Hello, listeners and welcome back to The Science of Self. Today we have a guest with us, mark Connor from St. Paul, Minnesota. And Mark, as is usually the case, I'm gonna ask you to take a first few minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners.

Well, hi, as you said, my name is Mark Connor from St. Paul, Minnesota. I am a literary pugilist, and when I say a literary pugilist, that means the only two things I've been good at in my life are boxing and writing. So I'm no longer a competitive boxer. I'm a boxing trainer and I'm a writer, and I have a book that, we're gonna talk about. It's called, it's about time. Millions of copies sold for dad. published, June 16th for Father's Day last year. it, won the Irish Network, Minnesota, blooms Day literary award, and it's a finalist in the Midwest, book awards. which will be announced on, June 28th, in the religion slash philosophy category. And it's, described as a saga wrapped around a package of poems guarded by angels. So it's a short autobiography that reads like a novel and it has 20 poems running through it. it deals with my life. My relationship with my dad, I wrote it in response, to losing him on, September 30th, 2019. I didn't actually write it until, early 2021 between, early February and, 29th of March is when I finished it. I juxtaposed my experiences with, my Catholic faith growing up. talk a little bit about the Irish, heritage influence, on myself and on the city of St. Paul, where I live, where I grew up, and, I talk about my experience with, the Native American Indian community. I worked, 13 and a half years at a place called Onai Young, which means our home in, Ojibwe Really spent a lot of time, in the, spiritual tradition of the Lakotas and sort of kinda lean that way for a while. but never abandoned my Catholic faith and kind of had a reimbursement of my faith back around 2007. So I talk about that in the influence of it and kind of a re embracing of my faith and, reinforcement of my faith as I deal with, losing my dad and letting go of him. That's what the book is about. One of the things, we cut corners, quite a bit on, Preserving ourselves, for, activity outside of marriage. I make a mention at a certain point in the book that I started. I started to go back and not to follow all the rules that I grew up with as a Catholic of what I'm supposed to do. Go and make it to mass every Sunday, you know, and, just keep basically keeping the commandments, you know? And I think that, I also tried to. Kind of blend things with, because we have this kind of feeling in American culture of, you know. if we live our faith, fully to, how we're supposed to, we don't wanna offend others by it. We don't want to try to be forcing others to be following the same thing that we follow. so sometimes we might. Not bear witness, publicly to what, our behaviors are supposed to be. Or we may make excuses, for others to just, and, you know, you can accept someone who doesn't believe the same thing that you believe or behave the same way you behave, but not necessarily, endorse the behavior or endorse the way of life. I was deeply immersed in the Native American Indian community at the time. And I wasn't announcing to people, I'm re-embracing my Catholic faith, but what I really love and respect about my friends and native community is no one was trying to pull me out of that or discourage me from that. They were, and no one was trying to push me to go to the sweat lodges or to pray the way that traditional Native American Indians prayed. but if I prayed with them in that tradition, it was accepted. You know, the fact that I was respecting them. And that was the cool thing about it. people will say openly to me, yeah, the Catholic church is just a cult, right? But, you know, when I didn't go to mass, there was no one knocking on my door saying, trying to pull me to mass. You know what I mean? And why weren't you there on Sunday? There was no one trying to. wrote, wrote me and said, you can't leave. You know what I'm saying? It's, it's, it's, and that's really when you talk about God, I mean, God is love. And God loves us, eternally and to love us. He must respect our freedom. If you don't respect someone's freedom, you don't love that person. So you can't force someone to do something. You have to make a free will choice to, to love God, to follow, you know, to follow what God's will is. And so, that's why Neither tradition I'm talking about is a cult tradition at all, you know, is, or, or what we would call a cult, right?

you talk a lot about the Native Americans. How did you get involved with that?

