal quality of human existence. And each of them is living it without restraint. A mirror cabinet of radical humanness that not only helps us to „know ourselves“ by finding ourselves in all these stretched, compressed, distorted shapes but that also invites us into full embodiment, full incarnation, into full immersion with matter – and in this way, it shows a path to becoming an immortal, too.

How would that be possible? Don’t we have to abandon all things worldly and material, detach from this reality in order to become liberated? I don’t think so. This only ever ends up in spiritual egos (who of course claim to have killed their egos) and their lofty judgement of the poor, lowly mortals. Damnit! We are here because our souls chose this insane experience, to taste the suffering, the joy, the defeat and the glory, all of it, and to find consciousness right there. Most of us never fully incarnated to begin with. How we are supposed to transcend this life then?

The gods are showing it: Liberation through full Incarnation. Coming fully into being. Into matter. That’s where immortality awaits. Because we are already endless. Once we manage to find and welcome every god, every archetype, every microbe within us, we are ready to adopt the One Life that beats inside every being as our actual essence.

By embracing every facet of it, we become the world.

We become wind godxs, thunder godxs, earth godxs – the force of the elements is not separate from us. We become nymphs and satyrs – guardians of trees and springs. Instead of anxiously trying to get the hell out of this supposed prison, we birth ourselves even more deeply, back into Earth.

The pull of the soul in my guts knows it: the mythological self is ancient and it’s still alive within our cells. And it still remembers the times when Nature was Us.

There are currently two offerings from this body of work that I warmly invite you to:

One is my weekly online event HANG WITH THE GODxS! where we meet one Godx from the indo-european traditions each Sunday, an experiential space with storytelling, embodied journeys, sharing circles to help us make use of the myth. I will be resumed on April 17th.

The other offering, and one that I am really excited about, is starting in July, it’s called BROTHERHOOD OF GODS. An archetypal journey specifically for men, to connect to our inner power, guided by 7 Gods from different traditions and the wisdom of a circle of brothers. Starting online and culminating in an in-person retreat in wild nature at the end of August.

For more information on both, write me via daniellovepower@gmail.com

GROWTH IS NOT SOMETHING YOU DO

GROWTH IS NOT SOMETHING YOU DO.

IT SIMPLY HAPPENS

WHILE YOU SLOWLY, STEADILY

SHED YOUR LEAVES,

WHILE YOU SILENTLY

GIVE AND RECEIVE,

WITHOUT EVER ASKING WHY.

Personal growth is a beautiful thing. There is movement, development, surprise. Unfoldment. But what exactly do we mean when we say we want to grow? No matter how conscious we deem ourselves to be, the kind of growth that is deeply embedded in our minds often still is the exhausting concept of growth that our economic system is based upon:

A kind of growth that may never stop, may never get tired, that's only ever allowed to go one way: forward. To colonize new territory, to achieve, be victorious, to build spaceships, but quickly. A kind of growth that so desperately tries to escape the laws of gravity that it doesn't know about soil anymore, that it doesn't care about the magical way the passing of time and slimy processes of decay make nutrients - enabling the growth of plants in the first place.

When our quest for self-realization turns into a race, a competition, a quest for more and more power, we are trapped in a capitalist hamster wheel, no matter how many crystals we buy to decorate it. 🐹

Looking at the way our ancestors, the trees approach the idea of growth might teach us something. Steady, persistent, interconnected, focused on mutual care, resting in the trust that life will take care of itself (as well as ourselves) if we simply get out of the way with our beautiful plans and ambitions. If we are ready to even fall with the next storm and transform into nutrients for future iterations of Forest.

Realizing in the end that we might be nothing but Forest anyways, the living embodiment of the perpetual growth we were so eagerly striving for. 🌱