Durag Dangerous

I thought my solitude was soul-building until I met the dude in the durag.

“The longer a man stays without a relationship, the more dangerous he becomes.”

Well, that got my attention.

Some backstory: After the death of Karen, my loneliness was all-consuming. Six months after her passing, and three years ago to this day, the ghost of Carlos Castaneda released me from my crippling need for human connection.

In May 2023, I was in my Tennessee cabin reading Don Juan’s admonition from Castaneda’s Tales of Power:

“You must cultivate the feeling that a warrior needs nothing. You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life… What matters to a warrior is arriving at the totality of oneself.” ~ Carlos Castaneda

“Wow,” I thought. “Can I live in my totality?”

Anthony de Mello, a 20th-century Indian Catholic mystic, kicked my pathetic loneliness into a higher orbit:

“When your illusions drop, you’re in touch with reality at last [where] you will never be lonely again. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.” ~ Anthony de Mello

I bowed to the present moment and let a warrior power enter. Instead of Bruce, I became Brujo.

Suddenly, I had the power. My friend Sherrill wrote to me: “Brujo, is WOW!”

As a writer, I live life through the lens of metaphor.

The image of a figure skater pulling her arms inward like a tornado came to me — spinning ever faster as she pulled her energy toward the center. The term in physics is the conservation of angular momentum. As the skater pulls in her arms, the total energy of her rotating system is conserved; it’s not thrown away. The energy moves toward her center, increasing her rotational speed.

In my manic need for intimacy, I saw how I had been giving my energy away.

Living from one’s center is a place of ultimate loneliness — but also the source of ultimate power.

So, now, three years later, that centripetal power has bestowed an unshakeable, purposeful core. In short order, I’ve written a book, developed an online course, managed the campaigns of four candidates, staged countless dinner parties, 3 seders, 2 Solstice weekends, written a Substack, and hosted three Jungian salons.

Sounds manic, but my philosophic mentor, J.G. Bennett, helped me turn my loneliness into power by bridging sex and creativity:

“The energy behind sexual activity is the creative energy. This is beyond life and even beyond consciousness. It is in the nature of the creative energy, and therefore of sex, to be spontaneous and unpredictable.” ~ J.G. Bennett

And that’s been my trick. I substitute my lack of an intimate partner with creative mania. I’m pecking away on this article right now, after midnight. You’re thinking, “Bruce, you gotta get out of the house, blah, blah.” It’s not so simple.

Does God work through the algorithm?

I’m a prolific scroller (what are you supposed to do in an empty bed?) As I scrolled through Facebook the other night, a pensive black dude wearing a Kente-inspired durag (headscarf) forced me to rethink my citadel of peace. The video was titled:

“6 uncomfortable truths about men who stay single for too long.”

Woah!

The Durag Dude did not say a word. He looked at the camera and reacted to each word with a “been-there” glance:

“A man who has been alone for too long doesn't become weaker; he becomes harder to reach.

”Not physically dangerous, not violent, but emotionally, mentally, and relationally, he becomes a completely different kind of man.

“He learns he doesn't actually need anyone. At first.

”Loneliness teaches a man what he's missing. But after enough time passes, something else happens.

”He adapts. He builds routines.

”He handles his problems alone. He eats alone, travels alone, sleeps alone, celebrates alone, and survives alone.

”Eventually, the emotional dependency that relationships often create disappears. What once felt like a need slowly becomes optional.

”And once a man reaches that level of independence, inviting someone into his life no longer feels necessary. It feels like a disruption.”

As you can imagine, Brujo Bruce was thrown off center…

Especially the line: “He learns he doesn’t actually need anyone.”

And then the kicker: “At first.”

“He stops chasing noise and starts protecting peace."

“Once a man learns how to live happily without a relationship, the only person who will ever keep him is the one who adds more peace to his life than solitude ever did.”

What’s so bad about protecting one’s peace?

The algorithm was working overtime. I woke up this morning, reached for my first shot of social media, and found another message warning me off my citadel of peace.

From Pema Chodron in Sun Magazine:

“There's a joke about bodhisattvas, who are a kind of spiritual warrior in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition: The biggest problem for bodhisattvas is that they don't have much to work with anymore, because fewer and fewer things trigger their negative emotions. It's humorous because this is everyone else's dream come true, but it's a big problem for bodhisattvas. I'm not saying that I'm at that level, but I do know from personal experience that life can become smoother.

”I once asked a spiritual teacher what happens as your life gets smoother, and he said you have to up the ante and go into more and more difficult situations.

What’s a bodhisattva to do?

