If you are in the world of culture work and trying to do something about the insanity of the times we’re in by planting the seeds of possibility for a time you won’t live to see… well… it’s good to have company on the road and be on the receiving end of that old-time, cultured wisdom from those who’ve put in the hard yards.

In the the next four months, we are spoiled with options…

September 3rd, Clynderwen, Wales

September 18-27th, BC

In September, the good Stephanie Mackay (with whom I held three interviews) is running a Wilderness Quest (September 18-27th) and also covering the story of Gilgamesh over four months this Winter in her Myth Club (local and online options available).

You can listen to those interviews below.

• In Between Poverty & Memory: A Conversation with Stephanie Mackay (Part I)

• Archetype & Psychology vs. Animism & Mythology: A Conversation with Stephanie Mackay (Part II)

• Rehydrating Cultural Seeds: A Conversation with Stephanie Mackay (Part III)

September 25, 2 PM - 6 PM - London, England

On Human Scaled Culture Work & Crafting Grassroots Rites of Passage for Boys.

An Afternoon with Tad Hargrave & Miki Dedijer

The world has gone mad.

We could start there.

Many of us feel without much hope for a better day or there ever being a healthy culture amongst us again.

This gathering is premised on the idea that, while we can’t change it all, we can begin to foster the conditions in which healthy and alive human culture can flourish at very small, local levels (where all true culture lives). We can, at the human scale, feed the soil of goodwill and shared understanding between us with the needed nutrients, prebiotics and probiotics that nourish culture (which is what makes a human life living and possible).

We’ll be exploring shifting from shifting from psychology to mythology, archetype to architecture and demagoguery to democratizing these principles.

In this session, we’ll explore:

• Different lenses on what ‘culture’ means

• A working definition of ‘culture work’

• How we can support a shift from the privatization of our lives and relationships to opening the circle a little wider.

• Stories and examples and conversations on how to work with what’s already happening - the ordinary hellos and goodbyes of life - and turn them into an occasion for us to gather and harness them to the wagon of culture work.

• Some reliable principles we can lean on as we engage in responding to the troubles of the times we live in.

• How a boy’s coming of age is an occasion for culture work

• How to craft Grassroots Rites of Passage for the boys in our communities

Click Here To Learn More & Register

October 1 & 2, New Mexico

Last November, I had the grand pleasure of collaborating with Stephen & Kimberly to create an event called Arc & Craft at Ghost Ranch which engaged in a hammer and tongs exploration around Culture Work (and did so fiercely in the presence of all the cultural poverties we've been entrusted with).

Some things worked.

Some things didn't.

The whole thing was full of old time magic which appeared in all the ways it appears.

Most of the labour was undertaken by Kimberly and her team. That ought to be said and underlined.

Enormous things were learned by all involved I'd say, myself chief amongst them.

Stephen and Kimberly have done many events together. I've lost count but not lost track of their comings and goings.

And they are partnering to do another event this year.

Kimberly and Stephen seem to share a culture working soul both in their willingness to work, their shared capacities:

• to lean in and walk the tightrope of what is happening rather than following any scripts

• to say the unpopular thing

• to name the elephant in the room

• to wonder, out loud, about how it came to be this way rather than dolling out simple solutions

Seeing them work separately is a privilege. Seeing them work together is a marvel as they make a loom of themselves, one the warp, the other the weft, man and woman, older and younger, birth work and death work - regarding each others differences as a wonder rather than as a problem to be solved or inequity to be rectified.

If you would see two people work, side by side, holding each other in high regard, this is such a time and such a missing blessing in this world full of rancour and grievance.

Their meeting was unlikely but, in looking back, it seems inevitable.

It's a rare thing to find someone to collaborate with who brings out your best. It's more rare to find a pair that bring out the best of each other.

And it's a rare thing, period.

Who knows how many more collaborations these two will be blessed with and bless us with but I'd encourage you not to imagine there will be another.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

• Birth and Death Workers

• Writers and Art Makers

• Ceremonialists

• Caregivers and Caretakers

• Holistic Health Care Providers

• Palliative and Hospice Care Workers

• Therapists

• Interfaith Ministers, Rabbis, Spiritual Leaders, Teachers, and Practitioners

• Rites of Passage Leaders

OR FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN:

• Birth + Death

• Oral Tradition + Storytelling

• Culture Making

• The Old Ways

• Grief Practices

• Intergenerational Wisdom

• Eloquence and Ceremony

You can register here.

October 9-11, Squamish, BC

And, last but not least, our friend finds himself returning to the West Coast of North America four times over the next two years to run a sort of school of myth called Connla’s Well. It’s sold out now but spaces might open. I’d get on a wait list if you can find one.

You can hear the good and discussing it here.

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Redemption is like my leather jacket, left behind at a thrift store in a community just outside of Lethbridge where, every Sunday, for the considerable sum of $5 you could go in an take anything you wanted. No minimum amount. No maximum.

It was left there for any of the reasons people leave worthy things behind. Perhaps because they no longer needed or wanted it, because the lining was already too frayed by the wear and tear, because they were moving somewhere and didn’t have room, because the one who wore it had died and those left behind couldn’t bear the memory, because it seemed old and out of fashion and the one who had enjoyed it for so long felt the need to keep up with the times.

I found it, perhaps seven years ago now. It was at a small music festival at which I asked a girl to guess what was in my pocket. She, somehow, guessed a rock. I asked her what colour. She, impossibly, said blue and both of our mouths were agape and our heads shook side to side in amazement as I pulled out that small blue wonder.

There wasn’t much in the thrift store that I wanted but then I found it there, amongst the other set aside and left behind things. This leather jacket - the colour of dark red Earth. It was a throwback to the seventies with it’s huge lapels and I found myself wondering if it was perhaps ‘too Shaft’ for me. And then I realized nothing could ever be too much of that and that, perhaps I might grow into it.

I took it from the store and wore it for years.

Finally, the lining gave way and I tore it out piece by piece until I decided something had to be done. The lining had been a shimmering, dark brown. But, I felt like this jacket wanted a shimmering, deep and dark blue lining and so I took it to the tailor and they sewed it in.

And then I kept imagining the cuffs being extended and made more ornate - leather wrist bands added with metals studs. And so I reached out to the best leather worker I know and he agreed to the commission. But, being an artist, phenomenally disorganized and chronically later than promised (the price one often seems to pay for a worthwhile muse), this work on the wrists took four months and was filled with frustrating backs and forths, new promises for a certain deadline and excuses why it hadn’t been done followed finally by, “It’ll be done when it’s done.” which ended up feeling like a relief.

When I finally got it, wrist cuffs added, this jacket seemed to be more of what it was wanting to be. And then I began to see the potential for the buttons. I could put silver buttons on to replace the brown ones (one was missing anyway) and add some ornate, stitch work to the row of button holes on the other side.

I bought this jacket for $5 and I imagine that dozens and hours and possibly $1000 will be spent on it over time.

I bought this jacket for $5 and I imagine that dozens and hours and possibly $1000 will be spent on it over time. It seems outlandish in a way and so much more expensive than simply buying a new one. And I suppose that’s all true. But it’s also true that it’s costing the Earth and its people less to use what’s already there.

But I imagine the owner seeing it now and how they would feel to see the thing they once loved loved again and to have so much care put into it.

I think that this is how our ancestors must feel when they see us picking up the tossed away and left behind pieces of this culture and redeeming them - buying them back for nickles on the dollar and investing our work into them to help them become what they wanted to be again.

I think of all the people who lie in the discarded scrapheap of our modern world, broken down hoping beyond hope that someone will find them and redeem them - that someone might look beyond the shattered exterior and see something worth far more than whatever effort and artistry it might take to redeem them.

I think of all the older people in our culture to whom no one comes for wisdom, waiting at the door of elderhood for the young person inside to open it up and invite them in. But the door does not open. And so they sit there with no one to help. Their wisdom seen as not necessary, antiquated and unworthy.

I think of all the people who would know what William Stafford meant when he wrote his poem A Story That Could Be True.

If you were exchanged in the cradle and

your real mother died

without ever telling the story

then no one knows your name,

and somewhere in the world

your father is lost and needs you

but you are far away.

He can never find

how true you are, how ready.

When the great wind comes

and the robberies of the rain

you stand on the corner shivering.

The people who go by –

you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs

any day in your mind,

“Who are you really, wanderer?”—

and the answer you have to give

no matter how dark and cold

the world around you is:

“Maybe I’m a king.”

I think this is how our ancestors must feel.

I think this is how our ancestors must feel when they see us finding and redeeming the old ways and the old stories left behind for any of the reasons people leave worthy things behind because they no longer needed or wanted it, because the understandings were already too frayed by the wear and tear, because they were moving somewhere and didn’t have room, because the ones who carried it had died and those left behind couldn’t bear the memory, because it seemed old and out of fashion and the one who had enjoyed it for so long felt the need to keep up with the times.

I think it’s how our ancestors must feel when we open up an etymological dictionary to hunting down the roots of a word and find ourselves finding them walking inside the forest of all the things it has meant, means and might mean again.

I think it’s how our ancestors must feel when we learn the deep stories of where our food comes from and let those stories inform the way we conduct ourselves in relationship to it.

I think it’s how our ancestors must feel when we look in the mirror and finally love our bodies, seeing that our nose is the way it is, our eyes, our mouth and our hands are as they are because they were gifted to us by our parents and their parents and their parents before them - a long line of love and that all of their stories show up there - not waiting to locked into cupboards to protect them from dust but to be worn with some sort of swagger and style as we move through our days.

It’s easy to worship the old but the old doesn’t want to be worshipped I don’t think. It wants to live again in some new way. It doesn’t want to lie forever in the thrift store of our cultures collective amnesia, all of its stories stripped of it. It wants to be found again and to whisper in the ears of the one who bought it, expecting an easy bargain, the exciting, hard labour-requiring plans it has for what it wants to be today.

It wants to be a storied thing again.

It wants to play some role in redeeming the one redeeming it.

It wants tailors to put in new, deep blue shimmering linings perfectly and then botch the cuffs. It wants to be in the hands of a temperamental artist for longer than promised. Those are good stories.

It wants to inspire outrageous ideas of ornate decorations.

If you want to get into the redemption business, you won’t go out of business any time soon.

If you want to get into the redemption business, you won’t go out of business any time soon - this world is full of those who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

This world is full of discarded people, places, creatures and things sent to the scrap heap of our collective dismissal long before their time. There is a road you can stand on as the trucks go by, full of the unwanted.

Stop them.

Beg their drivers to sell you everything that you can afford. And then, as they drive away, still overflowing with everyone and everything you couldn’t buy back, sit by the road for a while, weeping, and tell yourself that you did as much as you could.

Redemption is like my leather jacket which wants, above all things, to be worn and to wear someone. It wants to be brought back into the fashion of the days it inhabits and to inspire new, more redemptive fashions. It wants to gently draw people towards the redemption business with its beauty. Look for what has been left behind and discarded by those who could not do any differently and bring your artistry there.

As Gustav Mahler put it, ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’

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If you are in the world of culture work and trying to do something about the insanity of the times we’re in by planting the seeds of possibility for a time you won’t live to see… well… it’s good to have company on the road and be on the receiving end of that old-time, cultured wisdom from those who’ve put in the hard yards.

In the the next four months, we are spoiled with options:

and will, in the tradition of the Minnesota Men’s Conference, be hosting the first annual Cascadia Men’s Conference in the Squamish Valley (August 6-9th)

In September, the good Stephanie Mackay with whom I held three interviews is running a Wilderness Quest (September 18-27th)

You can listen to those interviews below.

• In Between Poverty & Memory: A Conversation with Stephanie Mackay (Part I)

• Archetype & Psychology vs. Animism & Mythology: A Conversation with Stephanie Mackay (Part II)

• Rehydrating Cultural Seeds: A Conversation with Stephanie Mackay (Part III)

And, this Winter, she’ll be opening up her Myth Club again, locally in BC and online. I can’t speak highly enough of the calibre of her work.

Last November, I had the grand pleasure of collaborating with Stephen & Kimberly to create an event called Arc & Craft at Ghost Ranch which engaged in a hammer and tongs exploration around Culture Work (and did so fiercely in the presence of all the cultural poverties we've been entrusted with).

Some things worked.

Some things didn't.

The whole thing was full of old time magic which appeared in all the ways it appears.

Most of the labour was undertaken by Kimberly and her team. That ought to be said and underlined.

Enormous things were learned by all involved I'd say, myself chief amongst them.

Stephen and Kimberly have done many events together. I've lost count but not lost track of their comings and goings.

And they are partnering to do another event this year.

Kimberly and Stephen seem to share a culture working soul both in their willingness to work, their shared capacities:

- to lean in and walk the tightrope of what is happening rather than following any scripts
- to say the unpopular thing
- to name the elephant in the room
- to wonder, out loud, about how it came to be this way rather than dolling out simple solutions

Seeing them work separately is a privilege. Seeing them work together is a marvel as they make a loom of themselves, one the warp, the other the weft, man and woman, older and younger, birth work and death work - regarding each others differences as a wonder rather than as a problem to be solved or inequity to be rectified.

If you would see two people work, side by side, holding each other in high regard, this is such a time and such a missing blessing in this world full of rancour and grievance.

Their meeting was unlikely but, in looking back, it seems inevitable.

It's a rare thing to find someone to collaborate with who brings out your best. It's more rare to find a pair that bring out the best of each other.

And it's a rare thing, period.

Who knows how many more collaborations these two will be blessed with and bless us with but I'd encourage you not to imagine there will be another.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

Birth and Death Workers
Writers and Art Makers
Ceremonialists
Caregivers and Caretakers
Holistic Health Care Providers
Palliative and Hospice Care Workers
Therapists
Interfaith Ministers, Rabbis, Spiritual Leaders, Teachers, and Practitioners
Rites of Passage Leaders

OR FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN:

Birth + Death
Oral Tradition + Storytelling
Culture Making
The Old Ways
Grief Practices
Intergenerational Wisdom
Eloquence and Ceremony

And, last but not least, our friend finds himself returning to the West Coast of North America four times over the next two years to run a sort of school of myth called Connla’s Well.

You can hear the good and discussing it here.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

Subscribe now

Share

On May 11th, I asked you all where you were struggling as parents (or aunts and uncles or as grandparents) in the raising of young boys in modern society. A few of you answered in the comments. A few direct messages.

On May 17th, I introduced you to the good Miki Dedijer (pictured above), an old friend from Sweden who is making public his work on rites of passage for teen boys.

On June 14th at 8am Pacific, I’ll be hosting him for an hour long presentation (with time for questions afterwards).

His take on this: grassroots rites of passage is incredibly compelling and finds its place in between the three options modern parents seem to face:

• Option #1: Doing nothing and leaving their sons to the screens and the algorithms.

• Option #2: The lonely and fraught attempt to initiate their sons themselves .

• Option #3: Handing them off to facilitators they likely don’t know a professionally run event.

Instead, Miki suggests democratizing the process and inviting the wider community in and burdening them with most of the responsibility for the thing.

In a phrase: culture work.

If you are a parent of a boy approaching adolescence, even if they’re years away, or know parents who are, I urge you to attend or spread the word.

Miki has been labouring to live out his form of culture work over the past decades, including a lot of work with young boys and crafting rites of passage for his two sons.

With much cajoling and encouragement, he is bringing the decades of learnings into the public for the first time.

I give Miki the highest possible endorsement I can. I put all my chips in for him and the full weight of whatever reputation I’ve earned on what he’s bringing into the world.

From the write up:

Is the boy you have known for a decade suddenly starting to disappear?

If your son is between 9 and 13 years old, you are likely noticing the first signs of one of life’s major shifts. His body is changing, his scent is shifting, and his voice is cracking. But more than that, a new kind of friction has arrived in your home. He slams the door, rolls his eyes, challenges your boundaries, or disappears into heavy silence and screens. It is understandable if you feel an acute sense of urgency right now. The hourglass is running out and you’re not sure what that means. Whatever the signs, it’s not a behavioral failure. It’s the end of boyhood.

This workshop is specifically for parents of boys who are curious about a rites of passage. If you find yourself asking, “Where do I even begin?”, you are in the right place.

The urgency you feel is not a sign that something is wrong. The door to his boyhood is closing. He is quickly approaching a threshold. You cannot carry him across, and you cannot force him through, but your support ease his way. That’s why you cannot afford to freeze, retreat, or hand his transformation over to algorithms. This 60-minute online masterclass is designed to move you out of uncertainty and provide a clear case for steady action to support your boy’s transformation into a young man.

You can learn more here.

You can spread the word on Facebook here.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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Today, I sat down to record a 30 minute conversation with my dear friend and colleague Miki Dedijer about his beautiful work in supporting parents to craft grassroots rites of passage for boys.

We’ll be bringing him back in a couple of weeks to share a more formal presentation on his approach to this all. Feel free to share your questions below and his work with any parents you know.

You can learn more about Miki’s work at: mikidedijer.com

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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WEST COAST FRIENDS: Please spread the word.

My dear friends and have collaborated to pull together something incredible: The Cascadia Men’s Conference (Aug 6 - 9, Squamish, BC).

On the website you will find the slate of this year’s presenters and special events, and you can learn about our vision, the people behind the event, and the lineage of this work.

We are honoured to have two of the elder stewards of the Minnesota Men’s Conference, Miguel Rivera and Walton Stanley join us to help light this flame on the West Coast.

LEARN MORE & BUY TICKETS

Standard Ticket: $1150

Youth/Elder Ticket: $950

Get 5% Off with Code: TADHARGRAVE

Tickets include all meals and rustic on-site cabin accommodation. Payment plans are available to spread the cost over 3 monthly instalments.

In the tradition of these conferences, each year carries a theme.

This year’s theme is:

COURTING THE DIVINE SPARK

There’s an old belief that a divine partner was assigned to a man at birth, fated to be their companion through life. She has been known by many names: Goddess, Daimon, Anima, Guardian Angel, Fate, Muse, The Woman With Golden Hair.

In many cultures, initiation into adulthood was the communion between you and Her. This is the marriage at the end of so many folktales: not between a man and a woman, but between a man and the Divine. This union brings balance, health, and wholeness to the entire community, which includes the psyche, the ancestors, and the land. And through it, culture is made.

For most of us living in the modern world, we’ve lost almost all of that. Without learning from this realm, we continually confuse this divine partner for a human, or, just as tragic, we decide that She has foreclosed upon us and is gone for good. But this archetypal presence is still out there, waiting for the heart-laboured gift of your devotion and servitude.

Join us at the inaugural Cascadia Men’s Conference, as we gather to undertake the worthy and soul-soaked labour of courting that divine spark back into our bodies through words, movement, ritual, poetry, song, and wonder.

Deep effort is required. Tempering is required. Courting is required. Success is not guaranteed.

*****************************************************************

We welcome men of all ages, denominations, and identities.

Men reading this: please consider joining us. Or, if you are reading this and have men in your family, your circle, or your community interested in a mythopoetic gathering in service to tending culture through spirit, soul, and embodiment, please share this event with them.

LEARN MORE & BUY TICKETS

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In the coming days, I’ll be introducing you to a colleague of mine who is doing some of the most beautiful work in supporting parents to create local, grassroots rites of passage for their sons.

Like most men in the modern world, adolescent rites of passage is something I know something about from having not received one.

So today’s post is short and comes with a few questions:

• how is it for you, those who have barelegged boys not yet in the throes of adolescence, to be a parent as their teen years hurtle towards you?

• what are your deepest hopes for your boy?

• what are your deepest fears for your boy?

• what is the support you feel most lacking in, beyond childcare, to prepare your son for this world?

In the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts, stories, wonderings and worries if you’d care to share them.

They will be responded to, as best as we can muster, in a post coming your way soon.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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I think that one of the easiest ways we go off track, as humans or one of the signature moves by which humans are known by the rest of creation, is that we fall under the spell of supremacy.

