Magus Dads

Hey all you dads, hope your Father's Day was awesome. I got to speak to most of my kiddos, and to my own Dad, and that was pretty great. We had "good speaks" as Harper likes to say. Connected, joyful, in-jokes, self-deprecation, the occasional ayyyyyyy, and terrible puns. It was awesome. I can die tomorrow and trust I did my part to make the world better JUST by having the kiddos I have.

But today I'm thinking about another thing.

Dads have a power we don't like to own, because it's scary as shit:

Every dad is a Magus... to their kids.

Every word we speak is a seed, and it falls on the most fertile of soils, and it stays with them for the rest of their lives. I hear my dad when I work on a car, or go fishing, or every time I screw up in life's projects because I forgot to ask, "What do I do before I do this?" But I also hear him telling me how proud he is when I do well, even if he doesn't even know what I'm up to. I got lucky like that.

I've talked to people a lot over the years about how they view the idea of "God" as a divinity, and as I've gotten to know them, I've learned that every one of them have an understanding of "God" that aligns 99.999% with their understanding of their fathers, in real life.

We shape reality with everything we do, as dads. We make the next wave of feminism with our choices with our daughters. We shape the politics of our nation by example. We lay out the framework of the next generation's experience of the Patriarchal Archetype of Divinity, just by playing shitty guitar to them when they're falling asleep, fighting the system for them when they're being wronged, believing them, listening, and loving them because they are awesome.

So dads, and father figures of any type, don't forget to be cool.

It matters.