Tending the Fire: Ignite Your Heart and Live Life as a Man

By Mike Yarbrough

A Valiant Call to Live Manfully

You and I are brothers in the battle of our age.

We are at war with complacency, abdication of responsibilities, anxiety, and those who ar

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wolf and Iron
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737261513

Book preview

TendingFire.jpg

Title Page

© 2021 by Mike Yarbrough

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

I dedicate this book to my sons and their fire within.

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Part 1: The High Call of Manliness

1. The Problem: A Lack of Manhood

2. Manliness: The Cure for What Ails Us

Part 2: The 5 Principles of Living Manfully

3. Living Deliberately

4. Living Courageously

5. Living Virtuously

6. Living Truthfully

7. Living Spiritually

Conclusion: A Fire Worth Tending

Acknowledgements

Fire Tending Resources

About the Author

Prologue

Thanksgiving Day, 2019: 9:00 a.m.

Nearly every Thanksgiving of my life, and likely yours as well, has been spent with family or friends. Typically, I wake early to cook all of the usuals: turkey, ham, a special stuffing, rolls, and all of the fixings, with the house still filled with the sweet aroma of pies prepared the night before.

Though I like to think of Thanksgiving as a day of feasting, it’s more like a day of preparing followed by an all too brief moment of stuffing ourselves and then watching in sorrow as the leftovers get sent home with the guests. But it’s worth it. Every year.

This Thanksgiving, however, for the first time in my life, I was alone.

My wife Summer and I were two months into a nasty separation. Not feeling welcomed in my own home and not wanting to bring any drama to our friends on a holiday, I decided to drive to the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina—about an hour and a half from my home in Charlotte—to spend the day hiking and in contemplation of how we arrived at this place in our marriage.

Had twenty-three years of hard-fought marriage and raising our boys together really come to this? I wondered. How many more Thanksgivings and holidays will look just like this one?

To be honest, this isn’t how I intended to open this book. When I first sat down to pen this tome, I imagined an introduction of such inspiring eloquence that men across the globe would take hold of the words contained herein and move upon their world like a sort of possessed orchestra—loud and thundering, yet with a beautiful harmony in the midst of it all.

But the truth is, there are a lot of things in my life that haven’t gone as intended. Instead, I’ve brought a bit of my own story and my own fire to these pages—the real stuff. This is where the heart is, and, thus, where my heart is. I’m bringing you in close so that you might catch a genuine flame rather than an impersonal ideal.

There’s a High Calling upon the life of a man. For some, the call is a whisper. For others, it beckons boldly: put the world in order, reject the status quo, live with passion, do what matters, and protect what you love.

The problem is, if we hear this High Call of manliness and yet lack the skills to live it out, we’ll fail ourselves. And when we face disappointments in life, we can begin to feel ashamed and defeated. Over time we become reluctant to swing for the fences.

That’s what I was feeling, that lonely Thanksgiving morning.

9:45 a.m.

On that solitary Thanksgiving morning, halfway to Black Mountain, I called home. The feelings of loneliness and the pain of holidays without my family made me look past the feelings of exasperation and defeat in my marriage. This was a fire tending moment for me.

To call home and let the longings of my heart be known without any certainty as to what would happen next was a challenge for a lone wolf. The truth is, I am a man that needs his family and longs for a community. This means there are desires of my heart that can only be satisfied by someone else. Opening myself up to this truth also meant facing the possibility of rejection. There’s an uncomfortable vulnerability in making our deepest desires known. And that’s exactly what I did.

One way or another, this call was going to be a defining moment.

Fortunately, my wife Summer heard the tenderness in my voice and responded in kind. My marriage wasn’t going to end. In fact, this was the beginning of a new and much happier chapter in our lives.

My friend Stephen Mansfield played a role in saving my marriage. Just a few weeks earlier, Stephen and I had a chance to sit down at a men’s retreat in Black Mountain. I’d read a number of his books (as should you) and interviewed him on my podcast some time before. Though I was intent on talking shop about the state of manhood and book publishing, he drew me out. Before I knew it, the story of my separation was on the table. In his fatherly way, he asked questions and listened to me as I laid it all out.

Despite my obvious feelings of finality to my marriage, he encouraged me: Mike, I don’t believe your marriage is over. I believe there’s still hope.

No one wants to disappoint the hope of a man they admire.

