Description

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This is a collection of twenty-one letters written to a young man from an older man. The topics cover a wide range of essential inquiries, from becoming emotionally fluent to enhancing creativity, exploring sexuality and love, learning to embrace the beauty of solitude and the sweetness of friendship. The intent is to stimulate reflection, increase awareness and authenticity, and perhaps pass on some pearls of wisdom about creating a meaningful, marvelous life. Life continually asks you to let go grieving, forgiving, and being comfortable with feeling stuck. And it also requests that you bring forthintending, creating, and being a force for good in the world. Believe in the person you want to become, the deep currents of your own life that you are stalking.

About the Author

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Born in Brooklyn. Not powerful enough to prevent the wounds of parental divorce at an early age. Nourished in the embrace of a large Sicilian extended family. Saved by a rambling neighborhood park & street life: freedom found! Played guitar in rock bands to pay for college. In medical school just after his twentieth birthday, witnessed his moms death and many others while becoming Board Certified in Pediatrics. Years in the challenging trenches of violence prevention, the wonder and liberation of mens work, and the disciplined joys of martial arts. Keynote speaker in every state and overseas. Approaching seventy: still fit, curious, and creatively exploring his Muse, enjoying forays on horseback and sleeping under the stars.Victor La Cerva MD actively worked on violence prevention and wellness issues for more than twenty-five years. He is retired from his position as Medical Director of the Family Health Bureau, NM Department of Health, and holds an Emeritus clinical faculty appointment with the Department of Pediatrics at UNM Medical School. In 1984, he co-created the NM Men's Wellness movement, exploring the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs of men in our society. There are seven major organized events every year as this work moves into its 33rd year. In 1989 he organized four statewide workshops on violence with the NM Public Health Association.Let Peace Begin With Us was released in 1990, updated in 1993, 1996, and 2002, highlighting levels of homicide, suicide, child & elder abuse, domestic violence and sexual assault on a county by county basis. The documents also included general information about violence as a preventable public health problem, programs that are making a difference, and specific recommendations for action. A similar document on children's mental health issues, Listen to our Children, was released in January 1998. He continued to build the movement as the NM co-chair for the 1994, 1996 & 2000 Silent Marches on gun violence, and the establishment of the New Mexico Not Even One Team: Not one gun death in any young person is acceptable. He was interviewed by Bill Moyers, in the 1996 PBS series on preventing violence, broadcast nationally, and consulted with the community after the Columbine school shootings. In 2008 he started Direct Village Compassion, a non-profit organization bringing resources directly to clinics and the main children's hospital in Eritrea. Victor cares deeply about social justice and preventing violence, and believes that solutions are found by strengthening what is already good within ourselves, our families, our communities and our culture. He is co-creator of two award winning videos, Man to Man (Emmy 1997) addressing issues of young men, and Stolen Childhood (Telly & Visions Awards 2001), which explores the adverse impact on children of exposure to domestic violence. Masculine Wisdom was released in 2013. Drawing on various worldwide cultural and spiritual traditions, this book and forty-card set is designed to help men and women embrace a healthier vision of what it means to be masculine in the modern world. Victor holds the rank of sandan in Aikido, a Japanese martial art that accepts and redirects aggressive energy, so that neither the defender nor attacker is injured. This practice, combined with Buddhist explorations and Native American teachers, forms the core of a humanistic spiritual path. He has provided trainings internationally and in every state. Letters to A Young Man In Search of Himself will arrive in 2018, and Hazelden will publish Cornerstones: Meditations For The Journey Into Manhood and Recovery in summer 2018. Both books evolved from his years of interacting with young men.

Praise For…

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A guidebook for young men, delivered in the form of lessons from an older man. La Cerva s (Worldwords: Global Reflections to Awaken the Spirit, 2000, etc.) prettily designed nonfiction work follows in the very long tradition of the enchiridion, a handbook of life advice along the lines of works made famous by Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. In such books, an older adviser gives advice and imparts wisdom to presumably younger readers, usually in the form of aphorisms or quick anecdotes. La Cerva organizes his own example around large conceptual groupings like Being a Man, Parents, and Demystifying Emotions. His short, accessible chapters address emotions like anger, fear, and sadness, and they attempt to untangle and simplify complicated subjects like sexuality, love, and fatherhood. The author surveys a wide spectrum of challenges faced by young men in the 21st century, and although he assures his audience that their real journey is interior, his chapters are nevertheless full of pragmatic advice on how to conduct oneself at work, at play, in relationships, and in a family. This advice can often be refreshingly counterintuitive; e.g., the author instructs his young readers that they need not always avoid arguments: Greet those clashing, challenging moments of disagreement with the larger conscious perspective that they can be compost that nourishes the garden of your connection, he writes. He is likewise direct on the crucial subject of habits not only inculcating good ones but being constantly aware of bad ones; cease clinging to the fixed points of your perspectives and behaviors, he admonishes, laying down a hard line, for instance, on addictions of any kind. The tone of all this is bracingly, invitingly optimistic. La Cerva wisely avoids lecturing, opting instead for a stern but empowering voice throughout. One of the inherent strengths of this kind of book comes about as a result of adopting exactly this mentoring tone, and La Cerva does it to near perfection, always being positive with his readers but never coddling them. He urges readers to acknowledge frankly their own biases and weaknesses as a first step to countering them and dealing with them, starting with the biggest of these, fear itself. Fear is always a guest in the living room of your emotions, and you have the power to ask it to quiet down or leave, he writes. But first and foremost you must acknowledge its presence! Such lines are typical of La Cerva s prose, which is energetic and evocative, clearly designed to stick in the memory. Don t surrender, he writes in one such passage, your vivacious style to the dungeons of mediocrity by being a slave to convention. Young male readers might feel slightly shamed by the author s blunt assessments of their potential shortcomings, but they'll never be discouraged by the advice laid out in these pages and they might gain some great guidance in the process. A wisdom-packed modern masculinity handbook that fits easily in the pocket. --Kirkus Reviews

I have rarely met a man so generative, so caring, and so consistent in his love and service of men, as Victor La Cerva. It is clearly a vocation, which he has responded to very beautifully. I know this personally and professionally and by observing it at close range here in New Mexico. --Fr. Richard Rohr O.F.M. Center for Action and Contemplation

Wise and thoughtful advice. --Jack Kornfield. Author, A Path With Heart.