My Son Doesn’t Take My Advice (and Why I’m Grateful)
What 30 years of guitar teaching didn’t prepare me for—and the spiral path back to my son.
There’s a strange ache that lives in the space between offering your wisdom and watching it go unused.
I’ve spent most of my life learning things the hard way—not because I was trying to be stubborn, but because my soul doesn't buy easy answers. I need to run truths through the rough filter of lived experience. I need the bruises. I need the silence after the storm.
And I’ve made peace with that.
In fact, it’s part of what led me to Sacred Imagination.
The sense that knowing isn’t about certainty.
That truth has more texture than doctrine.
That wisdom often comes dressed in paradox, in symbol, in song.
So when I offer advice—especially to my son—
it’s never because I think I’ve got it all figured out.
It’s more like I’m holding out a thread.
Something that might tether him
if the winds pick up in his own storm.
But here’s what’s stunning—
sometimes, I see him take the thread.
Not obviously. Not obediently.
Not in the way I might have hoped.
But in the way that says:
I heard you. I’m still going to walk my own path. But I heard you.
And then a week later, I hear my words—
reshaped, rephrased,
grafted into his own growing cosmology.
And it brings me to my knees.
The Myth Forming in Him
There’s a mythology forming inside him.
I can feel it.
He may not name it that way.
He may never call it Sacred Imagination.
But it’s there—the beginnings of a symbolic structure.
His own metaphors for meaning.
His own questions that don’t have quick answers.
His own encounters with the flame, the garden, the spiral path.
And I don’t want to colonize that space.
I don’t want to overwrite his story with mine.
That’s the danger of being a father who speaks in myth—
you can become too loud inside someone else’s dream.
So instead, I listen.
I try to hold a quieter presence.
I watch what imagery he uses.
What music he returns to.
What truths he tests in secret.
Because even if he never says it outright,
he’s crafting his own theology.
He’s sketching the boundaries of a world he wants to live in.
More Like a Song Than a Doctrine
This, to me, is Sacred Imagination at work.
Not as theory.
Not as language for a book.
But as something alive—
inherited, transformed,
passed through bone and experience
from one generation to the next.
It is less like a doctrine and more like a song.
A melody that recurs with variation.
That haunts in the best sense.
That shapeshifts but never disappears.
What Guitar Teaching Didn't Prepare Me For
I used to be a music educator.
A classical guitarist by training, a teacher by trade.
For over thirty years I worked with students,
many of them children—
guiding their hands, their posture, their listening.
Helping them find the shape of a phrase,
the silence between the notes.
And I was good at it.
Except, sometimes I wasn’t.
Because I was trained in performance.
In precision. In results.
I carried the invisible burden of the stage—
of making it perfect, of making it count.
And often, that meant I missed their hearts.
Not always.
But often enough.
Especially with my own children.
Teaching strangers was one thing.
But teaching your own—
that’s a different terrain entirely.
The stakes are higher.
The mirror is sharper.
And the line between offering and overstepping is thinner than a string tuned way too tight.
A Different Kind of Lesson
So I began to unlearn.
Not technique, but approach.
Not theory, but presence.
And I’ve come to believe that teaching,
at its best,
is not about depositing information,
but about tending a fire you didn’t start.
It’s about knowing that the music doesn’t belong to you.
That your job is to listen more than instruct.
To wait more than push.
And that might be the hardest lesson of all.
Especially when it comes to your own son.
He Needs Experience, Not Protection
There’s a kind of grief in this, too.
Because I know there are things I could spare him from.
Mistakes I’ve already made.
Roads I’ve already found to be dead ends.
Wounds that still pulse beneath the skin.
And yet—I don’t want to rob him of experience.
Because that’s where the sacred shows up.
Not in the neatness of avoidance,
but in the messy beauty of becoming.
The older I get, the more I wonder
what’s worse: a pain you had to endure,
or a life you never fully lived because you played it safe.
And he’s going to have to find his own answer to that.
So I watch.
I offer what I can.
And I pray—
not that he follows my path,
but that he learns to trust his own feet.
The Footnote I’m Glad to Be
There are moments, though—
and this is what stuns me—
when I see him carry my words
not as burdens, but as seeds.
And I realize: he’s writing his own Book.
His own sacred text.
And somehow, my voice is a footnote in the margins.
I could not ask for more.
Even the Eye Rolls Are Holy
I don’t want to pretend this is tidy.
There are days when he rolls his eyes.
Days when the weight of being father and son
collides with the awkwardness of trying to be real.
But even that is holy.
Even that is part of the spiral.
And I know enough now to trust the spiral.
The Language He’ll One Day Speak
One day, he’ll name this differently.
He’ll talk about it in a language I wouldn’t choose,
maybe through some medium I barely understand.
He’ll have his own mythic figures.
His own CowboyMonk,
if he needs one.
His own sacred fire,
lit by something I never even saw coming.
And when that happens—
when he begins to speak the language of the sacred
in his own dialect—
I will recognize it.
Not because it sounds like me,
but because it sounds like Truth.
What I’ll Say (If He Ever Asks)
I don’t know if this qualifies as advice.
But if he ever asks me for some,
maybe I’ll just say:
Listen closely to your life.
Don’t be in a rush to explain it.
Let it whisper. Let it haunt.
Find the symbol that keeps returning.
And trust the image more than the rule.
That’s how I got here.
That’s how I found my way home.
And maybe that’s how he’ll find his.