My fire was burning low, and Mansfield’s much-needed hope was a bit of timber from a friend.

Tending the fire of our souls can be like that. As Mansfield writes in his book, Men on Fire, Once an ignition has occurred, protect the fire, feed the fire and tend it as you must so it will engulf your heart. Once you know the principles that ignite your heart, you can help your brothers do the same.

As you may have guessed, I don’t have it all figured out. I’m on the journey toward becoming a better man. I’ve traveled some unsteady roads, made a few good turns over rough terrain, and I’ve found there are certain principles that keep us on the right path. They’re maxims of masculinity that’ll light our fires and help us find our way through the darkness.

In the six years since I started writing this book my life has been filled with unexpected challenges and blessings. I’ve grown a movement for men called Wolf & Iron, wrote a little book about pocketknives, saw my sons graduate high school, launched a successful business with my wife making wedding rings from historic woods, watched my dad take his last breaths, and scattered his ashes on a mountain far from home.

At each twist and turn of life, the principles in this book have guided me. They’ve proven to be a trustworthy foundation upon which to stand.

Friend, if you’re ready to ignite your heart and truly live life as a man, read on.

Introduction

What is to give light must endure burning.

Victor Frankl, Author, Psychiatrist, and Holocaust Survivor

Imagine with me if you will. You are alone, in deep woods, with a great canopy of green and brown overhead. The canopy of trees pushing back all the world and embracing only a single man: you. The sun never beats down here, if there is sun. And while I suppose you could determine whether it were the moon or the sun that illumes the grandeur above and pours out soft and white through the fog onto the forest floor, you would never strain to do so here. You have not come to analyze but to tend, and the forest needs no tending.

You stand in a clearing and your fire is before you—its ashes spread wide within a circle of large stones that mark its boundary. These stones, did you bring them to this place? No, you did not. How could you? See how they disappear into the earth? How deep they must go. They’re beautiful and immovable and in their center burns an earnest flame.

Now, the fire is nothing to brag about, but it’s hardy enough. It’s the type of flame that keeps the chill off most nights, though, you say to yourself, ‘Perhaps not this night.’ It’s early, and already a cool breeze has taken up and seems to have found its home in the ground. Your lower extremities are telling the rest of your body that the cold is coming. You instinctively know you must keep moving and tend your fire.

To your left is a crude but sturdy lean-to that serves as an entryway to a great cave. The scant covering is moss-covered and old, and, while it may be more ornamental than practical, it softens the appearance of the cave. Did you make this lean-to? Yes.

Outside the mouth of the cave, under the lean-to, you have staged the fuel for your fire. Stacks of old, worn, and faceless books, newspapers, and magazines are housed in broken and discarded boxes. There is some wood as well—sticks really—soft and unseasoned. It’s the type of wood that hisses and pops when it burns and wakes you in the night.

You peer into the cave and its darkness overwhelms the flicker of light behind you. Within lies more fuel for your fire. The more intently you stare into the cave the more the outside begins to fade into the dim, and in a moment all you see is black. You have been in the cave many times but never deeply. If the swallowing darkness of the cavern wasn’t enough to keep you from venturing further in, the tales of what lies beyond—recounted to you from boyhood—will and do.

Is it even necessary to venture deep into the cave? Near the entrance, stacks of boxes are filled with more old books and papers. They’re light and easy to carry, and they catch flame quite effortlessly. But, they’re quickly consumed, and on a cold night there’s no rest. Always, you are waking and heaving handfuls and armfuls into that great furnace; tonight, perhaps, boxfuls.

You make your way back to the fire and toss in some old books. They quickly catch and their brief flash of heat rebukes the chill in the air, but they are fast consumed, and the cold comes on again. As you reach for another armful, something in the distance catches your eye. There, through the trees, you see a glimmer and now a glow.

You steady yourself to be sure of what you are seeing and then you realize—it is the fire of another man. How can this be? It seems miles away from you. How could anyone stand a fire so intense? This fool must have thrown all of his books on his fire at once. You sit and watch for a while. His fire grows and fades—appearing so faint that your eyes can no longer focus—and then reappears bright and steady.

But how could someone keep it going for so long with such intensity? Perhaps his cave is nearer to his fire? Perhaps his books are somehow different. Or he can carry more. Or he’s faster than me.

Then a new thought forms.

Perhaps he has found what burns, deep in his cave.

The Fire of