Upon receiving the Rollo May Award some years ago, I jotted down some thoughts:
“I would like in my acceptance talk to reflect on my own personal acquaintance with Rollo May, an affectionate mentoring relationship, even friendship, that continued until his death and that, many years later, I continue to think about a great deal. I would like especially to speak to what was unique in May’s very person—his quietly charismatic way of being in the world and gracefully admirable character, his toughness and exquisitely sensitive core. I would like to reflect on what was most special in all this and what may be in it for the rest of us, for psychology and the world more broadly. Rollo May was fond of quoting this passage out of the fragments of Heraclitus: ‘They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of bow and the lyre.’ May himself was a bundle of contradictions who, true to Heraclitus’ evocation, forged out of these tensions and paradoxes one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever known.”
This forum is intended as a collaborative that earnestly takes up the vision and voice of a remarkable man—far and away the most surpassing exemplar and guide I have ever known. Participants are invited to join me in a conversation that honors and, indeed, restores a tradition that has been compromised by expedience and politics in a culture tending to value notoriety over substance—what the late Czech writer Milan Kundera called “imagology,” all balls pitched to “the lowest ontological rung.” In so doing, I hope to honor a promise I made to Rollo’s wife, Georgia, several years ago.
Shortly before she passed away, Georgia reached out to me after a long hiatus so that Rollo May’s visionary struggle and voice might continue. It was their conjoined wish, Georgia confided, that I keep this more inspired edge alive—precisely what the Kierkegaardian crowd would seem insistently to forego. There is much to say about all these things and many stories to be told. Let this briefest introduction serve as a first step in recovering a legacy increasingly compromised by repetition and indulgence culminating in a proliferation of adherents yet few gestures of novelty, substance, or aesthetic grace.
If you resonate with these remarks, please consider joining this forum—a venture for those who would remain willfully insomniac and wish not to resort to metaphorical soporifics in skating lightly through life along tributaries of predictable lexicons and outcomes. “It’s life and life only,” opines Dylan in his song It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) while still a very young man. It’s true, of course, and yet this allotted existence is all we have—something the poetic soul intuits best of all. “We are all human,” Rollo May’s mentor the psychiatrist H. S. Sullivan liked to say, “—some of us more so.” “I hope you and I will be among the more so,” Rollo would gently admonish in elaborating Sullivan’s point. Hence, this Rollo May Consortium.