It’s a spell that convinces us that we, who secretly feel so small are actually enormous. That we are the biggest, most central, most important feature of this universe.

This, of course, has its roots in the breakdown of village life, the shredding of the webs of kinship by which we knew ourselves and were known and the enthroning of the Self where the sky-god sat and ‘wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless’; lonely, having, at one time, been one of many Gods and now even he is left to himself and we to ourselves - lonely and compensating with Supremacy.

Supremacy… It seems to be a signal feature of all the major religions.

It seems like political movements are based on it seeing every other political ideology as incomplete, incorrect and inadequate with those following it being fools at best and infidels at worst.

Modern medicine has it in spades with its dismissal of traditional, folk medicines and anything not baring the allopathic stamp of approval.

Heaven knows every Empire has it. At the heart of colonization is the view that the Empire is superior to the indigenous world. As Wade Davis put it, “These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit—other options, other visions of life itself.”

And, of course, there’s the deep spell of human supremacy - that we are the crown of creation and that all the plants and animals are lesser than us and thus resources instead of relatives.

None of this is to suggest that certain views might not be more accurate and that certain approaches might work better.

And none of this to suggest we ought not to fight back when oppressed and when power is being imposed on us.

But to imagine that we, whether victor or victim, are better than the others and that, had we been raised as they were, that we would have fared better is the seed of supremacy.

Supremacy As The Root Condition of Conversion

When we miss that, we shift from the age old practice of persuasion, rooted in courtesy and goodwill, to the practice of conversion.

The Spell of Supremacy is the root cause of the practice of conversion. Conversion looks at others as somehow deficient, incomplete and needing to be formed and fashioned into something else.

But supremacy is a trauma response. It’s a cover for the profound lack of sense of self or belonging. Instead of kinship, we get power (or imagine we have it and work to convince others of the fact.) In our feeling of powerlessness, we can look at would be allies as enemies and speak to them as such. Instead of sharing our pain cleanly we might attack others who mean us well and who look like the ones who hurt us.

It’s one of the great tragedies in the human set-up: when we’re in pain, we tend to communicate in ways that push people away. When our need is greatest, we tend to act in ways that ensure our needs don’t get met.

And conversion is one of those ways.

We feel in pain, helpless, lost and confused and, instead of being with the heartbreak of that all, and feeling the depth of the anger and grief, those feelings become weaponized into grievances (many of those grievances utterly legitimate). They become hardened into positions, polemics and certainties that feel like an urgent matter of life and death. Others become either enemies or allies with nothing in the middle. People are either on the side of the victim or the perpetrator (with people being labled and frozen into those identities for all time). “You’re either with us,” they say. “Or you’re against us.”

That urgency, the condescension, the belief in the ‘one right way’, the leaning too heavily on perfectionism and the either/or, black and white thinking that goes with it, can also be a trauma response and is a part of the culture of white supremacy (which, itself, is a trauma response).

We first become victims of violence. And then, all too often, we become vectors of it. We are hurt and, all to often, we hurt. And we convert others to our cause which we can’t afford to doubt.

Jessa Crispin once wrote, “You proselytize to rid yourself of doubt, not to spread the good news.”

Supremacy is a narcissistic move in that we fall in love, like Narcissus of the myth, not with ourselves but with our reflection - with how we’re seen. And so the supremist, secretly doubting the full-spectrum rightness of their cause, devilled by the exceptions and nervous of any nuance, must continually convince others of it.

The road of their grievances and certainties has been paved but, over time, is broken down revealing the vulnerable ground of grief and doubts are exposed and it hurts too much. There is such a thing as hurting more than we can bear and so the bare ground is repaved with what we can deal with - the smooth, flat, hard surface of our convictions.

Doubt and ambivalence may not be as publicly glorious as supremacy but, as the well-known Jewish proverb goes, “Do not make yourself so big, you are not so small”.

This spell of supremacy, in its most pernicious form of ‘I’m better than those who hurt me’, is what turns the victim into the perpetrator and the trammelled into the tyrant.

I recall speaking with a Cree leader from Alberta and him expressing his concern about ‘revolution’.

“Is it because then things turn 180 and now the formerly oppressed are in power but the fundamental structure of power is unchanged?” I asked.

He nodded.

said it beautifully,

And as Martin Prechtel wrote in his book Rescuing the Light,

But it’s desperately hard to stop running. Even when you’re not in danger in the moment.

The modern world is the modern world because we, collectively, haven’t stopped fleeing.

“I Wouldn’t Have Been A Nazi.”

It’s so hard not to fall into the trap of imagining we are better than others. Underwriting it is often the belief that, “If I were in the shoes of the other, I would have made better choices.”

It’s the classic statement, “I’d never have been a Nazi,” about which the film The Wave was made.

But what do we know about being them?

What do we know about the darkness we’re capable of given the right environment.

Compassion comes from seeing the bigger story of how it ended up this way and how, given the realities, it couldn’t have gone any other way.

“There,” as they say. “But for the grace of God, go I.”

It could have have been me. A sobering thought.

And these times, drunk on an algorithm fueled, ideology endorsed outrage, could use some sobering.

Not sobering as in, ‘it’s not that bad.’ Sobering as in, ‘it’s so much worse than we thought.’

When we speak to someone from on high and say, in our words or tone, “You shouldn’t have done that,” we are telling them, “If it were me in your shoes, I wouldn’t have done that.” And this creates shame. And well… there’s a lot to say about shame but perhaps none better than in his book The Unshaming Way.

I recall Stephen Jenkinson, in the Orphan Wisdom school, underlining it as clearly as he could that we, in the school were no better than anyone outside it, that there was nothing ‘special’ or better going on with us and that all the cultural poverties of our times that lived ‘out there’ were most certainly ‘in here’ too. And that if he ever got a sense of us using the school to create an ‘us vs. them’ and that ‘we get it and they don’t’ that he’d burn the fucker down.

When one is trapped in this spell, then any challenge to that position of power is seen as an attack. It’s the trouble with privilege (real or perceived): we get used to it so fast. The dopamine hit of that entitlement is almost immediate. A strange truth of life: you can be born on third base and become convinced you hit a triple.

The Concretization Of The Mind

Part of supremacy thinking is the way it ossifies the mind and ends any further inquiry.

In her book Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman write brilliantly about this concretization of the mind and where it comes from:

As Tessa Lena of Tessa Fights Robots wrote,

The Inferiority of Supremacist Interventions

When we intervene in the troubles of the world from a place of superiority and grandiosity, our interventions become less effective and those being intervened upon feel our arrogance and brace against us.

We can feel it when we are being condescended and talked down to. We can feel it when people feel like they’re better than us and setting themselves up as arbiters of our worthiness.

We’re all better when we’re loved.

I received these words from an indigenous relative as a response to a post on this topic:

It’s possible to intervene, strongly and definitively, without imagining that we are better than another. We can stop people (and, dear God, we all need to be stopped sometimes) without having punishment in our heart.

Marshall Rosenberg called that the Protective Use Of Force. We would do well to redeem this capacity for perpetration.

Unworthiness: The Shadow Of Surpremacy

The shadow of this sense of inflation is, of course, deflation. The spell of unworthiness, the ‘who am I?’ into which the modern rescuers and allies can fall.

I’ve seen it with so many white people approaching issues of racism and colonization from a fundamental place of shame and collapse (which then has them turn to people of colour for needed affirmation which ends up being another iteration of the very ‘taking’ their ancestors may have done which they were trying to address by being an ally).

I’ve seen many people, under the spell of unworthiness, be used, manipulated and turned into tools for someone’s cause. That kind of weakness attracts predators like no one’s business.

Solidarity

Lilla Watson penned the famous words: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

And this shift from charity to solidarity feels central to what’s needed.

So central to the colonial enterprise is this black and white worldview that divides the world into easy binaries or good/bad. victim/perpetrator, hero/villain, allies and enemies.

But I’ve found it’s rarely that simple.

We have a better chance at dismantling the institutions and structures that harm life if we aren’t coming from a place of being above or below others - I think that this is one of the fundamental effects of these structures - to divide us into the worthy and unworthy and to get us to believe it and play those roles.

Closing Thoughts

I know I fall under these spells on most days. The struggle to find and get to right relations with others is harder than it looks. And the temptation to imagine ourselves as better or worse than others is omnipresent and deeply contagious.

I’ve come to extending this wish to many over the past years, “May you come to know those who’ve developed a taste for humble pie rather than the taste for dishing it out.”

And I extend it to you.

As far as I can see, there are a lot of approaches to help break these spells out there and bless everyone who, in their own ways, is trying. It will take all kinds of voices to do this work from angry to gentle, from quiet to loud, from curious to clear.

It will take remembering all the times we were wrong and all the times our views changed.

It will take asking the question, “How could you believe that?” with curiousity instead of contempt.

It will take stepping back and letting the full heartbreak of the realities hit us and wonder, “What befell a people that this all seemed like a good idea?” But to ask it for real and to not settle for the easier answer that we were the chosen (and chosen because we were better) and they, well… they were not (because they weren’t).

Mike Merenda, who I recently met at the Confluence Event, penned a beautiful song about the heartbreak of this all - a heartbreak that doesn’t make anyone wrong. The chorus is not a laceration of anyone but a lament: I always thought we’d end up on the same side of the war.”

It’s easy to look at these approaches to the troubles of the times that aren’t ours and immediately fall into the moral superiority of how much better our approach is than theirs.

And it’s easy, distressingly easy, for our best efforts for a better day to become a vector of the very thing we were fleeing and trying to defeat. Somehow our prescriptions can become another iteration of the problem and our grief, never being given a chance to live, can become the sharp axe of self-perpetuating and contagious grievance.

As Martin Prechtel put it, “For the lack of grief, we go to war.”

May we all see more tomorrow than we did today. May our view become wider in these mad times that seem to not only bring out the best of us but, moreso, the rest of us.

And that might be where the love is most needed: the rest of us.

Blessings on your head.

May the mercies crowd your doorstep.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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Other Resources On This Topic:

• Ten Bones of Supremacist Cultures

Recommended On Culture Work:

• I highly recommend the work of Stephanie Mackay and her Myth Club

• If you have young boys, I urge you to check out Miki Dedijer’s work on Grassroots Rites of Passage.

• Starting in May - The Fire Within: Empowering the Creative Transition from Womanhood to Crone

• July 19th - 29th - The Sacred Gestures Wilderness Fast with Trevor Mervyn

• August 6-9th - The Cascadia Men’s Conference

• August & September - Wilderness Quests with Stephanie Mackay

A short thought today.

In traditional cultures, rites of passage for the young people, particularly around adolescence, was about marrying the young to the wild Holy in nature.

A central function of culture was to mediate our human relationship with these larger forces to which we owe our lives and amongst whom we are the youngest and newest additions to Creation.

Myth was a medium through which this connection was mediated and we were instructed on the needed protocols to feed and sustain was has been sustaining us all along. Myth was a way of patterning our brains on nature. Myth was the weld, the holy ground in between us and the wild where offerings could be made in acts of remembrance.

But now, instead of a Holy ground between us the bigger story, a ground that connected us, instead of that old, careful constructed, laboured over and tended to bridge of human culture making sure the connection wasn’t lost, we now have a rapidly growing wall surrounding the village preventing that connection to soul or soil. And this machine, powered by AI centers popping up around the world, consumes the world as a resource instead of nourishing it as our source.

That wall is what we might call “the machine”.

It is patterning our minds on the algorithm.

And it’s getting taller every day. I know many days, for me, it’s hard to even remember there’s something beyond it.

Most young people have only ever known that wall. They’ve never seen beyond it. That wall is covered with screens reflecting our desires back to us and promising their fulfillment.

Maybe you see it too.

That phone in our hand at 2am is the wall.

The ads targeted to our worst vices (and promising to scratch the itches we didn’t know we had) is the wall.

The AI writing that trains us to think like the machine that wrote it.

The short form content that fritters away our attention (and our capacity to pay attention), that entices us to scroll endlessly and the react buttons encouraging us into reactivity is the wall.

The online world that fills up our every waking our so that we are never alone or bored is making us deeply lonely, profoundly unfulfilled and profoundly disconnected from our own feelings and needs and all the other ways our soul bumps against the banks of our psyche.

Instead of old stories that weave us into the world, we have Instagram and Tiktok stories that stop all weaving and unravel what’s already been done.

Instead of stories that fill us with longing and that affirm the worthiness of longing, of unrequited love, that deepen us and break our hearts open, the machine gives us what we desire instantly, without any medium, and rob us of what we need, as our hearts harden and our capacity to court what we love is slowly replaced by an instinct to get what we want.

I don’t know what to do about it.

But it seems to be how it is. I see it in my own days. Maybe you see it in yours.

Bless everyone working to point out the wall.

Bless everyone working to take it down.

Bless everyone tending to the bridges and the skills of bridge making.

Bless everyone doing what they can to tend to the young ones amongst us who are so defenceless against the synthetic promises and toxic mimics offered up by the technocrats.

If you know someone doing important work, please share them in the comments below.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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Recommended Work That’s Rebuilding The Bridge of Culture:

• I highly recommend the work of Stephanie Mackay and her Myth Club

• If you have young boys, I urge you to check out Miki Dedijer’s work on Grassroots Rites of Passage.

• Starting in May - The Fire Within: Empowering the Creative Transition from Womanhood to Crone

• July 19th - 29th - The Sacred Gestures Wilderness Fast with Trevor Mervyn

• August 6-9th - The Cascadia Men’s Conference

• August & September - Wilderness Quests with Stephanie Mackay

Mercy this world right now. There’s so much hatred, polarization and reactivity and so little graciousness. I’m hoping this post (that I first published in May of 2021) might be some needed medicine for your heart.

Graciousness

Other words for this:

accommodating

• affable

• amiable

• considerate

• courteous

• hospitable

• loving

• polite

• well-mannered

• respectful

I have been feeling called to write on the topic of graciousness for a while now. Because it’s something I’ve had to learn in my life. It’s something I have not always been very good at.

If it’s something I’ve learned it’s been from so many others in my life who have shown me, through their own example, what it means to be deeply respectful of others.

Graciousness is the hallmark of a mature person. It is the fruit of having grown up. Not only in years, but in one’s soul. And there is a difference. As Michael Meade lamented, ‘Instead of having a culture full of elders giving important medicine we have olders on drugs.’

I wrote a few days ago that, if I had to sum up being young and immature it would be with seven words: ‘trying to get away with things’.

And graciousness is the opposite of this. Graciousness is about giving other people the deepest respect possible.

So often, we use each other - even when it seems we are giving. I am appalled to find out how often even my most generous acts have hidden in them some sneaky agenda to get something for myself that I am trying very hard to keep myself and others from being consciously aware of.

And, it’s not surprising we do this so often. Byron Katie speaks of the only two fears we have as humans. The first is the fear that we won’t get what we want. The second is the fear that we’ll lose what we have.

And, when either of those fears run the show, graciousness goes out the window. We manipulate, bully, passive aggressively try to control or just shut down.

When those fears are running the show and we’re trying to protect what we have or get something we think we need (which we almost never really do) there are at least two things we immediately lose awareness of.

The first thing we lose awareness of is the context we’re in and which behaviours are appropriate there.

The second thing we lose awareness of is the impact we are having on people in the present moment.

And not being aware of those two things is the source of so many actions that lack graciousness.

We have all grown up in a culture that teaches us so little about how to be courteous and offering of deep hospitality to each other. Even if our parents do, we have a whole culture pulling us in a different direction.

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Why does graciousness matter?

On the selfish level, being gracious will give us a good reputation and that’s worth more than just about anything.

And on the surface level, it makes others feel good.

On the oblique level, it also makes anyone who witnesses it feel good. We love seeing these moments in action and hearing these stories.

On the deeper, and far more important level, they restore our faith in humanity.

And this, perhaps more than anything, is what we need right now.

Deep down, most of us who were born, raised and live in civilized culture suspect something: that humanity is a bad animal. That, deep down, we’re cruel and violent. That our better angels are also our weaker ones. That the world would be better off if humans just ceased to exist. That we are some aberration in nature, a virus or cancer with no hope of redemption.

But every time we witness an act of graciousness, a piece of our faith is restored. We are shown a different side of what’s possible. A new story is built like a table top with more and more legs under it until it can stand on its own and hold the weight of even the most opposing evidence.

This short film by Ian Mackenzie says it so beautifully.

Here are some things that I have learned, often the hard way, over the years.

Thirty One Flavours of Graciousness

#1. always bring a gift when going to someone’s home: I remember reading this in a Deepak Chopra book and being struck by the simplicity of it. Maybe we bring a bottle of wine, a book, or something we thought they’d enjoy. It could be a smile or a good story. But to have the intention to bring something good to everyone we meet and visit.

#2. always offer a drink when guests arrive: this is so ingrained in so many cultures but often missing in ours. When a guest arrives, offering them a glass of tea or water. At most of my potlucks, I make a hot apple cider drink. When guest arrive, i greet them warmly and ask them if they’d like a cup. There’s something that feels so wonderful about being greeted with drink when we arrive. That we are being cared for.

#3. when in doubt, ask: Most of the times I have acted in ways that weren’t considerate of others, I actually had a niggling feeling about doing it in my gut and did it anyway. If I had just slowed down a little bit, I would have really noticed the feeling and been able to check in directly about it. ‘This thing I’m wanting to do, is that wanted right now?’ And they could have said ‘no’ and the drama would never have arisen.

Of course, if there’s something I want or am scared I’ll lose... then I don’t want to ask. Because, if I don’t ask, I tell myself there’s a better chance that I’ll get it. And I might, but at what cost? Even if I get it, they will feel disrespected and violated. Even if I win, I lose. And, when we stop ourselves and ask directly and give people the option to say ‘no’, sometimes we don’t get the thing we want or we lose the thing we feared we’d lose, but what is gained that is almost always immeasurably more valuable, is the relief, gratitude and increased trust of the other person who sees that their well being mattered more to us than our agenda or hopes. There’s an old saying that, ‘the absence of ‘no’ does not mean the presence of a ‘yes’.

Just because no one has told us not to do something, doesn’t mean it’s wanted. And, whenever there’s any doubt or discomfort in us at all, it’s better to check in directly and find out. If we act without a ‘yes’ from the others involved, trust will evaporate, but if strong consent (not just a ‘yes’ but a ‘yes please!’) then whatever we do will be received deeply with joy and gratitude and our relationship will be deepened. Even more important than the gift itself sometimes is the graciousness of making sure it’s the right gift for the right moment.

Years ago, I was involved in a search for someone who had gone missing. After spending the day driving around looking for him, we returned to the apartment of his partner. I knew that there was some bad blood between myself and his partner and his close friends. But, in the moment of crisis, and wanting to help, I went in to the apartment to see what I could do to help. I later found out that this caused a great deal of discomfort for some of the people there. If I could redo it, I would have slowed down and asked someone to see if I was wanted. Perhaps, in the moment of crisis, I would have been. Perhaps not. But then the choice would have been theirs.

Another night, years ago, I was at Folk Fest in Edmonton. My friend was giving a shoulder massage to a friend and I was about to do the same to my friend who was sitting in front of me. But, something had me pause and check in. It turned out she actually had a very nad sunburn and even touching her would have been extremely painful for her.

A few years ago, a woman I was very interested in became single. She and I went for a walk and I really enjoyed the connection. But then I noticed she was spending a lot of time with a friend of mine. So, i sent him a message saying, “i wanted to check in about something and also set up time for beers. and i am also curious if you and shawna were exploring seeing each other. she’s someone i’ve been interested in for a long time. I’ve not felt any reciprocation or romantic interest from her but she’s for sure someone i’d want to explore things with if there were openness. and i’ve just gotten the sense that you two had been hanging out a bit. i’m curious because i love you both and want to make sure i’m honouring you two and also myself in the whole thing.” He replied graciously and let me know they had, indeed, been seeing each other but keeping it on the downlow. He invited me out for beers and our friendship deepened. Instead of trying to be sneaky, I was direct and so grateful I did.