Pema continues:

“You have the capacity to go into the hell realms of the world and help the people there because you're less triggered by how awful things are. As your own life gets smoother, you can move closer to people who are in severe mental or physical anguish, because you no longer have any fear of it, and therefore, you can be of some help.

A bodhisattva is someone becoming a Buddha. I know this because a few days after Karen died, I was in the Advance Auto Parts parking lot, holding an umbrella in pouring rain over the battery installer when the phone rang. Ignoring the guy’s plight, reached into my pocket

It was Suzy, my longtime friend, versed in all things quantum.

“Suzy! You can’t believe the scene,” I said. “I’m sopping wet, holding a black umbrella over a battery installer. It feels like Bergman, Woody Allen – maybe Hitchcock, ‘cause the cables are sparking and the guy may die. What’s going on?”

“I talked to Shelley, the medical intuitive, today,” Suzy reported.

“Wow, I said. “It was just three weeks ago when we reached out to her.”

“I told Shelley about Karen,” Suzy continued. “Shelley remembered you and tuned in. Where Karen is… she used the word, like a Buddha.”

I’ll accept that Karen became a Buddha, but now I’m watching the durag guy. I’m not clear if he’s warning me of danger or high-fiving my aspiring Buddhahood. His last line seems equivocal:

And the truth is, once a man learns how to live happily without a relationship, the only person who will ever keep him is the one who adds more peace to his life than solitude ever did.

That puts the onus on the woman, so not buying that either.

The dangers of solitude come down to Carl Jung’s understanding of the shadow.

The shadow represents the unlived life, buried bits, and unprocessed suffering we carry in the unconscious. Jung warned that “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” In other words, true awakening is not emotional anesthesia. It is conscious integration.

Life operates like a transformational sump pump: — push/pull/push/pull — one moment pushing discomfort away and the next, pulling up shadowy bits to be recognized. The push/pull of the transformation engine explains how last year’s stoicism becomes this year’s cop-out.

The Uplift Engine in action.

As a result, it’s hard to know when you’re bypassing grief versus processing grief. To quote Grace Slick: “One pill makes you larger. And one pill makes you small.”

Vivi Eagle, a psychotherapist, posted to one of my FB groups:

“I think real healing happens when the soul stops fighting its own humanity. There is something profoundly sacred about remaining emotionally alive in a world that constantly teaches people to disconnect from themselves.” ~ Vivi Eagle

Boom. This is a tall order once you’ve found your citadel of peace.

Side note: This is not just a male issue.

A friend of mine put it bluntly, “If anything happened to [her husband] Charlie, I would never ever dream of getting remarried.”

In 3+ years of high circulation, I have encountered just one woman in my age bracket who was in the market for a male partner. Absent a biological imperative, it’s protective nature to pull up the drawbridge to your citadel of peace.

Woody Allen, the paragon of toxic masculinity (and my film hero for way too long to ignore his genius), understood the primal fear men have of getting swallowed into a woman’s emotional vortex.

At one end of the primal fear was ditzy Diane Keaton in Annie Hall:

And the other extreme was Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine:

Consider the line “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

The original words are:

“Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, / Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.”¹

Fifty years ago, my Sufi teacher, Reshad Feild, and I staged a presentation with this phrase. I remember Reshad reciting the passage vividly:

The moment we say “I love,” we bring into play a force that has its own job to do in the universe, regardless of ours.

And it is lucky if we do not get hurt in the process. This force of which I speak is the greatest force there is.

It comes to help us if we understand it, but it may burn us if we fail to recognize it [talking to you, Alex Baldwin].

Reshad was speaking about a man’s inability to recognize women. It’s a long piece, but he continued:

Do you remember the old saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?”

A woman scorned is a woman who is not recognized for what she is. And sooner or later, the frustration and suppressed anger within her is liable to blow, to burst out shouting, look.

”Look at me, you idiots. For God's sake, look. I can give you everything. Yet you will not see me, you will not recognize me.”

I’m a bit old-fashioned when it comes to love, sex, and courting women. The crazy-making explains why Durag and I are hunkered behind the drawbridge.

In one of my two ill-fated attempts at lowering the bridge post-Karen, my almost-girlfriend dragged me to Cidnee, a tarot reader who shuffled the deck and told me straight up:

“The world is changing; you don’t have to follow the old ways of doing, being, and relating. I’m not going to say ‘lighten up,’ but don’t be afraid to expand your horizons, particularly how you relate to other people.”

I’ve taken Cidnee’s advice to heart, but I’m going to start with my soul brothers. Have a wonderful holiday weekend, and thanks for reading. Bruce

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1. The phrase is often mistakenly attributed to William Shakespeare or the Bible. It is actually an adaptation of a line from the 1697 play The Mourning Bride