in the early 1990s, I met this poet in his early forties, His name is Kevin O'Rourke. And he'd gotten, and I talked to him after, after this, this poetry, and he was, um, telling me that he was sober and got into sobriety and the time he got into sobriety. He'd, um, um, been brought to, uh, a Lakota Sundance ceremony down in, uh, uh, Rosebud Reservation, and that he was involved with this Lakota tradition and he said, if you ever, uh, want to, uh, come down there to, to, uh, to see this or to be a part of this, come on down. And, um, in the summer of 1995, I, I went down there with him and that kind of, uh, and, and at the same time also I'd gotten involved with, uh, I mentioned here that I joined this, uh, uh, Irish Catholic organization, um, Irish Catholic, uh, fraternal organization called the Ancient of Hibernians. I joined that right around the same time I, I'd gotten involved with. I had met some people that were involved who were kind of grassroots activists involved with, raising awareness about what was happening and advocating for, the Irish Republican side of the conflict that was going on in Ireland at the time, the troubles. And, there was a solidarity that had been built up for over the last couple of centuries. There's been a solidarity built up between Irish Republicans and, and, American Indians, and I mean, if you can go far as far back as the Irish famine, when the Choctaw raised money with, by selling some gold to send over to, to Ireland to try to help feed people and everything. Then the following year I met, the guy who actually, did the, cover art for this, book. His name's Eric Ke. He's a really good artist, Canadian Ojibwe. He got me the job at this place called And Young. It's spelled three words. It's spelled A-I-N-D-A-H-Y-U-N-G. It's a temporary emergency. it's an American Indian program. It's a temporary emergency homeless shelter for youth aged five to 17. And it's for all youth, but the primary, community that serves as the Native American Indian community. So I worked there in one capacity or another, for about 13 and a half years. And what really made me comfortable about going to a Native American ceremony and witnessing it But, what made me comfortable about it was, one, there's kind of a fatherly understanding of God that the Lakota have. And there's also, the recognition of the spo, you know, like, The word in Lakota for God is aka, which means, grandfather. Great mystery, I believe is, a pretty close interpretation in English, but also. Just the whole idea of Spirit or the Great Spirit is a parallel to me or another understanding of the Holy Spirit and also in the sweat lodge. one thing that I found very similar to Catholicism is. The belief that the ancestors who, who would come into the sweat lodge when they, when they would, uh, when, when the prayers are happening, and then, and listen to the prayers and then at the end, uh, go back to the creator. So they're bringing the prayers of the people back to God. One of the sickest incongruencies of modern life is that people generally are more comfortable publicly sharing information about their sex lives than about their financial lives. They're either afraid. People will think less of them for making too little money, or they'll try to exploit them or cause them trouble if they make too much money, They're ashamed to admit to striving for moral chastity. Though I told you at the beginning of the book that I'm Catholic and I said that in 2 0 0 7 I fully returned to the faith, began praying the rosary daily, and decided to avoid casual relationships. I started following the rules, all of them. So if the text of the poem portrays a greater or lesser degree of intimacy within its story, so long as you can critically prove it with quotes from the text, feel free to let your mind wander there. That's part of the achievement of universality in a well-written poem. No. With certainty though, if you try to assign any autobiographical realities between me and the women about whom I wrote these poems, that it never happened with any of them, especially since 2 0 0 7. That has been my choice because I'm a godfather to my niece and a confirmation sponsor to her under brother, and that is the standard up to which I must live. If I fall, I must get back up. That's the standard required of any honest Catholic as it is the standard of any honest sun dancer. It may seem strange to compare the honest Catholic to the Honest Sun Dancer. The mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional elements are the four portions that comprise each human being, the medicine wheel, which represents in color. Red, white, yellow, and black. All the people of the world also represents each of these four elements. The circle is always turning in one element or another. May be the central experience of the moment, but they're all there all the time. One point a merger of difference in unity is the respect for family and the value of sex. Those who believe sex is meant for arbitrary enjoyment. In the absence of commitment, who believe in polyamory, approve of produce, distribute pornography, and or broker prostitution do not value sex. No. Those who value sex are those who confine it to the commitment of husband and wife who making love form family. If God ever grants me a wife, I'm perfectly comfortable going through every page with a comma. So long as we're natural and open to life, those who value sex, never put a price on it because it cannot be bought or sold. Because in fact, sex is not a commodity. Humans are not a commodity. We are priceless. And sex is a gift to be shared only in love that is never lustful because it is never selfish and is always selfish. Sex is sacred. a lot of times we think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want, but freedom is more, being able to develop ourselves to the highest, level that we can develop as human beings. And it takes discipline to do that. And, it takes a certain amount of, anchoring in. we have to have a perception of what we want and what we're going to do, and we have to have a structure to get ourselves into the routine of continuously doing it. 'cause once you take the first step, you start to build momentum. When you have momentum, you can keep things going, but you have to be able to. have a focus on things to accomplish them. So that's the practice of boxing and the practice of writing. That's the similarity to the two of them. And the approach that I have, it's the same principle, applied in both endeavors.

We from the books that we present here is the of don't wait till you're motivated to do something, doing something, getting started on something. As you said, taking that first step is the motivation. That's what gets you into the process, not waiting to feel like you need to do it or want to do it.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I actually mentioned, a writer, when I'm, talking about the different poems that appear through the book, named, Natalie Goldberg, who wrote a really popular, book about writing and specifically writing poetry, but creative writing in general called Writing Down the Bones. She says, you know, is it okay to say a swear word in this podcast she says, the excuses that people have for not writing this, I write shit. And she says, well, so what? Then write shit. She said, every single. Great writer that you have ever encountered, writes shit. You just never see it because over 75%, maybe even over 90% or more than that of what great writers put down on paper, never sees the light of day The garbage is thrown away because you have to have the momentum to get to the point where you write the great thing, you know?

Great. Fantastic. thank you for joining us this week listeners. Hope you'll, Leave some comments if you have any on the podcast and, thank you for joining us and we'll see y'all next week.