#4. never walking between people who are having a conversation: I remember reading this in a book of understandings that many indigenous people lived by.

#5. don’t touch anything that belongs to someone else without asking their permission: This is especially important when discussing sacred objects.

#6. sharing our feelings, needs and requests without attachment: when we can ask for what we want, share our honest feelings and what we’re needing without making it a burden for others to carry but an opportunity to which they may say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ we are giving others an incredible gift. The gift of knowing where we stand and the gift of an opportunity to support us.

#7. refusing graciously: this is one I think we all wish others knew. Sometimes we’re interested in someone romantically, and they don’t share those feelings but, instead of letting us down in a way that was respectful, direct and let us keep our dignity they scorned us, belittled us, ignored or avoided us or pretended not to notice in an attempt to avoid the conversation out of the fear of hurting us. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a world where when we expressed interest in another and they didn’t share it, they could express that? I recall a friend who was being courted by a man for weeks. They had many dinners together and, even though nothing physical ever happened, deep down she knew he was interested. But, she was blinded by ‘hopium’ (the most addictive of all substances) - hoping he wasn’t really. And he, in turn, was blinded by ‘hopium’ too - hoping she, despite an utter lack of any evidence to suggest this at all, was in love with him. This ended rather badly with the man, in a drunken stupor, pounding on her door late one night, sobbing, telling her that she couldn’t fly home the next morning because he couldn’t live without her. If she had checked in with him when she had her first suspicion and said, ‘Can I ask you something? Are you interested in me romantically?’ He would have confessed that, yes, he was. And she could have replied, ‘Thank you so much for being so honest with me. I feel very respected by that. I’m not attracted to you in that way and I would never want to lead anyone on. The relationship with you that feels right for me is _______. How does that feel for you?” And he would have had the choice to respond however he wanted to.

There have been so many women I’ve asked on a date, only to have them message me later and ask, ‘Is this a date or are we just going for coffee? Because I am seeing someone right now.’ or ‘I just wanted to check in about going for drinks with you tomorrow. I’m realizing you might be seeing it as a date but I just think your great and wanted to connect as a friend.’ And then it was on the table and I could assure them that, ‘yes’ I had been thinking of it as a date and suggest that we cancel our plans but be very happy to see each other whenever that should happen down the road.

When in doubt, they asked. And that gave me the opportunity to clarify the truth. Which gave them the opportunity to share their truth. Everyone keeps their dignity. We’re not saying, ‘You’re not good enough for me’ we’re just saying, ‘This isn’t a fit for me.’

#8. giving the refusal: sometimes, we know that people will refuse our offers. But it can still be a wonderful thing to make the offer anyway. We’re going out to a party and we invite a friend who we know will likely refuse, but we give them the gift of being able to refuse. What we’re really giving them is love. We’re giving them the message, ‘You’re wanted.’

#9. giving people a way out: I recall hearing one sales trainer talk about the importance of making sure no one ever felt ‘trapped’ in a sales conversation. Always giving them a way out that they could use if, like most people, they were too scared to tell you the truth. For example, someone might say, “I would totally buy this car, if only the price were $1000 less.” The sales person hears this but has the sense that the price is just a cover for other issues and that it might not really be a fit. So they say, “Oh. I think we could take $1000 off the price but I could understand if the timing isn’t exactly right for you and you need to talk to your spouse first.” I think this is such an important thing to do. Because most people are so terrified of conflict or disappointing people that they might find themselves doing things they don’t really want to do and resenting it or hating it the whole time.

How many times have we gone further with someone sexually or romantically than felt right because they were pressing for it and we didn’t feel able to say ‘no’? How many times did we spend money on things out of a sense of pressure from others who gave us no easy way out? Give people an exit. Make sure they never feel trapped or without choice. Could they just speak up and set their boundaries? Sure. But, really, how many people will? Not many. The absence of a ‘no’ from them does not mean a ‘yes’. A ‘yes’ is a yes.

In Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, there’s a beautiful tradition of refusing an offer of tea a few times before saying ‘yes’.

They say, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

And you say, ‘Oh, I’d love to but I should get going.’

‘Are you sure? Just a quick cup.’

‘Well... it’s tempting but I don’t want to impose.’

‘Nonsense, you sit down, i’ll get the kettle on.’

It’s a beautiful little dance. In their culture, it would be so rude not to offer tea (even if you don’t want to) so, by refusing a few times, you are giving them an out. If you refuse once and they say, ‘Well, perhaps next time.’ you can take that to mean that it wasn’t really a good time - but they were able to offer to let you know you’re valued.

#10. apologizing & cleaning things up: recently, I had a texting exchange with a dear friend who was upset that an event I was a part of hadn’t done more to include him in the event. I felt like we’d gone out of our way and shared that it didn’t feel good to have him suggest this. Within minutes he texted me sincerely apologizing for his tone and the sense of entitlement from which he’d been coming and sharing his gratitude for our efforts. And it felt so good to receive that. Not two weeks later, I found myself responding defensively to a text of his and, thirty minutes later, texted to share my regret for my tone and to affirm that his feedback was important to me and that I loved him. Such small acts but they inspire so much.

one of the most beautiful acts of this I’ve ever seen is in the image below where these Chicago Christians showed up at a gay pride parade to apologize for homophobia in the Church.

#11. not overstaying one’s welcome: There’s the old show biz adage, ‘always leave them wanting more’. We’ve all been to the campfire where someone won’t give up the guitar and, takes the applause as a sign that they should keep going. Forever. And ever. And this erodes the audiences trust in the performer. The audience learns that this performer’s sense of what’s happening is different than theirs. That they can’t be trusted to know when to stop.

It’s a gift to give people our presence, but it’s also a gift to let them miss us and see when it’s time to go. The real message we’re sending here is, ‘I’m very aware of the context we’re in and the impact my presence is having on you and that leaving now would be the best gift I could give you. So I am going to leave instead of pushing you to the point where you finally set a boundary and make me go.’ And this message builds so much trust.

I know that over my life, I have misstepped on this one more times than I care to count. Sometimes being out socially and meeting a new group of people and, instead of excusing myself when things weren’t clicking, lurking or hanging around and making things incredibly awkward and uncomfortable for everyone. When we leave them before we’ve overstayed our welcome, it gives them the space to then pursue us. I recall one night out at a local bar, while in line, I did some particularly impressive magic tricks for the group behind us. They applauded. I thanked them and turned my attention back to my friends.

Once inside, one of them found me and bought me a drink. The temptation is to keep doing more and more tricks or to try and parlay the magic trick into acceptance into the group in an unconscious way - as a sort of social bait and switch. But, I’ve found it better not to. One night while out at the same bar with another friend who was visiting, I did some tricks for her. The table next to us was watching and my friend said, ‘you have to see a trick!’ I did a few for them, bowed and excused myself. The results were good vibes for all. Later on, I could go back to the group to connect and ask if I might join them for a little bit and they would likely have been open to it.

But if people think that we don’t know when to stop, that can be annoying at best (put down the guitar) and frightening at worst (stalkers or rape).

By not overstaying our welcome we affirm that we are noticing what’s going on for them and respecting it. The gift given here is the affirmation that ‘you are safe with me’. And couldn’t we all stand to feel a little more safe in this world?

Another example comes from Martin Prechtel who, when he was studying shamanism in Guatamala would stay up as late as he could listening to the story tellers. Everyone else would have fallen asleep hours before but he would stay up as late as he could. This went on night after night. Finally an elder pulled him aside and said, ‘You have to stop. You’re going to kill us. We can’t stop telling stories until everyone is asleep!’ He’d had no idea.

#12. giving people enough lead time to consider things so it won’t be rushed: this one is so simple but so important. When we come to people to ask for a favour and that we need an answer in two hours... it can be received as a burden for people. We’re giving them a crisis to deal with. But, if we make sure we are well prepared and give people weeks or months to consider and make plans then no stress is added to their life.

#13. giving people time to reply: connected to the last one is making sure that, when we ask for favours, we give people plenty of time to reply to us. Sometimes I will get emails from people asking for a favour and then, a few days later, an insistent email asking if I got their last one. And, when I don’t immediately reply to that one, another. People are busy. Some people are very busy. The more connected they are and established in their careers, the less likely they are to reply quickly. Build that into your approach. Know you might not hear from them for weeks. When people give me the graciousness of this spaciousness, I am so grateful.

#14. don’t gossip: such a simple one. don’t say anything about others that you haven’t or wouldn’t say to their face. the message we give when we gossip and cast aspersions on others is that this is what we would do if they weren’t present. we give the message that they aren’t safe either. of course, we will speak of others who aren’t present, but there is a way to do it that honours others. We can share our upset and also admit where we are guilty of the same things. We can share it with the intention of getting help in resolving it. We can express that we just need to vent and that we know we’re being petty so people don’t take it on as ‘the truth’. When we are attracted to gossip, it’s good to ask ourselves why. A key question here is, ‘who’s approval am I secretly seeking by spreading this rumour?‘

#15. check in directly with people when upset: this follows fast on the heels of the last one. Checking in directly with people about whom you hear rumours. I can’t think of anyone alive who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, felt terribly misunderstood by others and been the victim of the rumour mill. And, when you know that there are rumours circulating about you, and someone makes a point to sit down with you to check in, share what they heard and hear your side of the story, it’s one of the most incredible gifts to receive. I recall a time when my name was being tracked through the mud and a woman I barely knew made a point to ask me what was going on. I told her and she said, ‘Wow. That’s not what I’ve been hearing.’ She really listened and, to this day, I feel this impossible gratitude towards her. I recall another time, a dear friend of mine was being slammed for being racist and oppressive as a leader of his organization. An aboriginal activist friend of his was concerned but also knew there was always more than one side to the story. So he scheduled a walk with my friend to share what he’d heard and the concerns it had raised in him. They were able to talk it out and both parties left feeling enriched by the experience. To directly check in is to show the gift of respect. Because, the default is for people in a community to jump on the bandwagon, scapegoat someone, vilify, demonize and ostracize them. And being shunned is one of the most painful things we can endure. Checking in shows that our interest is more in getting to the truth and restoring good relations in our community than in punishing people.

#16. Let them win. There are so many incredible examples of good sportsmanship. The MMA fighter who stopped the fight and gave the win to his opponent rather than brutally beating him (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/mma-fighter-taps-out_n_5365615.html?utm_hp_ref=sports).

Or this security guard who let’s children win by pretending to absolutely believe they are who they say. The pygmy of Africa believed that the biggest sin you could commit was being unkind to a child.

17-year-old Meghan Vogel was in last place in the 3,200-meter run when she caught up to competitor Arden McMath, whose body was giving out. Instead of running past her to avoid the last-place finish, Vogel put McMath’s arm around her shoulders, carried her 30 meters, and then pushed her over the finish line before crossing it.

#17. Give your best portion to the guest.

An old story teller on the Isle of Skye, told me that the sgian dubh (the little knife kilted men wear in their socks) was originally known as a knife of peace. It would be used to cut off the best portion of food you had to offer it to the guest. Always the best portion to the guest.

#18. Praise in public, critique in private.

A simple idea. If we’re going to spread rumours, can they be beautiful ones that remind people of the better angels in others, not the worst?

At one gathering a few summers ago, I found myself in a circle around a fire pit. The group was mostly middle aged white people with the exception of three young women of colour. They were the only non-white people amongst 150 people. The conversation turned to money.

The young women were lifting up some more radical perspectives and critiques of capitalism but things were running late as lunch had already begun and so a patriarch in the community (an older white man) who had been sitting with his new child on the balcony, stood up and declared, ‘There’s nothing wrong with making money. But let’s thank our facilitators and get to lunch.’ And, in doing so, dismissed everything these young women said.

I suspected this hadn’t felt good for them and so, privately I pulled the man aside and shared a lense on what I’d noticed and how it might have occurred to the three women. That it could have triggered so many issues to have an older white, middle class man stand up and declare, from on high, that their views were foolish and dismiss them. And I suggested he might want to connect with them privately to see how that moment had felt for them and to apologize if it had felt dismissive.

I could have called him out in front of the group. Maybe it would have served too. But, sometimes, less resistance is arisen when we preserve people’s dignity and let them have the time and space they need to digest the information instead of feeling pressured by the moment.

I remember watching Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred start a course he was teaching by spending thirty minutes thanking and acknowledging his ancestors, his mentors, those who had helped make the course happen and those in the course. It was so incredibly warm and gracious and had me remember the importance of this.

#19. Remembering people’s names.

Again, simple. But it means so very much.

#20. Care packages left at the door.

When people are struggling or have gone through a hard time, can you bring some soup to their door? Buy them some groceries? Bring them something meaningful? The key is to bring it and leave it. It can be anonymous or with a note. But, when people are struggling, just leave it. Don’t follow up to see if they got it and enjoyed it. It’s not about you. It’s about letting them know they are loved. Recently, I was going through a hard time. A woman had sent me a lovely note to which I intended to get back and reply. Two weeks passed and she sent me a terse note explaining that she had put so much thought into the email to me and was offended that I hadn’t replied. I replied to let her know that, in doing this, she was turning her gift into a burden. She was freely offering support I didn’t ask for which meant a lot but then was imposing a timeline and turning it into something I owed her. She got it immediately and apologized and thanked me for my honesty. Which felt really good.

#21. Looking out for those in need.

This Louis CK meme says it all. Instead of obsessing about who has more than us, what if we turned our attention to who might not have enough to see if we can’t be of some help.

Another simple example is a friendly neighbour on the East Coast who offered power to those who need it after Superstorm Sandy hit.

Or this dry cleaner who did what many dry cleaners have done. Plaza Cleaners in Portland, OR, helped over 2,000 unemployed workers who couldn’t afford dry cleaning.

Or this...

Or this resident in Little Ferry, New Jersey saved neighbours from flood waters brought on by Hurricane Sandy with his own jet ski.

Or this Subway store...

Or this bookstore...

Or these cyclists offering water to a koala during a heat wave in Australia...

#22. Give the shirt off your back.

Once, during an improv festival, we were having beers at a local bar and a performer from Vancouver expressed his admiration of a shirt I was wearing. I loved the shirt but he seems to love it more. So, I went to the bathroom, took it off and gave it to him. He was shocked. He still speaks of it to this day, ‘he gave me the shirt off his back!’ If someone loves something in your possession more than you do and it’s clear they’d get more enjoyment out of it than you - why not give it? It not only gives them something new but creates a beautiful connection and a story. As my colleague Zan Perrion once said, ‘Do whatever will make the best memories.’ In the photo below, a man gives his shoes to a homeless girl in Rio de Janeiro. Beautiful.

#23. Take on the hard job and risk yourself for others.

Sometimes issues arise that ask so much of a community. And sometimes you will feel called in your heart to take the issue on, on behalf of everyone because maybe no one else is able or willing to do it. It’s an impossibly generous thing to do.

I love this example of a young passerby rescuing stranger’s Shih Tzu who was hurled into the rough water by strong wind

Two children collaborating to rescue a dog who had fallen into a ravine.

Or what firefighters do every day.

Or this young man saving a dog during a flood.

But the most magnanimous, heartbreaking and impossibly generous example of this I have ever heard is in the photo below where Japanese senior citizens volunteered to tackle the nuclear crisis at Fukushima power station so that young people wouldn’t have to subject themselves to radiation.

#24. Let people know they’re not alone.

On graduation day, this entire class shaved their heads.

#25. Offer a gift to your enemies.

There’s something so powerful about being willing to extend your support to those who seem to oppose you or even hate you.

The example below always stuns me.

#26. Helping people find something they lost.

How many times have you had your wallet returned with no money taken out. Or a purse. These acts of kindness and graciousness restore our faith in the goodness of people.

#27. Go out of your way to include people who might otherwise miss out.

Or this crowd raising man in wheel chair to see band perform because he couldn’t do it on his own.

Or this father and how he includes his daughter.

Or how 12-year-old Jose Rubio-Pavon with an inoperable brain tumor was sworn in as his city’s youngest police officer.

#28. Stand up for the little guy.

#29. Let people you know that they will be inconvenienced by you when it’s inevitable and do what you can to mitigate it.

#31: Give hard feedback without shaming.

This might just be one of the most exquisite art forms in the world. To find the balance between uncompromising truth and unconditional love. To share the unvarnished truth but to do it in a way that let’s people keep their dignity.

I recall an event I was at in Bolinas that was a gathering of leaders in the human rights field (I have no idea, to this day, what business I had being there). An exercise was led in which we envisioned ourselves forgiving our worst enemies in a closed eye process. A few minutes into the activity, one participant got up and left. Once it was over, he came back in and explained his departure, “I left because that exercise wasn’t appropriate for me. I just wanted to make sure you knew why I left.” He wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with it. Just that it didn’t work for him. It was so incredibly gracious.

At another event in New York, I witnessed the same man offer an important reflection to a room full of people after an older, middle to upper class white woman fully highjacked a session full of a diverse group of youth. “I’d like everyone to reflect on how dynamics of race class and gender played out in how the session today.” he said. No shaming. No attacking. Just using the brief moment he had to lift up something to consider.

Other Ideas:

- When at the bar, buy your friend or someone you’ve just met a drink.

- When you’re pouring drinks at a table, pour everyone else’s drinks first and then your own.

What would you add?

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.” ― Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

Introduction: 

The Epstein files have come out. Or some of them. Full of horrors as we learn about how the wealthy and powerful, and even some we admired, trapped the young and became entrapped in a web of violation, corruption and abuse.

“Perpetrators” is the name given to such people often.

In this essay, I plan to do my best to redeem that word. It’s a word that has become twisted over time into being the very opposite of its origins. It’s often like that with words. You can track changes in culture in the changes the word, itself, went through.

Why reclaim or redeem a word?

So we don’t get ossified or stuck.

One of the elite’s core skills is that of taking what is sacred and coopting it into the sacrilegious. They take that which serves life and tell us to fear it. They take that which might protect us and tell us to fear it. And so, we must keep our language fresh. We must be vigilant for the colonizing of language and the inversions of meaning that come to be.

But keeping things fresh doesn’t mean going to something new. It is best done by returning to the old roots where the vitality of life is found. That’s how we can stay radical and resist the coopting and mainstreaming of everything.

While on a call hosted by, if I remember correctly, the Emergence Network, a young woman Trina asked me, “why defend this word?” I don’t know if I was defending it exactly or suggesting that anyone else needed to be troubled by what had become of the world, as I was but what I was, and still am, trying to do was to redeem the word.

At first, I was trying to understand it. So I looked it up in various etymological dictionaries. I looked and was surprised by what I found: Beauty where I had imagined only ugliness. So often we can find utility in something that was discarded as useless.

Going back to the roots of these old words is a way we can be faithful to the language entrusted to us by the ones that we come from.

And so, I am here to make the case that the word ‘perpetration’ has its roots in the protection of innocence, not its desecration.

Note: I’m not suggesting anyone stop using this word in the ways it’s commonly used in modern times. I’m suggesting that this word originally meant something different and has become twisted and that it’s worthy to boil harmful things in the world back to their essence and to ask them, “What was it you originally wanted to be?”

There’s so much pain around this all and, for some, the word ‘perpetrator’ carries a needed heft, precision and clarity that is a healing balm for their wounds.

In all that pain, it can seem odd to center the etymology of the word rather than the experience of those hurt.

I’m not convinced that more attention given to those causing harm changes much or that that’s my work to do, though I’m glad there are many doing it. Not everyone can do everything.

The etymology might be a doorway to what it is I want to center which is the need for the capacity for intervention to be reclaimed so that we are no longer passive in the face of harm, abuse and coercion (which is what I see happening).

I hope to make the case that the same capacity (to transgress boundaries without consent) has a tonic and toxic form and I’m doing my best to make the case that we are worse off if we lump them together and throw them both out.

