 Let's look at the story of Iron John. This is actually a Grim Fairy tale, so it's really old. And it was made popular by Robert Bly and his book, Iron John. It's a great read. It's a kind of, they call it a mythopoetic type of thing. So it's a fun read. It's got a lot of really good information. Robert Bly does a great job with it. I'm just going to give a snippet of it and kind of something to help us unpack this whole story thing a little bit. So Iron John is the story of a prince in an ancient kingdom with king and the queen and a castle and a big huge kingdom. And adjacent to the castle is this really vast forest. And in the forest is this guy named Iron John. He's the wild man. He is strong, mysterious, and hairy. And the problem is, is that anybody who goes into the forest never comes back. So one day, Iron John, the wild man is captured. And they put him in a cage in the courtyard of the castle. And what happens is, is that the prince is playing, playing with his golden ball. And he's bouncing it around. And somehow, the golden ball bounces into the cage of Iron John. And the prince goes up to the cage. May I have my ball back? Iron John says, only if you release me from the cage. And the boy says, I don't have the key. Where's the key? The key, says Iron John, is under your mother's pillow. The prince is us. He's a boy. But most of us, as we've listened to the stories that have come into us from external places, most of us, we're still boys in our 20s, 30s, 40s, maybe even 50s. We still feel like a boy inside. Because we're still asking for our balls back and wondering where the damn key is. The queen, who has the pillow, she's not even in this snippet except that she's the one that has the pillow. She's all women. The queen represents all women in this whole thing. And she has a lot of power in this story. The wild man, wait, hang on a second. So the women, so the queen, a big part of her narrative is that the wild man is not good. As a matter of fact, the wild man scares the hell out of her. And her narrative is, if you set the wild man free, all hell is going to break loose. She's going to lose her son. He's going to become some kind of tyrant. He's going to hump everything in sight. He's going to end up in a gutter in some nondescript part of town. Scares the hell out of her to think that the wild man would come alive in her son. She would much rather the son just be a boy for the rest of his life. The wild man is our confidence. The wild man is who we are when we are alive. Now there's another thing I was going to say about that. Not coming to me, so that's all right. The mother's pillow. All right, so the mother's pillow is just a distraction. Now here's the thing. It's a pillow. Underneath the pillow's the key. It's just a distraction. It's just something that hides the key. And the key is underneath the mother's pillow. The pillow represents it's a metaphor for women's sexuality. And so it's something that totally distracts us. So imagine that the prince, and he goes back into the castle. He's down the hallway right outside his mother's bedroom. And he goes in, he's all quiet. Goes in, he looks in there. All right, there's the bed, walks on in. There's the pillow. And he sees the pillow. Now what he's looking at is the sexuality of women. And he sees the form. He sees the shape. He sees the beauty. He sees the allure. This is what I've been looking for all my life. She can complete me. She can fulfill me. She can make me whole. She can tell me who I am. And all of a sudden, he totally and absolutely forgets about his mission to get the key to set the wild man free. And this is what we do. This is actually what I think that a, what's it called, the midlife crisis. A midlife crisis is all of a sudden a guy has been distracted with the pillow and women's sexuality, which is a super shiny object that's distracted me. And I lost my mission. My mission was to grab the key and set the wild man free. But I spent 20 years of my life over here with the pillow, which distracted me from my mission to get the key. And I'm, oh, the pillow, right? That's what we do. And we wake up 20 years later going, where the hell am I? So imagine the prince 20 years later standing in his mother's bedroom. What am I here for? I was here for a reason. Oh yeah, my mission. I was gonna grab the key and set the wild man free. So then he goes on over to the pillow. Oh, no, I can't do that again. So he grabs the key and takes off and goes down to the courtyard. And he sees the cage. The cage are the lies that keep us in bondage. The cage that holds the wild man the lies of all those stories that are not true about who you are and about what men are and about what manhood is. That's what keeps us in bondage. And if we believe it, that's what happens. We're in bondage. We are not free. So here's the whole thing. So if the wild man really is set free, is all hell gonna break loose? Of course. But the prince, you will be free. You will be alive. You will live with vigor and vitality. And one of my favorite words, thumos. You will be alive. So the narrative is if the wild man set free, everything's gonna be horrible. But the truth is everything's gonna be awesome.