Nearly ten years ago, my wife, Becca, and I drove up to Maine Primitive for a survival course. I thought I knew what I was signing up for. A Marine-turned-survival-instructor in rural Maine. I was expecting hardcore. Toughness. Grit.
What I experienced was something completely different. I experienced a kindness and compassion from Michael Douglas that helped change how I see strength, especially in men. From that point forward, I started seeing different ways that men can show up in the world.
Last December, I reached out to Mike and asked if I could come up once a week just to volunteer. Do grunt work around campus. Whatever he needed. He said yes.
What started with me hauling firewood turned into something neither of us planned. Mike started learning about my work in strategy and business planning. I started helping him get clearer on where to focus his time and energy with Maine Primitive. Meanwhile, he started mentoring me. I took classes in bow making, earth living, and tracking. I spent hours in the woods learning to pay attention in ways I never had before.
Over the course of a year, we built something rare. He’s part mentor to me. I’m part mentor to him. And we’ve become close friends. The kind of friendship where you can say “I love you” at the end of a conversation and mean it without flinching.
This past December, we sat by a fire at Maine Primitive the day after a big snowstorm. Everything was still blanketed in white. The boughs were laden with what Mike called “pre-holiday ornaments of beautiful, fluffy white clouds.” And we talked about love, fear, nature, survival, and what it takes to choose love when anger would be easier.
Watching the Woods Disappear
Mike grew up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. One of the first wildlife refuges in the nation. As a kid, he had what felt like an endless expanse of cedar swamps, scrub oak, and pitch pine. Then development came.
He watched the dirt road where his best friend’s parents used to walk hand in hand get paved. When that happened, the walking stopped. More houses came. People stopped waving to each other in their cars. Neighbors stopped knowing who lived next door. The community became, in his words, “more of a municipality than a community.”
That loss made Mike angry. He joined the Marine Corps to push deeper into his passion for wilderness survival. He volunteered for every survival school he could get into. But each one taught the same thing: how to get rescued, how to get back home.
Mike didn’t want to get back home. He wanted the woods to be home.
Eventually, he moved to Maine because there were more trees than people. But the anger stayed with him for years. He carried it. He let it define him. Until he noticed something.
“At some point you look back at that wake, and you’ve burnt more bridges than you’ve built, and people are just sick of hearing you complain all the time. You finally notice that even you are getting tired of being alone and miserable.”
You Choose Love
This is where the conversation shifted to the core of everything Heart-Strong is about. Mike described the moment when fear stops being the driver.
“Obviously, no one’s gonna listen to what I have to say. I guess I have to roll up my sleeves and do something about it. What can I do in my limited life on this planet, in my neighborhood to cultivate a little healthy spot and with my own medicine, my own gifts, my own talent and perspective? And that’s when the shift from angry adolescent into young adulthood starts to take place, and it’s a powerful shift. And what is the catalyst of that shift from fear? You choose love.”
You choose love. Not love finds you. Not love happens to you. You choose it. After the anger. After the grief. After the bridges burned. You look at what’s left and you decide to build from love instead of fear.
And then Mike said something I’ve been thinking about ever since.
“So that dichotomy is false. It’s a dance, it’s a relationship. You cannot have one without the other.”
This is something I keep circling back to in this adventure. Love and fear aren’t enemies. They’re dancing partners. Fear alerts. Love responds. The problem isn’t that fear exists. The problem is when fear takes the lead and never lets go.
The Price of Admission
Mike talked about his new role as a grandfather. The sweetness of being a wisdom keeper, tempered by the recognition that his tank has more space than fuel. He’s watched his grandparents go over the falls. Then his parents. Now it’s his turn.
And yet, instead of retreating into fear about that, he said this:
“Bad things are coming. I don’t need to look for them. I don’t wanna find them, but they’re gonna come, and when they do, I look for the gift in them. Because that’s the price of admission.”
That’s not toxic positivity. That’s not pretending pain doesn’t exist. That’s a man who has been through enough to know that suffering and growth are woven together. And he’s choosing to orient toward the growth.
Attitude Comes First
If you’ve ever taken a survival class, you know the fundamentals: shelter, water, fire, food. Mike always adds one that comes before all of them. Attitude.
Your attitude determines how you approach everything else. And in Mike’s framing, that’s where love and fear do their most important work. A fear-based attitude says, “I need to suffer through this until I get rescued.” A love-based attitude says, “How do I make the best of this situation?”
He takes this into his classes at Maine Primitive. When students build shelters, the standard isn’t just surviving the night. The standard is more comfortable than your bed at home.