I am also suggesting that one of the consequences of demonizing this word - which conjours a transgressive, boundary crossing action is that what can also be thrown out is the capacity to use that sort of energy and action for good. Which is desperately needed now. I am suggesting that, if we don’t muster up that capacity (often used in predation) we also lose our capacity to protect.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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p.s. August 6-9th in Squamish, BC will be the Cascadia Men’s Conference: A mythopoetic gathering in service to tending culture through spirit, soul, and embodiment. There are a very small number of early bird tickets still available (a $200 discount).

p.p.s. Chris Gilmour is running a fantastic myth series called Old Stories Still Speak Mythology, Land & Ancestry As Guides in Modern Times. It’s featuring Kakisimow Iskwew, Dougie Mackay and Stephanie Mackay. It starts on February 23rd.

The Drive Home

I am driving home after a dinner at an old friends’ place. Her son, 18, is driving. He went to an alternative, charter school in town and I ask him how it was.

“Fucking terrible,” he said.

I am taken aback. From the outside it seemed like a good school. I ask him why and he explains to me that the school was run by two women who, full of good intent to empower women, had left many of the young men feeling like they were ‘the man’, the patriarchy, and potential predator who couldn’t be trusted and, in their early teens, they had no capacity to sort out the nuance of it all.

What to make of being a man these days?

He had left the school with deep shame about being a man and, deep inside, a perpetrator.

But, the word ‘perpetrator’ might not mean what we think it means.

The Wild Twin

Martin Shaw, in his book Courting the Wild Twin, writes of a king and queen who cannot bear children. They are a good royal couple. No complaints from the people. They do their job well. And yet… something vital is missing.

“Life preserving but not life giving: remember that thought of Bly. That’s what the wagons are circled around here. Nothing is harmed, but nothing thrives either. This is a less overt malaise than tyrant and tanks, but it’s a malaise nonetheless. If you’ve ever laboured to be a ‘nice guy’ over your own moral instincts, a ‘good girl’ and not shake the status quo, then you’ll know things can get pretty arid. Dried up… Being in charge can get awfully stale. So, we are not in the presence of tyrants, but a subtler stagnation. Too much civic duty can lack the sheer, thrusting eros required for new life to burst forth.”

Etymology of Perpetrator (Round One)

Although the word ‘perpetrator’ is often paired with the word ‘victim’ (where the victim is the good and innocent one and the perpetrator is decidedly not) there is nothing in the word that implies good or bad until the 1540’s when it was first used in English in legal statutes, which gave the tone and meaning of "to perform criminally." It comes from the Latin perpetratus (the past participle of perpetrare "to perform, to execute, to accomplish,").

The word, in the vernacular, just means ‘to do’. 

But deeper still… the word comes from two roots. 

Franco Rendich explains that in its deep Indo-European etymological roots, the letter p signified purification.

The root pa connotes meanings of “to perform [a] an activity of maintenance and protection [p], “to protect”, “to watch” or “to preserve”.

The prefix is per which carrying a meaning that weaves together "completely", “thoroughly” and “to beget” or “to produce”. 

He also denotes that “pr” or “par” are “an act that achieves [r/ar] a purifying result [p]”.

He goes on to suggest that “The Greek adverbs péra and péran are variants of para, which means “hereafter” or “beyond” in Indo-European. They come from the verb roots pr and par… in which the consonant p “purification” also implies “protection”, as is evinced from the roots pu and pa. The roots pr and par mean “to pass through”, “to pass beyond” or “to rescue”. In Greek, the action of “passing through” is expressed in a concrete fashion by the verb peiro (peir is a variant of per) “to pierce” or “to cross”. It is captured in this image below.

Here’s a deeper dive into the per prefix.

Per can also be expressed in a figurative sense by the verb peirao “to experiment”, “to test” or “to try” (or rather, “to cross a problem”). With the mind or with actions repeated in order to find a solution). The Greek term peira (-s) means “test” or “experience” (in Latin, the root per is present in ex-perior “to experiment”, which the Italian word per comes from).”

The second is patrare which means to "carry out,” “bring to pass” or originally "bring into existence”. This word patrare is, of course, from pater "father". The root patr carries meanings of “defender or protector” and pater, “he who purifies”, “he who protects” or “father”. 

The suffix ‘ate’ speaks to ‘having the characteristics, function or status of’. 

And so, we come to understand that there are many things this word does not describe: passivity, collapse, acquiescent, browbeaten, closed down and compliant, docile or dominated, led by the nose, lethargic or lifeless and listless. There’s no meek obedience in this word. There’s not submission or tame but perfunctory action. This word is not tepid or timid. This word is not half-hearted saying, “Well, we’ll see.”

Collapse Is Not More Noble

Some people deal with their stress by hurting others. Others deal with it by shutting down, attacking themselves and withdrawing.

The former is forever the villain and the latter forever the victim.

I want to make the case that this kind of shoulders rolled forward, head down approach to life is just as harmful as the head cocked back sneering malevolence we see too often.

The first hurts with their presence.

The second hurts us with their absence.

Given the state of the world, we can’t afford a collapse response.

Bullies, in our personal lives, community lives and on the global stage, are allowed to continue because we stay silent, do nothing and turn a blind eye. In any act of violence, big or small, there were often three or four people who might have intervened to stop it at various moments. Often there are many more.

But that's not only the way they allow harm done by others to continue and I am suggesting there's a more direct way the harm is done.

But, in this culture, it's invisible.

I remember Lewis Cardinal speaking about how the Cree understanding was that babies came into the world with closed fists because, in those fists, they were bringing something for us, some gift that had been prayed for.

Many indigenous cultures have this understanding, that each person is bringing some needed thing to their tribe and that the tribe's health and well being depend on it being given.

When people collapse, it is true that they are not doing overt harm. Oh, they're being 'nice men' and 'polite women'. They are 'respectful' and 'demure'. They are 'sweet' and 'gentle'. They are fitting into well with whatever scene they find themselves in and the waters around their boat are still and smooth as glass. But, what they are not doing is giving their gifts. One can not live a collapsed life and do what one is here to do. One can not live a life in which one is basing one's actions on what will get the love and approval of others and be giving one's gift.

Collapse is the invisible sabotaging of community. It's the leaving too much work for too few shoulders.

"At least I'm not hurting anyone," they will say and it will be said about them. "I'm not like those other ones out there. The perpetrators and bullies." There can be a smugness there. There can be a self-righteousness there.

I have seen people, so terrified of confrontation, that they couldn't speak their truth to others because they feared it would be seen as (or actually be) an attack. Instead, they worked behind the scenes, spread gossip, sowed seeds of division and tried to get others on their side on a particular issue. I've seen people shunned from communities in part because no one was willing to confront them and have a hard conversation.

Aggression is labled as bad but passive aggression is just fine somehow. And somehow this all gets rationalized as 'less harmful'.

I have seen people spend their days beating themselves up so viciously that it caused others deep concern, worry and stress. Their violence to themselves caused them to not give their gifts in this world and yet this is rationalized as 'less harmful'.

I understand this could read as my being upset at those who've been hurt and are going through collapse. But it's not. The upset is the with the ways that our society says withdrawing and shutting down or attacking one's self is more noble than those who directly express their feelings or confront others. I understand there are healthy and unhealthy ways to engage in confrontation; there's a difference between aggressive and assertive. Of course that's true. I'm not saying attacking others is a good thing. I am lifting up the question of whether attacking others is actually more harmful to the world than shutting down and if there might be a cyclical relationship between these two: people shut down and don't give their gifts and this results in a cultural malnourishment which lays the groundwork for people to behave badly and attack others, which causes more pulling away and shutting down which leaves less food on the table and soon everyone is starving, running on empty and tempers grow short.

I understand that, when people are triggered they can engage in fight, flight or freeze. I understand that all of those serve a noble purpose. I am contesting why we demonize one (fight) and the other two are so understandable and deserving of pity (flight and fright).

Some people are terrified to open up to life because life is wild and hard to control. If they open up to it in one area of their life then domestication in others might no longer suit them. If you open up to that wild life, you may risk the deep disapproval of those whose approval you've spent years, if not a lifetime, courting.

You can't shut your sexuality down and give your gifts. You can't clamp your heart into a vice grip and give your gifts. You can't let yourself be trammelled and trampled by others because 'your boundaries are mean' and then give your gifts. Your gifts come from the wild life that made you. That life is not interested in submitting. It is not interested in rebelling either. It is wildly driven to do what it came here to do.

I have known so many 'nice' people who are loved for their niceness who are dying inside and envious of everyone who isn't 'nice' who get to do what they want. But they don't. Because they don't want to be 'one of them'. They can't take the risk. It's too terrifying.

And, of course, the reasons that people collapse and retreat and play nice are all deeply cultural. I don't blame people for doing it. There are a hundred and one reasons not to give your gifts in this culture the first one being the reality that it may not be received by anyone. And who can bear that? Or maybe it will be received but with dismissal and derision. And who can bear that either? No, I don't blame anyone for collapsing but I will contend with it being valorized.

The reasons that people hurt others overtly and play mean are also deeply cultural. I wouldn't stop anyone from stopping them but I will contend with them being demonized. It always seems to be that hurt people hurt people. That the ones who do the most obvious harm were the most damaged by others. Those who beat their children were often beaten as children themselves.

I remember visiting my mother in the country. One of her dogs was so terrified of people. I reached out to pet her and she ran away and hid under the couch.

I looked at my mother, "What did her previous owners do to her?"

"I think it may have been more a matter of what they didn't do," she replied.

Neglect can have consequences as deep as overt abuse. Absence of love can make every bit as a big a mark as presence of hatred.

And so there are many ways to hurt the world. Who do we blame for the harm when it comes? The braided relationship of personal responsibility and cultural consequences will forever be wrestled with by humans and I won't propose to answer it here. But perhaps the question of blame isn't the most useful one, anyway.

Anyway...

I see it too often.

People shut down to life and call that heroism (or have it called that by others). They make themselves small and call that nobility (or are treated as noble by others).

Knowing it or not, they starve the rest of us of the food they came to bring.

They imagine it hurts no one because they imagine that they are not needed.

I’m not saying that collapse doesn’t or can’t have its own nobility and necessity. I’m saying it’s not more noble and that our rendering it as such has had untold consequence for our culture.

Collapse Is Dangerous

The opposite of ‘perpetrator’ is not ‘victim’. 

There is no opposite. 

The world doesn’t divide up neatly into these binaries. 

But another relationship to look at is the relationship between perpetration and passivity. 

I think of incels. The term stands for ‘involuntarily celebate’. It is a name taken on by men who can’t get women to sleep with them (and who imagine they are entitled to this).

But, entitled or not, they feel a deep loneliness in their marrow which, when combined with a deeply misogynistic and inanimist understanding of the world (which is the modern society in many corners of the world) creates a deep bitterness.

Incel men are utterly collapsed. They are defeated. They’ve thrown in the towel with all the other men. They feel powerless and so angry. 

Like many men, they’ve mistaken their armour of disdain for a having a backbone and approaching a woman when interested and learning from that approach if it doesn’t go well without making the woman wrong.

A collapsed man can’t act bravely when needed.

And so they hate themselves and the world. 

If you lack healthy capacity to perprate action in the world you will feel powerless.

If you feel powerless then you will either submit (and become a ‘nice guy’ while silently resenting it) or you will rebel (become an incel troll on the internet).  

But ‘nice guys’ are the most manipulative men out there.

And incels are terrifying.

A strange thing: It might be the lack of this healthy capacity to perpetrate that gives rise to the predators we see in the world.

In either case, their inability to take action in the face of difficulty delivers them to this.

Stealing The Key From Under Your Mother’s Pillow and The Cooking Pot From Her Kitchen

In the story of Iron John, popularized by Robert Bly in his book of the same name, we meet a young boy whose golden ball (his innocence and soul) has rolled into the cage of the Wild Man (who is utterly capable of perpetration in the service of life). The boy wants his ball back but the Wild Man, Iron John is his name, won’t return it unless the boy releases him. The key to the cage is under his mother’s pillow.

The boy is asked to transgress against his own mother. 

But such transgressions are needed for a boy to become a man.

Martin Prechtel, in his book Long Life, Honey in The Heart, writes of how the young men in his village, during their initiation into manhood were required, under the cover or night, to steal a cooking pot from their mother’s kitchen. A transgression. Once they had stolen it they were tasked with returning it without being caught; deception piled onto transgression.

A thread of this initiation process, which included a night of heavy drinking, was to break taboos; to do things that ‘good boys’ should never do. ‘

If a boy couldn’t perpetrate these things, they would never become a man.

If a boy couldn’t perpetrate these things, he would always remain a boy.

And, here’s a truth known to all traditional peoples: one of the most dangerous things in the world is an uninitiated boy. They grow into powerful adult bodies but with the swaggering entitled and “i’m the center of the world”ness of a child.

There’s much more to be said about the ending of childhood but, for young boys, this seems to, mandatorily, include a capacity to transgress.

The Uncuttable Apron Strings:

I am in Victoria.

I see a post on Facebook from an old high school friend. She is wondering about rites of passage for her eighteen year old son.

I message her, “I have thoughts on the rites of passage thing. I fly home tomorrow. Pick me up at the airport? We could talk on the way back.”

She does and her partner, not the father of her child, is with her. I’ve met him before and liked him right away.

“So, what’s going on with your son?”

It all spills out. He spends all day playing video games. He’s been promising to look for work but he hasn’t yet. Her ex-husband and her brother are still, in their forties, the same way. She’s terrified of her boy becoming that. 

“Ok. I have thoughts. First of all, he’s eighteen. The kind of initiation you’re hoping for? That’s gone. That needed to happen six years ago or so. It’s not coming back. It’s too late.”

She looks crest fallen.

“But, he’s still living at home, yes?”

She nods.

“So then, moving out is still a culturally sanctioned ‘big moment’. So, this is what I would propose. One day, he gets home and the locks on the house have been changed. He goes around the back and all of the older men in his life are sitting around a fire together.”

As I was to learn, there were almost no older men in his life. This was part of the challenge. 

“He asks what’s going on. The men invite him to grab a seat and inform him that the locks have been changed. He asks if he’s in trouble. They inform him that no, it’s a miracle, for the first time in his life he’s not in trouble. So why, he asks, are the house locks changed? Because he’s moving out, that’s why. He sits back and shakes his head and tell them he’s not moving out. They tell him that he is and that it’s already been done. His stuff has been packed up and it’s already over at this fellows place sitting across the fire from him. And that this wasn’t his mom’s idea. And that he won’t be speaking with his or seeing her until he gets his own place and invites her over for dinner.”

My friend’s eyes have grown wide now.

“Also,” I tell her. “This happens soon. In six weeks, not in six months. And, from here on out, the planning goes through him,” I nod to her partner in the back seat. “You already know too much.”

She looks horrified; genuinely shaken. 

She drops me off at home, her partner enthusiastically in favour of this plan.

I never hear from them again on matter. 

On Initiating The Young:

Ah. But imagine a different scenario. You are formally approached by a parent who is willing to submit to your plans.

They won’t ghost on you like my friend did. They’re willing to turn over the adult-making of their sweet boy to you.

First of all, in a society like this, you must be reckless and insane to take it on. I can promise you that, if you knew what it would cost you: emotionally, spiritually and financially, you would not say yes. But you did. And so did the parents. And here you are - self appointed in an endeavour that is so unlikely to work that, if there were insurance for this sort of thing, it would be utterly uninsurable. You’d be laughed out of the office.

But this makes me like you even more.

So, what do you do?

Well, if you and I were sitting together talking, I might share some ideas or recommend some books, but the translation would be over to you.

There is one thing I would make sure I tell you.

And maybe I’d start it out with the following story.

It’s the Summer of 2020, the world is still reeling from the successive lockdowns and fears that have gone along with the whole Covid-19 situation. I’m in Northern, BC visiting a friend on a horse powered farm.

The conversation about vegans comes up. I ate a vegan diet for fifteen years and it likely cost me my gallbladder. Ah well. We all make reckless decisions and they don’t always pan out. We just hope that the cost isn’t too much - to ourselves, to others and to this world.

This notion of ‘cost’ is what we keep circling around. My friend, who eats meat, is puzzled by her interactions with vegans and the place from which they come. The ethics or ethos, the intentions and interests that drive them keep eluding her. She understands, and agrees with, the concerns about factory farms. She understands the intention to be healthy and to sustain the eco-systems of the world. But there is something underneath it all that, like a fish under the water, is visible for a moment and then swims out of view. It’s on the tip of her tongue.

I tell her the following story, “Back when I was raw vegan and living in Santa Cruz, California, I heard of a fellow named Johnny Lovewisdom. Now, Johnny was a fruitarian. He only ate fruit. He only ate what the world freely gave - the fruits that fell from the tree. He’d moved to Costa Rica to live the good life decades back and then vanished. Well, this got people curious. Where had Johnny gone. And so, someone went to look for him. They found him, living in the jungles, toothless and insane. His teeth, due to a lack of minerals and good fats, had fallen out. Good, he’d said. They were ‘mandibles of destruction’.”

She shakes her head. We are riding on a horse drawn cart through the farm.

“They want to have no consequence on the world,” I say.

Her eyes widen and her head leans back. “That’s it,” she says. “They want to have no footprint on the world.”

But, from whence does this come, this desire to be so insubstantial? It comes from the spell that modern humans have been under for as long as we’ve been modern: that humans are a burden on the Earth and that burdens are bad. Maybe, we think silently to ourselves, the world would be better off without humans. 

It’s collapse by another name, the desire to not take up too much space, the less space the better. 

When camping, the adage is often, ‘leave no trace.’ 

How about this instead? Leave the distinct trace that a real human being was there. Why does the footprint of a human have to be ‘bad’? Maybe someone comes across the place you were camped by and they find a little altar of stones with some hand made bits of beauty offered to the natural world. Evidence. Consequence. A trace. 

If you are asked to initiate someone’s child, you are being asked to do something that has no chance not leaving no trace. And, if you succeed in doing so, you host a little camp out weekend, an utterly forgettable appreciation ceremony where you say all the things to that young boy that your father never said to you in exchange for the approval of this oncoming generation that has so many reasons to hate you, and you leave no mark, you have failed this boy. You have failed the parents. You have failed the world. 

If you do nothing because you realize how wounded you are and you can’t get over yourself enough to focus on this real boy whose adulthood has been entrusted to you, you have failed.

And that failure will leave a deeper mark than anything you could exact on them. The mark will not be visible to them. It will be visible to every woman they ever date as they proceed with sexual selfishness and hunger and deep emotional immaturity. It will be visible to their male friends who they let down over and over. It will be obvious to their employers who watch them phone it in, day after day, ekeing by with the least effort possible. It will be obvious to their children when they’re grown up and sitting in their therapists office trying to make sense of why they’re so fucked up. And it will be obvious in the eyes of the parents who you let down in a way you’ll never understand until it’s your kid and someone else promises to deliver them across the threshold of adolescence into maturity and fails for lack of trying. 

You’ll see the mark there most of all. 

Your role is to have consequence on the life of that child. Your job is to leave a mark on them that will, for the rest of their life, no matter what insanity the world whispers to them, no matter how strong the spell casting power of the modern, corporate media is, remind them that something happened. There’s a reason that boys were literally scarred. They had a mark delivered to them by men who intended consequence on them. They had something perpetrated on them by older men who didn’t ask for their consent or the consent of their parents. 

But you having a consequence on the child is not the main thing. That’s not what you’re aiming at. You’re aiming at helping that young boy understand the consequence they’ve already had on this world and the consequence they might yet have. Your job is to help them understand the bigger story of their life and Life itself. Your job is to help them wrestle with the questions of what happened and never happened that formed them as they are now, what is happening and what is not happening right now as you sitting with them. They ought to know all of the things you have set aside, all of the time being invested, everyone covering for you so you can do this insane thing. Your job is to help them understand all of the things that are likely to happen and not to happen as a result of all of this. Your job is to help them face, maybe for the first time, the consequences that humans have had on the world - the good, the bad and the ugly, to help them see how it might be otherwise, to see how deeply needed they and their gifts are.

Initiation is that young boy being confronted by consequence from every direction: from you, from their conscience, from the natural world and from the divine. 

If you shield that boy from any of those consequences, you have failed them. 

If you don’t want to be a perpetrator, don’t say ‘yes’ to those parents.

But, remember as you make your excuses, there’s a term for those who don’t want to have consequence on the world: cowards. 

My Father Is Dying But Won’t Speak Of It…

I remember years ago, Ian MacKenzie’s interviewed Stephen Jenkinson and Stephen shared the story about a woman who wanted to give her 65-year-old father a Die Wise death. She could see the immensity of the moment and the importance it had for him, for herself and for her family. She could see the consequences on our world of the privatization of dying and the seeing our death as our own possession. She could see how this is both the result and a central vector of the troubles of our times.

The trouble was that her father didn’t want to speak of his dying. He wanted, I imagine, to keep it small, internal and untroubling. No burden to anyone.

”How do I give him such a death and yet respect his desire not to speak about what’s happening?” she asked Stephen.

Of course, the answer was, “You can’t.”

The only way that she could give him and her family such a death was to not respect his wishes or get his consent but to roll the dice and ask something of him and the moment that he would not or, perhaps, could not do himself.

If she waited for it to spontaneously come from him, she knew it wouldn’t come. If were to happen, she would have to perpetrate it. 

On Bullies As Leaders

Years ago a friend told me about his son dominating the other kids, being a bully. It reminded me of the story that Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager, coaching his little league baseball team. There were three young boys; young, charismatic, from a rougher part of the neighbourhood and with all the markings of bullies. And so, he sat them down and asked them to be the team captains. “I see so much leadership in you all. These younger kids look up to you. You remember how it was when you were a few years younger. How cool the older kids were? You’re them now. Can you be the kinds of team captains that protect these kids and make them feel good about themselves?” He saw their capacity for harm and employed it for the health of the team.

A woman I met years ago, Brandon Bays, was in New York late at night on the subway by herself. She was a beautiful young woman and could see some rough looking young men staring at her. She found herself in a story she didn’t want and so she stood up and approached them, “Hi there. My name is Brandon. I’m by myself and scared. Will you protect me?” In asking them, she could she that something galvanized deep in their hearts and bones as the unexpected burden she placed on them asked more of them than they would have asked of themselves. They sat up taller, “Yeah lady. We’ll protect you.” She sat nearer to them and they began to speak. At the next step, a group of much rougher and less stable looking young men got on the train and leered at her. One of the men sitting with Brandon stood up and said, “Hey! Eyes off. The lady’s under our protection!”

A woman I used to know worked in Calgary working with indigenous communities. She would go into their schools to do leadership workshops. One of the first moves she would do was to ask the older kids to step into their role as leaders, “These younger kids worship you. Do you see it? They’re all going to do what you do.”

When we see the capacity for predation, this can, sometimes, be employed for protection.

The Wetiko Killers

Years ago, I read a booked call The Wetiko Legal Principles. It spoke on Native American tribes and how they dealt with those who had become infected by the Wetiko. Those who did might begin to crave the flesh of humans or want to hurt the young. They might look at their children but see beavers instead and find themselves hungering after them. If that person could tell the medicine people of the tribe soon enough, they could often, with effort, be saved. But, there were times when they could not be healed, and, after much deliberation, it would be decided that they needed to be killed and there were those, the Wetiko killers, who were tasked with this job.

Enter the Government of Canada who might learn of such a killing and want to arrest and jail the one who had been sanctioned by his people to carry out the act. The book makes the case that these tribes had their own legal systems that governed such matters and documents that clashing of these world views.

In order to keep the tribe healthy and well, these people had to be killed. That killing was a perpetration, true to the original meaning of the word - an act done to another without consent with the intent of protecting and keeping clean the village.

Perpetration and transgression have their needed place in this world.

The Etymology of Perpetrator (Round Two)

This word threatens to upset the apple cart but it’s current definition doesn’t suggest how. 

This word suggests an imposition but its modern usage doesn’t imply to what effect. 

This word is dangerous. In the dominant societies of the world, it is dangerous to the weak. But I want to suggest that, in its original form, it was dangerous to the powerful, the selfish and the careless. It was a word you might use to speak of Robin Hood himself.

So, tying a gentle string around the bouquet of wildflowers gathered into this word, we might find a rendering of this word ‘perpetrate’ which could mean something like this, “That one who has watched how things have been going for a while and seen that something has gone wrong that has tainted or poisoned things in the world and, by themselves, they have not gotten any better. Perhaps it is a custom amongst the people that has become ossified in and is now causing harm where it once had done good. Perhaps the King has become a tyrant. There are those who need protection. There are those who are acting badly and causing harm. A friend must be spoken to in such a way that it may risk the entire friendship in order to save the friend. Something must be done to protect the wholeness of things. But, to do that thing, it will mean a transgression of immense proportions. The old courtesies and slowness have to be set aside, boundaries must be crossed and consent will not be asked to do any of this. The  dice must be rolled with no guarantee that it is the right thing, that it will go well, that the friendship will survive or that one will be thanked or understood. An intervention must be conjured and brought to pass that might set a boundary that isn’t there but needs to be or that will pierce a boundary that is there but shouldn’t be.”

This is, of course, to say that there is a healthy side to the perpetrator. They are the one willing act and transgress boundaries and act without consent for the greater good. 

Hunting to feed your people is a transgression.

Approaching someone you are attracted to is a transgression. 

Confronting someone or calling someone out is a transgression (even if it is done in response to their own transgressions).

The parent yanking their child out of the way of traffic, the friend willing to call their friend out, the family intervening in the life of an addict, the protestor standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, the first women to say #metoo and name the ones who hurt them who had been insulated by privilege for too long… these are all done, and must be done, without consent of the other party. They are all  actions that perpetrate something onto the others. They are crossing boundaries without asking permission. There is a courage and nobility in this. Sometimes boundaries ossify and must be broken down. Sometimes the healthy need for consent becomes a pathological obsession with control. Sometimes we need safe spaces. And sometimes we need brave spaces. 

As Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote in their book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: "In our view, patriarchy is not the expression of deep and rooted masculinity, for the truly deep and rooted masculinity is not abusive. Patriarchy is the expression of the immature masculine. It is the expression of Boy psychology, and, in part, the shadow side of masculinity." 

The perpetrator isn’t inherently bad anymore than the pater or father is. 

The perpetrator is a function that must be played. 

The perpetrator might be a predator but they might also be a protector. The former is full of cowardice alnd the latter is full of courage. And of course, another possibility is to collapse in a heap, as if this is more noble. But collapse is not more noble. The world is in deep trouble. It needs us to be willing to do hard things, to act now and apologize later. It needs people to be willing to step outside the norm and test and try new ways of being without permission - even from the one they are experimenting on. 

A Blessing & Prayer For Us All

May we all have most of their lives guided by the deep respect for the sovereignty and autonomy of others - be they human or not.

May we all learn to, once again, be animists and know the world as alive. 

May we all know that all living things are in this world for their own secret reasons (perhaps secret even to themselves) and those reasons do not include being used by us for our purposes.

May we all learn the heartbreak that comes from taking what is needed to survive and to eat.

May we all be food for the Earth one day and feed their corner of the world again with their bodies

May we all understand what consent is and why it matters.

May we all know perpetration for the big medicine that it is; something to be used with immense care and infrequency. The old ones say that you don’t give a man a sword until you’ve taught him to dance. 

And… when it is needed (though it be needed rarely) may we all learn how to be perpetrators in this world - full hearted, life-giving, acting with an intention to be thorough and complete in one’s intervention, lightning bolts and thunderclaps of unexpected beauty and thunderstorms that clean the air, generators of petrichor, the old time, seed-planting fathers, protectors of what is sacred, never asking permission to act in service of life.

Additional Reading:

From a friend, “I recently read a wonderful Substack article from a man talking about how he came alive with Punk and for me inadvertently touched on what draws young men to”toxic masculinity” or fascist movements. It’s not mean spirited, it is a deep natural state with a need for somewhere to direct that energy. If the left keeps saying, shut yourself down, control and be nice, it leaves nowhere for those feelings to go. I love article like these that show how to redirect.

Liminal Lab

What Punk Taught Me

I was thirteen years old when my best friend Richard’s older brother Jim told us to sit down and listen. It was the summer of 1979. We were in his bedroom. He put the needle down on Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols and looked at us like we were about to receive something. We were. What came out of those speakers wasn’t music in any way I’d bee…

Read more

5 months ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Chris Hoff

Recorded fresh off the back off our shared time together in New Mexico at the Arc & Craft event that I co-hosted with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Anne Johnson, join Betty and today’s guest, and friend of the podcast, myself, as we explore culture-work as a living practice rooted in land, limits and shared responsibility.

I do my best to map out the often unglamorous work of village-making—potlucks, dances, welcomes, proper goodbyes—and the extent to which therapy might do well to prepare us for engaging with community in a healthy way; without replacing the culture-work itself.

• culture as living instructions held by human, non-human and unseen

• human scale and seven-generation thinking

• syncretism and empire; why multiculturalism differs from culture

• protoculture practices: potlucks, street festivals, meal trains, tool shares

• ceremonies for hellos and goodbyes as village-making moments

• therapy as prebiotic capacity, not a substitute for culture-work

• dangers of grievance, shaming, coercion and AI-enabled narcissism

• the role of business; avoiding manipulation and sponsoring culture-work

• merriment as antidote to the machine

Also mentioned in the podcast were:

Kâkîsimow Iskwêw

Dr Martin Shaw

Article: The Machine to the Merrie - Martin Shaw

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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p.s. August 6-9th in Squamish, BC will be the Cascadia Men’s Conference: A mythopoetic gathering in service to tending culture through spirit, soul, and embodiment. There are a very small number of early bird tickets still available (a $200 discount).

p.p.s. Chris Gilmour is running a fantastic myth series called Old Stories Still Speak Mythology, Land & Ancestry As Guides in Modern Times. It’s featuring Kakisimow Iskwew, Dougie Mackay and Stephanie Mackay. It starts on February 23rd.

Sometimes the most important thing you’ll do is to do nothing.

When I look into the world (and into my own psyche) I see a chain of reactivities.

They’re unconscious but not inconsequential. One could say that most of negative consequences we see in this world come from this.

I see it in so many relationships around me right now. Couples caught in reactions. I see it in my past relationships too. Things are just starting to turn around and then there’s another reaction and the whole thing catches fire again.

It happens inside our psyches, our relationships, our communities and in the world, this chain of reactivities.

And I find myself, as I’m sure you do too, asking yourself, “How can I be useful here? How can I help bring healing and not harm?”

I fail at this most days.

Sometimes our reactions are the kind that come from trauma (think of Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn). Sometimes they are the kind of reactions that come from shame (think The Compass of Shame). Sometimes they’re our unconsidered impulsivities, rooted in a nervous system all a-jangle, that have us do something without thinking the consequences through and, by the time we realize it, it’s too late.

The image above strikes me so powerfully, how the match doesn’t attack the matches for their inflamed reactions. It merely steps away and refuses to pass it on.

There’s an enormous power to biting one’s tongue (temporarily), refraining (vs. repressing), sleeping on that text or email you were about to send–just long enough to ask ourselves, “Is this a response, or a reaction?”

And then to breathe. To go for a walk. To vent to a friend. To get the empathy and emotional oxygen we need so that we can come back with love and something useful rather adding fuel to the fire.

I am reminded daily about how much more space most of us need in our lives than we get and that those with the privilege of some more breathing room have the opportunity to use that space to breathe deep, do our inner work and be useful to those who don’t.

As Stephen Jenkinson often puts it, “A healthy village doesn’t mean that no one’s crazy. It’s just that not everyone is crazy at the same time.”

Today, it’s me.

Tomorrow, it’s you.

Whoever is, temporarily, sane gets leaned on and has a chance to bring some healing.

Whoever is sane can bring cooling waters to the fires of outrage and grievance.

That’s not what happens in unhealthy communities: tensions are inflamed, conflict is reframed as abuse, harm is overstated, sides are taken, the victim/perpetrator binary is established (with everyone else expected to be rescuers).

As the old adage goes, “It’s tempting to want to take the wind out of their sales but it’s usually better to take your sails out of their wind.”

Don’t react.

Step back.

Don’t keep the chain reaction going.

Be a place where it stops.

There are so many responses we can bring to reactivity but one of the best is to ask the hurting one to share what’s going on for them and to let them talk while you listen and give them the empathy they need for the pain they’re in and, thereby, help them reconnect with what’s actually alive in them underneath all of the surface anger and grievance.

Another is to apologize fully for our part in how things went.

Another is to say ‘no’ firmly and kindly.

I remember being involved in a possible rite of passage for a younger man. There were two other men involved and one of them, in a Facebook thread, was enormously reactive. I turned to the other and said, “That kind of thing will kill this dead.”

In the end, it did.

So many beautiful endeavours die due to this chain of reactivities.

I remember the story of a well known man who had a history of womanizing. Years after his cancelling, he wrote a piece about finding himself on a train across from a beautiful woman. And, for the first time, he caught himself: this would be the moment he would have flirted with her, asked her out and the same pattern would have repeated itself. He did nothing and, in doing nothing, stopped a chain of reaction which he had no doubt inherited from his family and this culture.

You could make the case that one of the core themes in folklore is just this: Don’t react. Respond. In how many stories, is the hero or heroine guided by wise animals who tell them, “Whatever you do, don’t touch the golden saddle,” and, of course, impulsively, they do.

Of course, they do.

Of course, we do.

Take it to your journal, your meditation cushion, the woods, the fire, the ocean, the gods, your God or your friends.

Let the internal storm die down and come back with soothing winds.

And, to do less reacting, we often need to do less in our lives. I think most of us are running on empty and deeply depleted by over-giving. When you’re running fumes, there’s not much chance for anything but reaction.

Doing less. It’s not a bad recipe for an era of ‘more’.

It’s not a bad aim these days: Just don’t make it worse.

Breathe.

Don’t react.

Respond.

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Additional Resources:

Not Reacting When A Bee Stings You

A small thought today for those living with the weight of regret.

Reverend Michael Beckwith once said, “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies that called.”

You won’t be ready for what you want when you start.

You’ll be ready when you’re done.

Another way to say it: you’ll be ready too late.

I often joke with friends who are doing a new event for the first time, “Well, you’ll be ready to do the event by the time it’s over.”

Another way to say it: mistakes, some of them costly, will be made along the way.

Another way to say it still: when you begin something new, be it a project or a romance, there’s so much you don’t know, about the others involved, about yourself, about what it takes and what it will ask of you. And you can’t know. You won’t know. Not until it’s over and the dust has settled.

When I started to offer my new signature workshop, The Seven Fundamentals of Ethical Marketing, I knew that I was aiming for 60 minutes. I also knew that, the first time I did it, I’d try to pack in too much.

The first time I ran it, it went 90 minutes.

I wasn’t worried. I’ve been through it enough. So I cut out 30 minutes worth of content and I ran it again.

80 minutes.

What?

So I cut even deeper, cutting some of the best parts of the thing. Parts I couldn’t believe I was cutting. I ran it again.

80 minutes.

Dear God.

So I cut even deeper, wondering if there’d be anything worth doing after these cuts but cutting enough that I’d finally arrive at my goal of…

75 minutes.

Are you fucking kidding me?

By the tenth time doing it, I hit sixty minutes and had the bones of something to be proud of.

But this makes it sound like a victory march.

The learning is costly. Often, most of that cost is not born by us.

It’s easy, and good, to laugh about it when it’s a workshop.

But not when it’s a relationship that had all the markings of ‘meant to be’ on it, handed to you by the gods themselves, and you drop it. And it shatters. Then, when you look back, seeing so clearly everything you wish you’d done differently, seeing the human shortsightedness, selfishness and stupidity that you’d imagined you were beyond, you try to put it back together.

But it’s too late.

Too late for you.

Too late for that.

And so you spend time in that old, human, road house of regret for a while, with its self hatreds and self recriminations, sitting around the meagre fire it allows hoping, more than anything, for the company of others who know this, who have failed like this, all the while overflowing with disbelief that you were capable of this level of failure.

I think it’s one of the reasons why the old stories, the myths and folk tales, are so precious to us still. Of course, in part, they’re told so we won’t make the worst mistakes we could. So we learn from those who came before us. But, even more so, they’re kept alive so that, when we do (and we will, there’s little ‘if’ about it), we’ll have a friend who understands even though he was a king, or a princess, or a little beggar child, who lived so long ago no one remembers exactly when but, in his story, we meet them – someone who has failed like us too.

Here’s an old story: A fellow meets a beautiful woman. They fall in love. She moves into his home. They spend the night in each other’s arms. He comes home the next day from hunting to the thatch torn from the roof and his love gone, stolen by a giant in order to protect her from the man who, the giant could clearly see, didn’t have the capacity to hold her. And then it’s a long journey to develop the capacity he so sorely lacked. The story doesn’t say that he curses himself for his failure to protect her as he goes but I think that’s in there.

I once read a quote that said, “Listen to your elder’s advice not because they are always right but because they have more experiences of being wrong.”

It’s like that.

But having those stories of failure to pass on doesn’t always erase the sting of the failure, the heartbreak doesn’t vanish, but, with care and work, it deepens. The healing doesn’t lead us to feeling less pain but to feeling more.

As my brother, a stand up comedian, would say, “Comedy. Tragedy plus time.”

A botched workshop can be funny but it’s not funny when it’s your health and you find the right path but too late and, in retrospect, you look back and see how careless you’d been.

It’s seems to be one of the thumbprints of our humanity, that we are ready for a thing only once it’s over. We are often prepared when it’s too late for it to matter for that one. We should have seen it more clearly at the time, we tell ourselves, but we didn’t. We knew better, we tell ourselves, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I think of that song that George Burns used to sing.

That’s the song of someone who knows.

You’ll be ready when you’re done.

It’s a hurtful thing to know.

Maybe it’s what William Stafford was speaking of in his poem A Ritual To Read To Each Other when he wrote:

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

We often seem to recognize it too late.

For you.

For this time.

But it also means we’re more ready for the next time (which is cold comfort some days).

It also means you have stories to tell of those who come after you (and that is a comfort for them).

It also means that you get to discover the true meaning of friendship and who your real friends are.

I think Stephen Jenkinson, in his book How It All Could Be said it better than anyone I’ve ever met.

“Inescapable truths have always struck me less like executioners and more like angels.

Wrestle your executioner if you will, but the best outcome you should expect will be a subtle shift in his estimation of you while he delivers on the irreducible result of why he is there. It can only be a desperate event.

He is and will forever be your executioner after all, before he became your friend or confidant and after. But wrestle your angel: already this sounds like a different business entirely. Not many people can recall a time in their lives when they wrestled an angel.

In our age this is often mistaken for more personal conflict, more intrapsychic bamboozling, or maybe an inner child trying to stay childlike against the odds.

But angels aren’t part of our psyche, in my experience.

They are not part of our inner architecture.

They might, though, be part of the architecture of the way life is.

Or you could say, angels might be the way life has of being itself, come suddenly to call on who we are trying to live at any cost.

If you wrestle an angel, you will grow muscle.

There’s no doubt of that.

You will hurt in places you didn’t know you had. No doubt of that either.

And you will lose, by the normal calculus of trying to engineer the life you hope you deserve. It will not come out as you had planned, wrestling angels.

Your plans are usually the first casualty of the match. But here is the great secret of it: you will be able to boast of your defeat. You will be able to stand in the wreckage of what used to be your certainty, your creed, your way of doing life’s business, and you can tell wild, true stories of how it all came to ruin.