“Now we’re not building a survival shelter. We’re building a fort, and we’re kids and it’s gonna be cool.”
Suddenly it’s play. And in that play, fear and love start working together. The fun gets you going. The cold keeps you honest. Both voices are real. And in holding both, something powerful happens.
“Congratulations. You’ve just been repowered with your birthright choice. Also known as sovereignty, also known as empowerment, or resilience or reliance.”
Being Vulnerable Isn’t for the Weak
I asked Mike about the shift from his angry younger self to the man I know now. The one who leads with kindness. The one who helped change my understanding of what masculine strength looks like.
“Being vulnerable isn’t for the weak. You have to be strong enough to be vulnerable.”
He talked about how many men in the modern Western world stay stuck in adolescence well into their fifties. The us-versus-them thinking. The need to conquer before being conquered. At some point, he said, you realize the rest of the world is your home. And creating an enemy out of it is exhausting and counterproductive.
“When you put that down and you pick up love, even though you know it’s going to go its own way, like there’s a peak of fruition and then things die back. It’s part of the cycle. When you can accept that rhythm and you become part of it, you do more good.”
He also named something about men and emotional scars that hit close to home. Men take pride in physical scars. We show them off. But we don’t even acknowledge our emotional scars to ourselves. And that silence is taking a toll. Men in the US are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Young men, five times more likely than young women.
Mike’s response to this wasn’t clinical. It was human.
“Strong good men are born of strong good women. And if you don’t have that powerful matriarch in your family, your neighborhood who stands up for and holds you accountable at the same time, then how do you know how to be a good man?”
Aboriginal Television
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Mike said something about fire that I don’t think I’ll forget.
“Aboriginal television. One channel. Infinite stories, no commercials, and everybody taps into this ancestral spirit around the fire. They can’t help but feel connected to something deeper than self. Life feels at once sacred and so insignificant in the vastness of the space.”
That’s why these conversations happen around fire. Not because it looks good on camera. Because something happens when you sit in the glow that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Defenses come down. Stories rise up. And the things that matter most find their way into the open.
Tending Your Sacred Fire
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Mike what fires we need to tend in ourselves and in the world. His answer started where I’ve been learning all great answers start. With self.
“Tending your sacred fire starts with self. You can’t spread ease if you carry dis-ease in your heart about who you are. It shouldn’t drive you. The dis-ease should fuel your love for self first.”
And then he drew a distinction that I think matters more than anything else in this conversation.
“If you have dis-ease and it drives you to make other people happy, you’re spreading disease. If you have dis-ease and it gets you off the couch and you look at the landscape and address the needs of the people around you, your loved ones, your community, starting with self...”
He went on to paint a picture of what that looks like in practice. It’s raking your elderly neighbor’s lawn. It’s checking in on someone. It’s letting energy move through systems of care instead of systems of transaction.
“Once you become part of that energetic system exchange, it flows through you too. And that, I mean, there’s bounty in that. It’s an untapped resource.”
The Child Warrior and the Adult Warrior
Mike ended our conversation with a distinction I keep coming back to.
“That’s the realm of the adult warrior. A child warrior thrashes against an imaginary or an actual enemy, an other. The adult warrior recognizes the battles within and its unconditional love for self, for family, for ecos. Our home.”
A child warrior fights the world. An adult warrior tends it.
A child warrior says, “This is me and this is how it’s gonna be.” An adult warrior says, “Oh, that’s where you’re at. Okay, let me get there with you and then let’s find some common ground and then let’s hash some things out and grow together.”
That shift, from fighting against to growing with, is something I see in Mike every time I’m at Maine Primitive. It’s in how he teaches. It’s in how he meets people at their edge instead of demanding they meet him at his. It’s in how he builds shelters in a snowstorm because the love of what he’s creating is stronger than the pull of a warm couch.
Why This Matters
This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, an exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men.
Mike’s story is one of transformation. From a young man burning bridges out of grief and anger to someone who chooses love knowing full well that love comes with loss. That’s not weakness. I think that’s one of the strongest things a man can do.
The forest isn’t trying to kill you. It’s just trying to grow. And so are we. The question is whether we approach that growth from fear or from love. Whether we armor up or open up. Whether we stay stuck in the child warrior’s fight, or step into the adult warrior’s care.
If something in this conversation sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them.
Because the conversations we have around the fire, the real ones where love and fear both get to show up, those feel like how we change.
For more information on Maine Primitive and their programs, visit www.maineprimitive.com.