Whatever is left standing—and there is always something left standing when you wrestle angels—is the thing that was true about you and about your life all along, as faithful a companion as the earth that will someday cradle you again. Finding someone to tell, who will stay still long enough to listen and might understand, well, that is a human struggle.”

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A few weeks ago, I sat down on zoom with a dear colleague of mine Lian Brooke-Tyler for a fourth interview over the years.

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This week’s show is with Tad Hargrave. Tad is a hippy who developed a knack for marketing (and then learned how to be a hippy again).

Since 2001, he’s been weaving together strands of ethical marketing, Waldorf School education, a history in the performing arts, local culture work, anti-globalization activism, an interest in his ancestral, traditional cultures, community building and supporting local economies into this work of helping people create profitable businesses that are ethically grown while restoring the beauty of the marketplace.

Tad did improv comedy semi-professionally for 25 years, co-ran Edmonton’s progressive community building network TheLocalGood.ca, founded streetcarshows.com and the Jams program of yesworld.org. He speaks Scottish Gaelic and helped to launch and co-facilitate the Nova Scotia Gaels Jam.

He is from Edmonton, Alberta (traditionally known, in the language of the Cree, as Amiskwaciy [Beaver Hill] and later Amiskwaciwaskihegan [Beaver Hill House]) and currently lives in Duncan, BC (Quw’utsun territory).

In this episode, Lian and Tad explore how living stories form culture, meaning they’re more than psychological metaphors, they’re teachings tied to the land and beings around us. They touch upon Tad’s Waldorf childhood and the years he drifted, the Gaelic homecoming that pulled him to Scotland and an elder storyteller. They follow the thread from archetype to architecture… sun, soil, and seasons.

From there the conversation turns to how stories remember what a culture must not forget, why punishment poisons, and how initiation is smuggled into folktales so boys and girls grow into people.

Listen if you have ever felt imprinted by myth then somehow lost your connection to it, wondered why archetypes can feel lacking, or longed for belonging.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

✨How Tad’s own hunger for ancestral story led him from activism to Gaelic study, reawakening a lineage of belonging

✨How old stories once carried medicine, mapping the plants, elements, and ethics that kept a people alive

✨Why myth without land becomes psychology, and what returns when stories are rooted back in place

(recorded on October 28th, 2020)

You can listen to the full audio of the interview here, starting with a bonus track of Lisa Hodgson singing Dark, Dark Heart from Dark Roads (the new album from Stephen Jenkinson and Gregory Hoskins). Below you can read an augmented transcript of the interview.

– Introductions –

Tad: My name is Tad Hargrave. I run MarketingForHippies.com, an online business dedicated to helping good people, from holistic practitioners to life coaches to farmers, crafters, and permaculture practitioners, find ways to market that feel good to them and the people to whom they’re marketing, ways that feel good but are also sustainable.

My guest today is Stephen Jenkinson. Stephen Jenkinson is an activist, teacher, author, and farmer. He’s the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School in Tramore, Canada, and the author of four books, including Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, the award-winning book about grief and dying and the great love of life. In 2018, he released Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble.

I asked to speak to Stephen today on the theme of stories and spells. It’s our fourth conversation together. Over the past decade, the marketing world has been full of the importance of telling your story in the marketplace.

Sometimes these stories come from an honest and good place, and sometimes they don’t. More often than not, marketing, advertising, and PR seems to practice a kind of what could only be called “spell-casting,” convincing us that we’re inadequate and need whatever products they happen to be selling at the time.

But I didn’t want to talk with Stephen about marketing. I wanted to go deeper into an understanding about these two old technologies that seem unique to humans: storytelling and spell-casting. So, Stephen, welcome.

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Stephen: Thank you, Tad.

Tad: So where does today find you?

Stephen: Well, I’m at home, which up until this year was very rare. In fact, I haven’t seen an autumn at home probably for five or six years, so it’s very odd to watch the leaves come down. I’m wondering what’s happening. [Laughter] And of course, I’m really wondering what’s happening, given everything else that’s falling down.

I’m a very odd denizen of my own environs, because I spent so little time here over the years that the forced confinement, even though from the outside it would seem idyllic and a perfect place to go through a plague, I’m finding it just an odd, strange, and sometimes despairing place to be.

There’s nothing wrong with the place, I should say. This is all on me, as despair properly should be understood to be. It’s all on the despairing one. It’s, after all, my despair.

Tad: Yeah. Many of us find ourselves in the same place, or different places, but a similar despair.

First of all, I should say thank you for being willing to sit down once again in front of a computer or on the phone. I imagine there are things that could pull your attention on the farm where you are and work to be done, so thanks for taking the time to be here today.

Stephen: You’re very welcome. Thanks for asking.

Tad: My first questions, I suppose, are to help situate and come to at least some temporary understanding of these words, because I’ve heard you speak about both of them, story and spell, over the years in your writing and in the school and various environments. You have a different understanding of them than I’ve heard most places.

So maybe we could start with — I suppose it’s a big question —

– What is ‘story’ in your understanding? –

Stephen: This is a kind of question that should break down of its own accord, really. It’s too monolithic. It’s like asking you about God, but I’ll try. I’ll see if I can break it down and speak to it at the same time.

There’s nothing generalizable from what I’m about to say about it, I don’t think, nor particularly reliable. We’re wondering here. This is increasingly illegal activity, to be engaged in a wonderful pursuit, so I’ll see if I can stay on the side of the law, the way things are going.

A story is… I used to be very uncomfortable with the notion because it reminded me of Morris dancing, if you know that. Are you familiar with Morris dancing? [Laughter]

Tad: I am.

Stephen: Okay. I’m laughing as I say the phrase, which is a terrible thing to do, but there’s just something a little arch and a little, perhaps, stiffening about an engagement with Morris dancing. I say that purely as, it’s my problem. I used to hear storytelling or a storyteller or things of that kind basically in that way: it was a re-enactor’s kind of precinct.

As I got older, and particularly in the last, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years, where mysteriously some kind of platform has been established beneath me that I stand and occupy from time to time and people have been willing to entertain what I have to say, I’ve had to rethink, because I’ve stood there and I realized, basically — and I’ve said it many times — all I have is stories occasionally interrupted by an idea. That’s really all I have, and thank God it’s saved me from being a salesman.

So that’s one characteristic of stories, is if it’s a real story and it’s functioning faithfully that way, it can’t run for office and it can’t sell you anything. That’s probably a strange parentheses to begin with, but I find that the fact that a story can’t advocate for a particular position or concept or a grievance — and especially these days — to be enormously trustworthy.

There I’m saying that I find story to be a deeply trustworthy, compelling, and rooted proposition. It’s a kind of fingerprint rather than an artifact, it seems to me, by which I mean rather than imagining a story as something that the hand of life or the divine or the best of humans makes, you could imagine story is a way of those things doing their making, not an artifact, but a verb, really, a making way.

That’s fundamentally how I understand stories to work, is that, as wildlife would have it, they have their way of proceeding. As soon as they’re bent out of shape, they very quickly cease to be a story and very quickly turn into diatribe, harangue, a pitch, and the rest.

In that sense, I don’t think stories believe in anything at all. They’re not artifacts of belief. They don’t seem to be that interested in belief, nor are they strictly reportage: “He said,” “She said,” “Then,” “Then,” “Then,” “Then,” not really like that.

Stories, when they’re faithfully attended to, I think the best of us — or the part of us that’s engaged in good faith — recognizes a story’s emanation, recognizes it almost immediately, over and above what’s being said and who’s saying it.

You could say that maybe story is in fact the oldest profession, after all. Stories is a way by which something about our lives that is difficult, if not unbearable, to approach in a naked and unadorned fashion is somehow more doable when it comes to you via a story.

It’s no probably secret now: I was lucky enough to have an undeclared apprenticeship with a storyteller when I was in my early 20s in Boston. In fact, I just received a piece of film that’s — wow, is it 40 years old — probably 40 years of old, of him and I performing together. I haven’t seen any such thing for, wow, a long, long time. He’s well dead now.

I watched the first 20 seconds of it. It revived my willingness to lay aside my old re-enactor grievances about stories and storytelling and storytellers, and remember again how immaculately human this guy was. That’s all he ever called himself, was a storyteller, and I was lucky enough to accompany him for seven or eight years before circumstances had it otherwise.

So that’s a little bit about my first stab at what it is. I repent, I should say. I used to have, obviously now, a dim view of the thing. I’ve become corrected as I’ve begun to unwittingly occupy the position of being what I think is something of a storyteller now. Really, I’m not self-effacing when I say this.

I’m pleased that that’s all I have. Oh, I have my grievances like anybody else, but I never mistake them for a story and I never tell them in that fashion. I might relate my grievance. I might grieve aloud or be aggrieved aloud, but none of those things are stories. Stories are something you serve, not something that you press into service.

(Post interview note: In my August, 2018 interview with Stephen on Elderhood, Stephen said this. It feels relevant,

“What I was lucky enough to be in on from probably a very early age is stories, of all things, and stories are not just ‘one thing after another’. Stories have a very particular arc or you could say only stories have arc.

Arguments don’t. Diatribes don’t. They have intentions. They have sometimes diabolical strategies but there’s nothing strategic about a story. A story has a kind of arc that’s somewhat user friendly but absolutely world friendly. There’s something about the arc of a story that is as naturally occurring as snowfall or the rain that’s falling just outside the door as I’m talking to you now.

Naturally occurring doesn’t mean without consequence, by the way. It doesn’t mean benign but it certainly means that it’s in the order of things, that stories virtually seem to tell themselves although God knows they need a good teller, and they need a good hearer to appear as a story. I was exposed to the arc and the lilt of storyness or storydom, or something from a very early age.

Of this I’m fairly certain because I’ve never not heard that way. It’s in my ear, not a particular story, but storyness is in my ear and everything is available to me that way. I’ve found that people credit me with a certain capacity for memory but it’s not a factual memory.

The memory that I have is a kind of nuanced Geiger counter of ‘story movement’. That’s how I remember things, because the story suggests in almost a serpentine fashion what preceded the moment that you’re enquiring after right now, and with enough attention to that, the story begins to suggest to you something about the moment that you have not quite arrived at yet.”

And, in his Interview with the It’s Hot in Here Podcast (50 minutes in or so) Stephen said this,

“The beautiful thing about stories is… there’s no argument in them. There’s no ideology in them. Stories are an ideology free zone where you get to recognize the comings and goings of life that are apparent there regardless of how you feel about them which is a more important realization to have I think. By the same token, there are no stories in arguments which what the news is all about now. It’s all about arguments and no story. I think people are withering for lack of stories wherein their own lives become recognizable to them. I think there’s something in [stories] that can make their own people’s lives slightly more available to them than anything that they can hear in the popular media.

Tad: Thank you. That’s beautiful. It seems like a contrast, and not maybe an opposite, but there’s something that often has some kind of kinship to story that isn’t so familiar. It seems there’s a marked difference between spell and story.

I’m wondering. It’s a similar monolithic question, I suppose, but what is your understanding of spells or this in-spelling that can happen, because it seems that’s very different than story?

– What Is ‘Spell’? –

Stephen: I don’t know if it’s as different as you hope it is. Here’s what I mean by that. It would appear to me that spells and stories are easily mistaken, one for the other, largely because they get dressed in the same dark change room. They’re arrayed very similarly, not that easy to tell apart, nor should they be, frankly.

A spell is an enchantment. The beautiful verb that’s buried in the middle of that word is the verb to not quite sing and not quite say.

I’ve discovered, particularly over the last 18 months or so with Nights of Grief & Mystery, and then doing some records and all of that, composing and so on, that I’ve been chanting for some time now. As a good Anglo-Saxon, I’ve chanted with alliteration way more than I’ve done so with rhyme. It’s come quite readily to me.

So you could say, and I would go along with you if you did, “But you’ve engaged in enchantment consistently and probably made something of a living doing so.” That’s true. So how is that not spell-casting? Well, I didn’t say it wasn’t.

Let’s wonder for a minute what spell-casting is and go back to chant subsequently. A spell is a spoken thing. It’s not an intended thing. If it remains in the realm of your intention, it’s a stillborn, little piece of stone that resembles some intention you may have had.

If it’s romantic, it has a good PR campaign working for it, obviously. Who doesn’t want to be spellbound if it has a tremendous sexual and affectionate upside? I suppose a lot of people do.

It’s really hard for a spell to deliver on the upside consistently. I think anybody who’s walked the road knows that. It’s not an easy thing to admit aloud, but of course, it’s true. It doesn’t have a lot of staying power.

Spells of the darkened kind, which I think is partly where your question might’ve been headed, are very hard to contend with, largely because of their resemblance to things like affection and attention and stories.

So what gives them their darkening proposition? Well, my best guess on the subject is that the darkened aspect of spell is a consequence of the seductive inclination that the spell seems to participate in, to the exclusion of most other possibilities.

Seduction… Let me take a second with it. Seduction, as best as I’ve come to understand it as a meager practitioner, a failed practitioner of seduction… I wish I had been better at it. I used to wish I’d been better at it, until I’d come to an understanding of what it was.

Seduction is a way of seeming to give something, when in actual fact it’s mostly theft. You can, in a thieving way, give people attention and come away with more attention from them than they ever got from you, for example. A spell is seductive because it’s full of promise. In that sense, it probably requires, dwells upon, lingers in the future tense, or the allegation of a future tense.

I think that’s where you find the spell doing its fundamental work. The consequences are all in the present, but the staging area for a spell is actually the future, the “could’ve” and the “would’ve” and the “should’ve” and the promise as opposed to the vow, for example, and the allegation of “forever and ever,” “amen,” and “truly, truly,” all of these elements or aspects of spell-casting.

Spells, as I began to say earlier, are made with the tongue, aloud. Until they achieve that status, they’re something else — I can’t think of a word for it right now — but not to be held in particularly high esteem.

When a spell materializes, it’s spoken. It’s heard, and as such, it has an immediate, different kind of consequence than whatever the intent might’ve been. The amazing thing about spell-casting, unless you’re highly achieved at the business of it, is that the consequences that spin out from spell-casting and from seduction go way beyond the intent that marshalled them in the first place.

Spells employ language. This is what makes them so hard to contend with and even to recognize, because it’s the same language that a love song would employ, the same language an exhortation would employ. And so you begin to mistrust the language across the board when you’ve been on the receiving end of spellbinding and seductiveness and so on.

I’m not saying anything that you yourself haven’t heard, no doubt, many times, the idea that language is just inadequate to the deep “verities” of the inner life. That’s complete bullshit — excuse my language.

The language that we have available to us, the English language, is more than adept at giving you every valance, every degree, every inflection you need to make yourself known and understood, if that’s your purpose. It also gives you all of those things with which you could disappear and cease to be available and accessible and all the rest.

So it’s very tricky now. Spell-casting and spell-breaking are essentially achieved by the same mechanics. It’s very unnerving if you don’t get an unsentimental education in spells and in the power of language at some point in your relatively young life.

You’re likely to stumble into your middle age so extraordinarily vulnerable to them and at the same time fundamentally mistrusting their power, but you don’t say that. You say you mistrust their capacity, but it’s not really the truth. The truth is you mistrust their power, having been on the receiving end of a little bit of power unleashed. That’s a bit of a beginning to what I’d say about it.

Tad: Well, it’s interesting because I noticed when you started speaking about stories, you spoke about them… The word that came up a lot was “trustworthy.”

When you were speaking about spells, there was something about it that seemed to have a consequence of violating a trust, in which people might question language entirely or people’s intentions entirely. I’m wondering what it is about stories that has them be so trustworthy and spells that, at least of the darkening kind, can be so untrustworthy.

I heard you with the seduction piece. I’m wondering. There seems to be something about the consequence of the two. I’m wondering if, in your experience, when spells are spoken, they can spin out in their consequence far beyond what the intended impact was. Do you find the same is true with story?

Do stories have consequence like spells do?

Stephen: Yes. If you talk about impact in a neutral sort of way, then I guess the answer would be yes.

Let me double back on your question a little bit… let me speak to an early part of what you said.

You came back to me invoking the idea of stories being trustworthy and spells somehow not so much. You never heard me say that trustworthiness in and of itself is something to pine for or to give yourself over to. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say it. So I’m saying now that trustworthiness is not all it’s cracked up to be, if, by “trustworthy,” you mean somehow assured.

There was a moment in the last book I wrote called “Come of Age.” I think the chapter’s called “This Is An Important Safety Announcement,” where I called into fundamental disrepute the notion of safety.

Or let’s use a slightly different word, “readiness.” You know: “I’m not ready for da, da, da, da, da, da, da.” When you investigate what people mean by “not ready,” they usually mean not insured against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

It’s by the same token. When people talk about feeling assured, or feeling that such-and-such a person or a place or a time or an idea is trustworthy, they seem to mean that they can now unflex, uncoil, and bask in the glow of an assured outcome that only means them good. That’s very naïve, no? Your willingness to trust something is not the same thing as saying, “It’s going to be okay.”

Let’s use the example of dying, something I’ve been around and know a little bit about. I’ve called dying a “deity.” Death is a god. Here’s what I meant by it and here’s its relationship to what we’re talking about now.

I’ve got interviewed about this — I think it was yesterday morning — by an Australian outfit. I was up at 5:00 in the morning to do this thing, and they said, “You’d never know it,” which was hard to tell if that was a compliment or not.

They asked me about this very point, about the current plague being a god, which I had said at some point. In their question, they asked me, “So what does this god want, insist they foist upon us?” and so on and so on.

I came back and I said, “Wait. What makes you think that’s the repertoire of the divine, simply because we come to the divine with a list of expectations, demands, including infallibility, including the insistence that the divine at least must be trustworthy?”

In other words, what? The divine plays by our psychic rules, and our longing after safety and so on is the divine’s principle preoccupation and concern? And if the divine really wants to be recognizable to us as the divine, it will be benign instead of divine? Where is all this coming from?

My answer? This comes from a chronic lack of deep, unvarnished encounter with things divine, and so we turn it into an aspect of, “Wouldn’t it be great?” which, again, has that future problem.

So this is all a way of me taking part of your question and saying I never said that “trustworthy” means it’s going to work out okay in the end. “Trustworthy” means, at least as I meant it, that this is likely to be true to its nature. It’s not likely to be duplicitous.

Whether that will work out well for us, being exposed to it as human beings with peculiar needs, is an entirely different question, Tad, right?

Tad: Mm-hm.

Stephen: Okay. It’s a very big deal for what we’re going through now. Of course, I have long since forgotten the thrust of your question. Could you revive it for me?

Tad: Well, yeah. Thank you for that. One of the things that it made me think about was the etymology of the word “truth.”

Stephen: Oh, yeah.

“So far as I know, there is no word in any early Germanic language that means quite what we mean by ‘truth,’ least of all the words cognate to our word ‘truth.’ Old Saxon trûên, Old High German trôsten, Old English Truwian: these words convey meaning of loyalty, uprightness, and trustworthiness, not those of the Modern English ‘truth.’ Old English soð did not come to mean ‘truth’ (translating Latin veritas) but its earlier associations were with personal avowals and asservations.

These associations continued to be dominant, as shown by the frequent use of soð in contexts of speaking oaths, citing customs and proverbs, telling the future… and telling a story. Given the use of soð, it was perfectly possible to ‘tell a true story’ (soðgiedd wreccan) even though the story was completely made-up and less a story than a song built around an extended metaphor. What made it soð was that the lesson was true…

like Truwian, soð was less a veridical proposition about the world than a capacity adhering to the man deemed credible to speak it or a quality of the truth being spoken. Trustworthiness, wisdom, standing, cunning,: these are the qualities one would expect to be valued in societies where oath-helping was a common means of proof; where the worth of an oath was gauged by a man’s standing; where interpreting dreams and healing illnesses needed canniness and command of lore; where truths were expressed by maxims, similes, riddles, and tales. Within the field of such values, there might be good stories and bad stories, useful stories and not-so-useful ones, stories that confirmed to and supported tradition and ones that did not, and the criteria of judgment were probably highly specific to particular needs in particular situations (just as a particular god was good and useful in one situation but not another); but the idea that a story was simply ‘true’ as an abstract absolute – this is something we do not find…” – (excerpted from Chapter 4: Truth and Its Consequences: Why Carolingians Don’t Speak of Myth by Geoffrey Koziol of the University of California, Berkeley from the book Myth in Early Northwest Europe edited by Stephen O. Glosecki – emphasis mine).

Tad: And how it seems to speak more to the person speaking and the qualities of them, just that the testimony could be relied upon, and… Let’s see if I can revive this.

When you were speaking about stories and you said there’s something about, they have a way of being themselves or they don’t vary from that way of being themselves, does it feel like spell is different than that?

“Does a spell vary from its way of being itself?”

Stephen: Probably. Probably, because spell is, I think, more in the manner of Mephistopheles than it is in the manner of Homer. That’s one of my rare classical allusions. What I mean is that there’s something about spells that can fit into a quiver of arrows quite readily. Spells can further the program, and the dark program more than any other kind.

Stories, they don’t do very well at hiding the chicanery that’s trying to mobilize them. Stories have a way of simply shrugging off the bad suit of clothes that the miscreants try to dress them up in.

Yet the remarkable thing about spells is how speech-reliant, speech-engaging, speech-determining they are. The good news about that… Okay, sorry, not the good news. The challenging news, first of all, about that is that every time speech is resorted to, this possibility about spellbinding, spell-casting, exists.

“There are, in every profound sense of the terms, neither good nor bad words. There is speech, and it is a powerful, conjuring thing, and on the skilled tongue it does not submit, crimped into domesticated, housebroken categories. For example, though you many never have said aloud what I am about to write, I think intuitively you may have known it to be so and may have lived some aspect of your life accordingly. Spells are not cast in the mind, in silence. They are cast by the tongue, in speech, aloud.” – Excerpted from Come of Age – Chapter 12, The Rock and The Hard Place

This is nowhere more prevalent than what we’re obliged to endure every time we make the fatal error of opening our “emails” or our YouTube thing or the stuff I don’t know anything about, the social… What’s it called?

Tad: Social media?

Stephen: Yes. You can see I’ve never done it, but I’m alert to how it’s being preyed upon and worse. These things, we’re in the midst of a degree of spell-casting that’s technology-reliant and technology-perverting so fundamentally now that it reminds me a little bit of what unnerved me when I was in the death trade, which came to this.

The advancement and the innovation in medical technology, including drug innovation, was so relentless that it was beyond the capability of any medical practitioner to keep pace with the scale and the rate of this innovation.

What this meant was, so as not to be left behind and so as to be able to deliver to their patients the “best possible care,” they were obliged to take it on faith from the drug reps and from the med tech salespeople.

If you let that observation in for a second, then something almost unbearable begins to dawn on you, which is that for all the right reasons, the medical practitioners, especially at the high end, are very vulnerable to doing the wrong thing, taking dictation from salesmen and saleswomen. Right?

Tad: Mm-hm.

Stephen: Okay. What’s happening — and it’s still happening, and it’s happening more so than it did when I was there — is that the innovation is so relentless that the practiced wisdom that should be there to guide its use, its application, to consult as to its advisability, and more often than not, to decide to not employ it at all, is lagging so far behind that at this point, there probably isn’t any practiced wisdom that’s in keeping with the innovation that sets itself upon us every time we’re in extreme medical circumstance.

That’s the deal. If it’s not the drug reps, it’s the business guys associated with the hospitals. That’s a very eerie thing.

What’s the parallel to what I was talking about a minute ago? Well, the very machine that you and I are going back and forth on is tracking. When it advises us about its privacy statutes and so on, what you have to realize is they’re throwing you a bone when they do that.

They know that in the vaguest, most uncommitted, and probably not-very-believable way, we’re concerned about our privacy. We’re only concerned about it to the point where we can get reassured by the people we should be concerned about, about what becomes of our “data.”

It’s not clear to me at all that people are concerned enough about it to refuse to part with the data — that is to say, to refuse to participate, and in so doing, be left on the dung heap of progress, which I’m perilously close to myself.

So all this is to say then that the parallel from dying to IT is a similar parallel from IT to language and spell-casting, that language can be employed for very dire purposes.

The exact same language can be employed to redeem that darkness.

“Upon this rickety branch of the English tongue, with its rogue prepositions and its vagrant, poetic, skaldic soul, I propose to drape my dread, my contrition, my pleas on behalf of elderhood among us. There’ll be etymologies to consider, prepositional subversions to administer, poetry to revel in. I hope you’ll find that employing a language to subvert its madnesses and emerging with a syntax of sanity in a troubled time is worth the considerable trouble and attention to detail and disciplined sorrow that it will take. It seems to me that much is now hanging in the balance.” – Excerpted from Come of Age – Chapter 2, Modern English

What distinguishes one from the other is the willingness of the buying public to assume fundamental responsibility for how they participate, how they receive it, how they send it along and so on, so that they stop leaving it to the pros.

If we were to do that in the circumstance of palliative care, end-of-life care for people, it would be a much different operation. If we were to do that and with respect to medical technology, it would be a much different operation. If we were to do that with respect to the technology that you and I are employing now to speak to each other, it would be a different deal.

If we were willing to educate ourselves about the consequences of language and the consequences of speaking and invoking or putting to speech something, then the… What are they calling it today? Not the “diatribe.” Not “discussion.” Help me out here, Tad.

Tad: Oh, “narrative”?

Stephen: Okay, “narrative.” There’s another word I can’t think of right now.

(Post Interview Note: I think the word we were both trying to find was ‘newsfeed’)

This would be a different order of engagement than it currently is.

In other words, language is neither trustworthy, nor untrustworthy. It’s the same way you would describe a wild animal. You only use the word “trustworthy” as to whether or not it makes you food. It makes food of you — that’s what I mean to say. That’s what makes it trustworthy or not.

Well, that’s not a calibration that the animal would even recognize or hold in any particular esteem. If the animal is hungry and you’re in its backyard, well, the chances are very good it would overcome the general disagreeability with which we present to the wild and sate its hunger. It’s no less trustworthy for doing that. Language is like that.

Tad: So that’s something about animals can be trusted to be themselves, and language can be trusted to have the consequence that it does, as well. Am I hearing right?

Stephen: Yes, provided that we don’t mistake a wild animal for a feral animal and we don’t mistake, let’s call it, the “God-given languageness” of the human mind with the half-assed half-speak.

“Given half a chance, these young people dangling from the thread of instant transformation could well go feral, their domesticity slipping, imagining themselves wild and free and dangerous. Dangerous: that much is true. That is the old adage—there’s nothing more dangerous than young people who are needy unawares, who are not gathered towards what needs them. All of this has come to pass in a time and place where elderhood is in eclipse, where wisdom is relegated to opinion, where age is endured and not radically learned from and employed, where seniority trumps sagacity. That is no coincidence.” – Excerpted from Come of Age – Chapter 9, The Fourth Temptation

I can’t even begin to marshal the adjectives to describe what we’re being subjected to now in terms of the political process, particularly south of the border right now. That’s not language, or if it is, it’s language unrecognizable to itself. So we have to work ferociously hard to redeem a spoiled language.

When language is seconded to the workplace, to the marketplace, and to the political process the way it has been done — including all the metrics that are being employed to sell people stuff, all the Amazon stuff, all of that — until we redeem the language, it’s understandable but deeply lamentable to me that people continue to diminish and disregard the power of language as being in and of itself untrustworthy and too slight to bear “the truth.”

It’s one of the ways by which we come to an understanding of what constitutes the truth, is by speaking our way towards what could that possibly mean.

– Four Spells Of The West –

Tad: Yeah. To change gears a little bit, in your book, Come of Age, you speak about the four spells of the West. I remember the first time I heard them, I was so staggered by them because there was something about your speaking them that over the years has had me see them everywhere, hear it in people’s language, read it on the page.

I was curious how you came to that understanding that there were these spells of the West. I don’t know if you recall the moments where that happened or the thought process behind it, but it was such a potent thing. When I’ve shared them with other people, there’s been a similar response, a similar consequence.

Stephen: Well, it’s very difficult to remember the first time you thought a thought, because the first time you think a thought, it hasn’t taken on its language heredity yet. Because of that, I don’t think it’s accessible as a memory.

“So with that caveat in mind, I come to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who have carried the West to the world. Yes, flagrant language, indicting and accusing language, to be sure. For a few pages, I’d ask that you not decide prematurely as to the accuracy or fairness of the image, but only consider, and extend something of the host’s etiquette towards these unruly guests who may even now be tarnishing the furniture and bringing down the tone of the marketplace of ideas.

There are four markers, four cardinal points on the compass of recent history, a history during which we’ve seen the malignant breaking of the world into colour-coded spheres of influence, a calculation and conjuring by which the West and its ways and means, is recognizable. These four markers are probably more recognizable to whatever outsiders, pagans, and renegades are left than they are to civility’s beneficiaries, its crusaders, its pitchmen. Each has been offered up to the world as an achievement of civilized people, though it is probably better to say that each of these things was done to people in order to civilize them, by people to whom it had been done, and so on down the sad line. But and so on does not mean “that’s how it’s always been.” That notion, as may become clear, is one of the Four Horsemen.

Each of these markers is part meteor and part crater, part cause and part consequence. For all that, they are spells. By this I mean that what has come to pass for history, for the way it is, is likely a kind of veneer that has been laid over the armature of the verities and particulars of time and place so convincingly that our habits of understanding and preference and the eye are more persuasive than most learning we are subject to. By the four spells of the West, I mean four epistemological and phenomenological habits, four bewildered habits of the mind that have come to “hold space” for the West. These spells—universality, eternality, inevitability, potentiality—are carried on through the generations principally in the habits of our speech.” – Excerpted from Come of Age – Chapter 12, The Rock and The Hard Place

Stephen: That’s a rather elegant way of saying I don’t recall how these things came to me. I do recall that they did, and I recall a gratitude bordering on giddiness. They shimmered forward, all four of them at the same time.

If you were to ask me what they are right now, I would labor tremendously to try to remember them, largely because I haven’t read the book in some years now. I think potential was one. What are the other three?

Tad: The eternal, the universal, and the… Eternal, universal, potential, and inevitable.

Stephen: There we go. That’s good. I like the sound of it still. I think these things, things like this, they’re entrusted to you for a very brief time and not to be mistaken as your own kith and kin, which is why I can’t remember them as articles of faith, because that’s not what they are to me.

They were a kind of realization that it was all language-driven, language-bound. Each one of those things is syntax and grammar. That’s how it appears. One of them, not the inevitable, but… Sorry, can you do it again? Inevitable…

Tad: Inevitable, potential, universal, and eternal.

Stephen: Right, so at least two of those need the future to happen. The future remains, as best as I can understand it, an allegation. Nobody’s experienced it yet, so it’s not clear that there is such a thing, but it’s a useful conceit to get to take the pressure off the current situation, I guess.

I’ve never taken a lot of comfort, certainly not in my adult life, in the notion that there’s a future. I’ve got my hands full with having been lucky enough to have a present that I’m trying to be faithful to. No, again, that’s not the right word — to try to be an authentic citizen within. That’s what I mean.

I’m glad you find them useful or disarming or disheveling or disconcerting. Certainly, by the time they occurred to me, there was something about how I was built that could accommodate their corrosive consequences.

In other words, I guess I’d already seen the consequences, particularly in the death trade, such that when the formulation occurred to me, a good part of me said, “Oh, yeah, that. Sure. That’s what I’ve been seeing,” without being lucky enough in the early days with the language to make it discernible to me. When the language was finally granted to me, my days in the trade were numbered.

Again, same deal. They were all spell-breaks, spell-rupturing things. None of them were easy to take. It’s certainly undermined and finally limited my employability, not only in that field, but I’ve never had a job since I saw those things.

So you see I can’t possibly recommend them to people who have mortgages to pay and things of that kind. I don’t. I put them in a book and I might as well have said, “Caveat emptor,” about those things, because they will diminish your capacity to take seriously what the system asks of you, the regime asks of you.

In that sense, it’s very much like the story I’ve told many times in Nights of Grief & Mystery about the dying nurse, where she was dying and then she wasn’t as a consequence of getting some test results. This is right towards the end of the story. I have to say to her something like,

“You know, you have to go to work this morning with this realization about what being a dying person and then suddenly not being a dying person has done to you, about what’s asked of you every day. And it’s not clear to me that you’ll be able to join the walking wounded, those of us for whom endings are all matters of lifestyle choice or failure of the will.”

– On The Perils of Spell Breaking –

Tad: Well, it’s interesting. Speaking of the caveat emptor, I’ve seen how people have come for you when you start speaking to these spells or dropping the dye in the swirling water of this culture to help illuminate and bring these spells into some sort of appearance. People don’t seem to react too friendly to having these spells pointed out.

I’ve seen this consistently. When people have spells of this culture pointed out to them, often people get very tired, people get very foggy, or people can get very angry. I’m curious if you have any understanding of what’s going on. Why is that? Wouldn’t we want to be liberated from a spell that was keeping us maybe from seeing clearly?

Stephen: Or would we? Would we? How much evidence can you marshal that that’s what we want?

Tad: Right.

Stephen: Okay, so there’s the dilemma. There’s a “should” implied in what you said, but it’s not something that you can actually observe very much.

The parallel I draw for you is this, often referred to by me, “idea” of being in a room full of people. I’m at the front of the room. I’ve proposed nothing in particular. I ask them, “How many in this room know that they’re going to die?”

If they’ve come to see me, they know what the right answer is. They know the right answer is, “I know,” and so eventually everybody’s hand goes up. So I thank them for answering the question and then proceed to demonstrate to them beyond any reasonable doubt that they don’t know that.

The thing I point to is the role of knowledge. The assumed role of knowledge is that it informs how you proceed. That’s what a known thing is supposed to do, apparently, especially something as vital to the proceedings as the fact that they’re not going to last.

You would think that would be highly sought-after information. But I was in the trade, Tad, and I’ve got no reason to lie to you: it was not heavily sought-after information. You could demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that most people didn’t know they were going to die.

They suspected. They feared it. They may have on occasion been curious about it as long as it didn’t get too close. But the knowledge was nowhere to be found because it didn’t inform the way they proceeded in the months and years and decades prior to that moment. You couldn’t trace the knowledge in how they were proceeding, you see?

I’m using the same idea about, I’m going to use the word “disillusionment,” because that’s probably what I’m a purveyor of. More than any other single thing, I’m a merchant of disillusionment. That’s what I’m hawking.

I don’t promise it’s going to release you from bondage or soothe your aches and pains. I’ve never promised, to the best of my knowledge, anything about the consequences of disillusionment, except that even though it would appear that this should be the very thing that you would seek — to not be laboring under illusion — you discover much to your chagrin that illusion works, baby.

It really works. It works the same way addiction works. It’s indisputable in its efficacy. That’s the problem, if illusion wasn’t so powerful, wasn’t so compellingly a one-size-fits-all solution, temporarily and erringly and not very satisfyingly.

But for a time, man, it’s as good as anything can be to labor under an illusion. To have it pointed out that that’s what you’re doing is as unwelcome as discovering that you’re being cheated on. You might still love the person, but what are you going to do with the love now that it’s not as clear that it was reciprocated as what you thought?

So you should pray for disillusionment, but only if you intend to live a life that’s a story, a story that could be told and could be entrusted to a generation to come. That’s the big “if.”

– On Story and Culture –

Tad: When people ask me and say, “Who is this Stephen fellow? What does he do?” one of the things I’ll often say is I just see you as an advocate for real, achieved, human culture.

You make this beautiful distinction, a series of distinctions, one of them relating to culture and civilization. I’m wondering if there’s a connection you see between story and culture? When I think about civilization, I suppose I don’t see story in the same way, but I see it as kinship between story and culture. I’m wondering if you see anything there yourself.

Stephen: I do, and this is what it would be. It’s hard to argue if you’re telling a story. It’s hard to choose sides when you’re telling a story.

You could bend yourself in the direction of trying to identify with a character or a circumstance in the story, but that’s not the story. That’s you. The story itself is remarkably adept at not being in the least concerned about the buy and sell of the marketplace, or ultimately of civilization.

The beautiful thing about a story’s relationship with culture is that you can remember a story for much longer and in much more compelling and necessary and mandatory circumstance than you can remember an argument, an idea, a concept, a metaphor, a simile.

It’s quite marvelous to observe this very simple, almost epistemological fact, that it’s very hard to remember an idea: “How does it go again? How does that go?”

The amazing thing about telling a story that you’re trying to recall is that no matter where you begin, the story begins to tell itself in almost some kind of mycelium-on-the-forest-floor fashion; that your willingness to tell it somehow moistens the ground enough that whatever was waiting and somehow incipient in the ground bursts into remarkable flower as a consequence of you beginning to tell it.

Then you can barely keep up with the story as you’re beginning to remember it. It casts cadence over your cadence. Have you had the experience I’m describing?

Tad: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

(Note after interview: I find this to be even more true when a group of people are trying to remember something together. In his book Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong gives a fine illustration of this:

“In the period he studies, Clanchy finds that ‘documents did not immediately inspire trust’ (Clanchy 1979, p. 230). People had to be persuaded that writing improved the old oral methods sufficiently to warrant all the expense and troublesome techniques it involved. Before the use of documents, collective oral testimony was commonly used to establish, for example, the age of feudal heirs. To settle a dispute in 1127 as to whether the customs dues at the port of Sandwich went to St Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury or to Christ Church, a jury was chosen consisting of twelve men from Dover and twelve from Sandwich, ‘mature, wise seniors of many years, having good testimony’. Each juror then swore that, as ‘I have received from my ancestors, and I have seen and heard from my youth’, the tolls belong to Christ Church (Clanchy 1979, pp. 232-3). They were publicly remembering what others before them had remembered. Witnesses were prima facie more credible than texts because they could be challenged and made to defend their statements, whereas texts could not (this, it will be recalled, was exactly one of Plato’s objections to writing).”

Stephen: It’s amazing, no? You’ve never done that with an idea. Even if you do, like one of my ideas that you might’ve been trying to explain to people, and even after you get it right, there’s very little satisfaction. Why? Well, because ideas are a dime a dozen and they just… It’s okay, but they’re seasonal.

Stories are epochal by comparison. That’s what makes them both children of culture and godparents of culture simultaneously, is that a culture can recognize itself in this telling beyond argument or dispute. They’re still left with the remarkably onerous job of translating the story that they know about themselves into a political process and a social justice process. The work is still there. It doesn’t make it any easier.

I suppose you’ve got to turn to Leonard Cohen at least once in an interview. You have to. At least as a Canadian, you have to, and so maybe this is what I mean. He said it better. He said,

“I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean. I love the country, but I can’t stand the scene. And I’m neither left nor right. I’m just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless, little screen. But I’m stubborn like those garbage bags that time cannot decay. I’m junk, but I’m still holding up this little, wild bouquet.”

That’s story talking. In the rare times when it stops telling a story and is willing to submit itself very briefly to an autobiographical interview, that’s what it sounds like.

“I’m neither left nor right. I’m just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless, little screen. But I’m stubborn, and I’m not going away.” Time cannot decay this thing that’s been entrusted to you. What you will do with it constitutes the fate that you wrangle. That’s the deal.

I took an entire story on the new record called… Which one is it? Rough Gods. It’s a story called “Fate” and it has four movements to it, almost symphonic, some symphonic movements, if you will. In each one of them, there’s a refrain: “Hey, what time is it?” Towards the end of the observation, that’s what time it is.

So I do my best to answer the question, which is another way of saying, “What’s going on? Where are we? And why do I call it ‘Fate,’ of all things?” Well, of course, the way “fate” is used today, both of us know, is it’s used to foreclose upon possibility and to say, “Well, it’s the inherited way that it will be.” In that sense, here’s that future tense again.

“Fate” actually, etymologically, meant something very close to this: right now, the gods have spoken. That’s what the world is. That’s what gravity and photosynthesis and everything in between. That’s the gods having spoken. That’s what the world is. It’s made up of what they declared.

That’s not fate. Fate’s the other half. The other half of that is, now that the gods have spoken, what will you do?

That’s why it took me a 12-minute story to wonder in four parts about that and about the consequence for young people who are inheriting a derelict understanding of social responsibility and a broken-down marriage to the real world. I know that’s what they’re inheriting.

The notion that this legitimizes grievance as a proper orientation to everything that has preceded you, becomes the fate you thought was visited upon you by those who became before you. See?

– The Labour Of Spell Breaking –

Tad: I’m struck by how it seems a couple times in this conversation there’s been an implied labor around stories, that when we hear a story, there’s something entrusted. I’ve heard people say, “This story can work on you.” I think that’s true, but there’s also a kind of labor of sitting with a story, reflecting on it, listening to it, listening to it again.

Stephen: Being disillusioned by it.

Tad: Trying to remember it, all of these things. It seems perhaps there’s something with spells, where the same level of labor isn’t asked of us. I think about your…

Stephen: Only if you’re trying to break them.

Tad: Aha.

Stephen: That’s where the labor is, with respect to spells, is trying to undo them. But no, this is a point very well taken. I’d never really thought of this before, but I’m very compelled with your idea now that there’s something about spells that absolves us from any further labor or involvement or sheer recipience or celebrance or endurance.

Story, on the other hand, just doesn’t give itself away in the backseat in 20 minutes. It just doesn’t do it. It’s not coy. It’s just not getting in the backseat with you. It stays in the front seat and looks at you in the rear view mirror and asks you if you’re finished yet, because it’s waiting for you to proceed. It’s quite remarkable.

I know I make it sound like it has a sort of personality type. Story does, but these are my limitations, trying to find a way to make what story has been to me and done to me and meant to me accessible to people for whom this might not just be an idle word.

Tad: It has me think about your distinction between prejudice and wisdom.

(Note after interview: I’ve heard Stephen speak many times about the difference between prejudice and wisdom; that prejudice seems to come in the breast milk. It can be osmoted, inherited, absorbed and passed on with so little effort. Wisdom, on the other hand, seems to need to be laboured over by each generation as they take the seeds of wisdom, the proverbs and stories passed down to them and try to see how, and if, they fit the times and places they find themselves in. Prejudice asks nothing of us. Wisdom asks a great deal of us.)

There seems to be a kinship between story and wisdom, and perhaps prejudice and spell. There’s something in a spell that stops us from wondering, stops us, or can, anyway, stop us from, as you said, thinking any further, wondering about it any further.

Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time.

– Farewells –

Stephen: Well, Tad, you’re very welcome. I don’t have a lot else, actually, like most of us. I’m getting lost in this hopeless, little screen more often than I wish I was. I’ll tell you this by way of signing off. I’m not aware that in the brief but intense sojourn known as my little life, I’ve really made a bedfellow of despair, but I’ll tell you this.

Starting in somewhere around July, I encountered a degree of despair so profound, so impersonal, so compelling that it was unnerving in a fundamental way. I was really wondering whether something anatomical hadn’t occurred, whereby for the duration, this would be my demeanor. I was that concerned about it. It was so pervasive.

I’ve thought about it since and thank everything that bears me in mind that it’s lifted and hasn’t recurred in that way, but I don’t see myself as past it. I see myself as being called to attention by it. I know I said it was impersonal before. I’m perhaps recognizing it as something that is afoot, that doesn’t actually have much to do with me at all.

If I have any particular function in this world here in the last decade, or whatever it is I’ve got left, to have the seismic consequences of despair register upon me so profoundly that I mistook them for my own character or my own life was hugely valuable.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. But I seem to have been tuned or tempered again by the particular poverties of this time to be those poverties’ true child, which is why, when you ask me to talk about these things, I say, “Yes,” because they seem to be my lineage, or at least my parents for the time being.

We have work to do, ladies and gentlemen. We, honest to God, have work to do. Let’s close out by remembering this. I’m going to tell this story imperfectly, not by intent, but as a consequence of my faulty memory on the matter.

I heard that there was a place in Iceland very recently, where the civic authorities or someone else took it upon themselves to put a sign at the foot of a rapidly receding glacier. As best as I can recall, the sign said something like, “We know now what’s happening. We know what we should do, but only you will know if we did it or not.”

So here’s the question, folks. Who was the third sentence aimed at? Who was that spoken to? Who’s the “you” that’s being referred to? You could say, “The future generation,” and you probably wouldn’t be wrong, but I’m thinking it was the glacier. “Only you, the glacier, will know if it we did it or not.” That’s how deep-running the intelligence of the world is.

– Rough Gods / Dark Roads –

Tad: Thank you. Well, as we close here, I want to make sure people know a couple of things that you’ve just launched into the world.

For everyone listening, in 2015, Stephen created Nights of Grief & Mystery with Canadian singer-songwriter, Gregory Hoskins. I had the pleasure to attend many of these evenings in 2018-19. With a five-piece band, they’ve mounted international tours, released three albums, most recently — I hope you’ll all go and get your copies — Rough Gods and Dark Roads.

These albums and all of his other books, video products, and work can be found on the “Work” tab at OrphanWisdom.com. I can say I haven’t had a chance to listen to much of the new albums, but the Nights of Grief & Mystery album is an extraordinary achievement, incredibly well put together.

– Stone Fence Sagas –

And then this month, in October 2020, Stephen is offering a four-part livestream speaking series entitled Stone Fence Sagas, which is a four-part livestream speaking series.

Each one will be organized around a different theme, so

October 29th, it’ll be “Truth/Reality/Personal Experience”;

November 5th, “Radical Citizenship in a Time of Plague”;

November 19th, “Patrimony, Matrimony, Ceremony”;

December 3rd, “They Eat Teachers Here.”

Prompted by these themes, ticketholders will be invited to submit questions in advance through an online form. These questions will be read, considered, and a selection of them will be asked of Stephen by a small, in-house audience during the evening.

So those are coming up. Tickets are available, and of course, if you go to the website under the “Events” tab, I believe you’ll find that. I’ll put all of the links in the transcript with this, of course.

Stephen, is there anything I’ve missed that you have coming up, that you’d like people to know about?

Stephen: Well, only this: that all of this that you’ve kindly mentioned is a preamble to the dream that Hoskins and I have of reconstituting our tour of this year, next year. If there’s any way at all, we’ll perform all of that work really for the first time live as soon as we can. That’s our intent, and that’s what I’m living for.

Tad: Well, that’s what I’m looking forward to. Thank you, again. Thank you, everyone, for listening, and signing off until next time. Take care, everyone.

Stephen: All right. It’s in the can.

Tad: In the can. Well, thank you so much, Stephen, and blessings to everyone on the farm.

Stephen: Thank you, sir.

Tad: We’ll be in touch.

Stephen: Beautiful. Take care of yourself.

Tad: You too.

First of all, thank you too all you who contributed to the fundraiser for my dear friend and Alberta based, cultural, indigenous activist, Kakisimow Iskwew. We’ve raised $4000 and if we could hit $5000 but midnight on Sunday, I’d be thrilled.

I am writing this from a hotel in Santa Fe as we, myself, Kimberly Ann Johnson and Stephen Jenkinson prepare for Arc + Craft.

It was years ago, on a ferry going to the Orphan Wisdom School that Stephen looked at a few of us and said, “Right about now is when you want to start paying attention.”

What he meant, as I recall, was that, as you approach an event, the signs and auguries will begin to appear that could give you a sense of how the event might go and what might be needed - that the world would hand you some threads you might best use to begin your weaving of your time together.

I’ve found this to be true of opening circles as well. It is the off hand comment made in an opening circle that often tells you how the whole event is going to go as if the whole gathering were held in the seed of the opening minutes.

Years ago, with Rapid Fire Theatre, back in my improv comedy days, I used to teach a workshop called The First 60 Seconds. I would have people do a scene for sixty seconds and then we’d stop it and talk about where this scene seemed to want to go: what was likely, what was unlikely, who was high or low status, what did each character want. And everyone in the audience knew. Everyone in the audience could read it. I think we could have done it in 30 seconds. It was all there, the whole scene, in those first seconds if you knew how to pay attention. Most scenes that ended badly did so because they weren’t faithful to their beginnings.

And this is a reason why, when approaching anything of import, the manner of approach matters so much because the way that you approach the thing will be among the clutch of things from which the entire event is woven, good or bad, intended or not.

And so Stephen Jenkinson, Kimberly Ann Johnson and myself are approaching Arc + Craft. We arrive at the venue, Ghost Ranch, tonight. Over the past days, I’ve done my best to keep my ear to the ground and eyes open to what’s happening and threads might be being given over to us.

I landed in Albuquerque at 10pm on Nov 12th and caught the shuttle from there to Santa Fe where I met a couple, in their early thirties. She, a painter and artist committed to making a go of it and him a massage therapist of ten years. After over a decade in Santa Fe, they’ll be rolling the dice and moving to Denmark, where she holds citizenship.

I asked them how the world seemed to them these days and they spoke of their concerns in the sharp rise of homelessness, crime and violence (or at least the growing fear that it is somehow looming in urban centers) the cost of food, the steep toll on mental health that the lockdowns exacted and what AI might mean for us all.

She asked of my work and I told her of my last national tour in Canada and I mentioned my sessions on the story of Briar Rose that I’d led, four of them, along the way.

”Oh I know that story! I went to an art exhibit about it. It was so disturbing!”

And, of course, the artist’s entire positioning of the story was that Briar Rose was about sexual transgression and the disempowerment of the feminine when, in fact, it is the opposite. But this is what happens when the only lens you have on myth is modern psychology and politics.

And so, appalling as it was of me to even try, in the ten minutes before we reached my hotel, I tried to shoehorn the story and a more faithful exigesis of the story, apologizing for even trying to do so along the way.

She seemed grateful for it.

And so there are all of these threads: the concerns of the young about the world as it is and might be and some shame about the cultural patrimony left to us by our European ancestors.

Other threads that have appeared are that of being a custodian of your craft and whatever you are presiding over. That if you sell textiles, and you know the provenance of them, that part of your job is to protect them and make sure they get into the hands of those who will care for them properly.

Stephen found this in his time in the death trade: no one was on death’s side. Everyone was on the side of denying the reality of what was happening. No one would use the D word. And so, he had to ask himself to whom he owed his allegiance: to the dying person or to death? His book Die Wise is the result of that meditation.

As he began to be asked for guidance and his participation in the weddings of younger couples in his midst, the same formulation and wondering began to appear: to whom do I owe my loyalties and from whom do I take marching orders? The couple or from matrimony herself? And so, his book Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work is the result of that meditation.

Those attending have their loyalties too: to their work, their places, their people and their customers (as many of them try to wrangle the differences between coaching and culture work). I imagine that all of that and their belief, or lack of belief, in the aliveness and cultural consequence of these larger forces of death or matrimony, rites of passage and ritual, will appear.

I think that’s a thread.

And then there’s this, a thread that’s appeared in conversations as we approach: if everyone healed themselves, if the great goal of personal development were achieved, would the world be healed? I suppose there’s a case to be made on both sides, but, as I grow older, I tend to lean more firmly towards “No. That’s not enough.”

And thus our event about culture work and supporting culture workers in wrangling with these questions, particularly in the face of a world of commerce.

And any kind of real culture work, relies heavily on the old laws of hospitality and it’s twin roles of host and guest. The other day, sitting in the van outside our second hotel of the trip, I leaned over to Stephen and said, “So much of culture work comes down to these roles of host and guest.”

“And, if you look into the etymology of those words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ you find out they’re basically the same word. They’re both in on the same thing. So, what’s that third thing?"

I think that will be a thread too.

In the lead up to the event, I did three interviews with Stephen on the theme of Starting With The Poverties that were shared with the participants of Arc + Craft.

So that will be a thread.

I’ll report from the other side of this thing in a couple of weeks to let you know what appeared and what didn’t.

I know Kimberly and Stephen have their own threads in their hands too.

The weaving has already begun and it will start to become visible over the coming days.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

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The culture is at a tipping point.

AI as therapist. People losing faith in the human body. Fragmented education, fragmented birth. We’re grief literate but still determined to outwit death. Politics breaking families apart.

There is little sense of commons, diplomacy, or shared values.

With no active rites of passage, we arrive at the altars of birth, death, and matrimony with a pile-up.

For a limited time, I’m opening the vault on my most requested collaborations with Stephen Jenkinson — three courses for the price of one.

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This is not self-help. This is cultural repair work. Oral tradition. Village mindedness in a time of cultural estrangement.

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This is three courses for the price of one — and the last time they’ll be offered at this price.

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For today’s Substack, I wanted to share a story from Michael Newton’s fantastic collection of folklore, Into the Fairy Hill: Classic Folktales of the Scottish Highlands, which no serious scholar of their Highland Scottish ancestry should be without. Also, a fantastic Christmas gift to get your Scottish and Scotland descended friends.

The winter is coming or already here in some places and the cold weather of struggle, hardship and trials beyond our capacity to endure are also here in this world and in these times. This is a story of encouragement: your people have known colder winters than this and survived. You will too.

Donald C. Macpherson, a native of Bohuntin, Lochaber, contributed this tale to the periodical An Gàidheal in 1872. It was one of the most popular items shared in the céilidhs of Brae Lochaber around the turn of the twentieth century.

In order to gain a better understanding of the tale’s significance, it is useful to compare it to two other Gaelic variants: a version that Calum Maclean collected from noted tradition-bearer John “the Bard” MacDonald of Highbridge, Lochaber, in 1951, and a version collected in County Mayo, Ireland, for the Irish Folklore Commission in the early twentieth century. These all belong to a Gaelic ecotype based on the tale type AT-221 “The Legend of the Oldest Creature,” which was popular in Celtic literature and tradition. What might seem to be a quaint children’s tale has incorporated archaic motifs from Gaelic cosmology.

In all three tales, an unusually frigid Beltane morning sends someone on a quest to find out if there has ever been a colder Beltane. In both the Irish variant and that from John MacDonald, the first character to appear is the local manifestation of the chthonic goddess figure (Cailleach Bhéarrthach in Mayo and Cailleach Beinne Bhric in Lochaber), who helps to begin the quest. Although she has been lost to this variant, her presence in the ecotype indicates its mythic nature.

Beltane marks the end of the dark and cold half of the year, and the beginning of the light and warm half of the year. For a Beltane to be unusually cold suggests that there were unusual climactic conditions that broke the expected norms of the calendar’s cycles. Gearóid Ó Crualaoich suggests that this refusal of the winter to yield to the summer may be an ancient memory of the Ice Age. The salmon asserts that even those who survived that extreme event suffered losses.

The place where the salmon is found in the Irish variant of this tale is also significant: Eas Rua (anglicized as “Assaroe”), where Fionn mac Cumhaill ate the salmon of wisdom (see the tale “How Fionn Got His Psychic Powers” in the next chapter). This association underlines the role of the salmon as a keeper and bestower of wisdom, as is befitting for the oldest of elders. The similarity between the name of Eas Rua in Ireland and the river Ruaidh in Lochaber likely helped to relocalize the tale in Scotland.

The name of the bird at Bunroy also requires comment, as there is a pun lost to translation. I have used the term “dipper-bird” in English for what is also called the “water-ouzel,” a bird that can dive, swim, and walk in the water. In Gaelic it is called the gobha dubh, which literally means “black smith.” That is why the eagle is told to find the bird at the smithy.

*

There was once a great eagle elder dwelling in a peak in the middle of Loch Treig, where her kind often was. She was grey with old age for as long as she could remember. And so, because of that, she expected that she was the oldest creature alive in her era.

But to be sure that she did not have a contemporary who had survived somewhere, she decided, at the first chance she could get, to travel around.

That year there came the very coldest Beltane Eve she had ever felt or seen, and she thought that would give her a good excuse to put her plan into action. And early in the morning of that very Beltane Day, rather than any other day, before other birds had tasted water, she started on her journey’s quest.

She asked every living being she met, who appeared to be old, “Did you ever see a Beltane Eve as cold as it was last night?”

But not one had. However, the day had just begun and she kept moving on, without rest, until a kindly wren elder met her.

“Welcome to the wren, on this bright Beltane day,” she said. “Did you ever see a Beltane Eve as cold as it was last night?”

Although the form and complexion of the wren was old, he was not aware that he had seen such a night. He did not know of any creature that was older than himself, but he had heard that there was an old dipper-bird a long time ago at Bunroy, and if he were still alive, it was probable that he had seen the likes of it, if it had ever come. And he pointed out the way to her.

She gave thanks to the wren, and she took off for the smithy at Bunroy.

She arrived but there was nothing there but a cold ruin: everyone, high and low, had departed, except the dipper-bird, and he himself had long since become blind with old age, and had made a hole in the anvil cleaning his beak.

She gave a Beltane greeting to the dipper-bird, and she explained the reason for her journey.

“Did you ever see,” she said, “a Beltane Eve as cold as it was last night?”

The dipper-bird made a sad shrug, and he said that he had never seen one, and that he never heard of the likes of it, but that there was an elderly stag frequenting Coille Innse and that its bristles had been grey with old age from his earliest memories as a fledgling fluttering through the bushes.

“Many is the time since then,” he said, “that he has come to pay me a visit to while away the long winter’s evening, and to give me news about the state of the country. But that stopped. The last time that he was here, old age had come so heavily on him that I’m afraid that he cannot move very much. We spent so much time together as neighbors that I take great pleasure, as you will understand, in his aged bellowing, even if it is hoarse, when I hear it at twilight. He is the most elderly creature that survives today as far as I know, and if you speak to him on your way, tell him the reason for your journey and that you saw me. Unless he has declined greatly, he will make you entirely welcome.”

He then recounted to her the notable matters that happened during the era of the chieftains he remembered seeing, and the great deeds of his ancestors, and how his children had prospered. As they were sharing the morning together, he urged and exhorted her to visit him the next time that she was going off to Coille Innse.

And she found the stag stooped over in the shelter of an old alder stump with icicles in his nostrils.

She gave him a Beltane greeting, and she explained the reason for her journey: “Did you ever see,” she said, “a Beltane Eve as cold as it was last night?”

The stag was so old that he drooped his antler on his shoulder blade but he said very sluggishly that he could not remember that he had ever seen one.

He was warm and welcoming to her, and he asked kindly about the dipper-bird. They then spent a while discussing ancient lore and genealogy, and the eagle was going to assert her rank as the elder of the two. But just as they were parting, the stag said that there was a one-eyed salmon in the little loch of Coire na Ceanainn that he knew when he was a very young calf at his mother’s feet traveling over Làirig Leacach from Beinn a’ Bhric.

“Even then the dullness of age weighed heavily upon him,” he said, “and if you have time, it will be worthwhile for you to see him: he is a great talker.”

So it was that she took off again, and she reached the little loch.

She drank a toast of acquaintance to the one-eyed salmon and she explained the reason for her journey: “Did you ever see a Beltane Eve as cold as it was last night?”

The salmon said that he had: there was one other night that it was so cold that, although he was vigorous and at the height of his strength, he had to begin to leap and jolt through the water to keep himself warm.

“And,” he said, “on one of the leaps that I took, I jumped out of the water and struck the side of my head against the dark flagstone over there. But the depth of the freeze was so intense that before I could pull myself back, my eye stuck to the flagstone, and that left has me one-eyed to this day.”

When the eagle heard that, she gave the rank of age to the salmon. And she returned to the middle peak to tell her tale to her chicks.

They saw many a fair, sunny day after that but for as long as she could flap a wing, not a Beltane Day, whether hot or cold, went by without her going for a while to visit those excellent elders: the dipper-bird, the stag, and the salmon.

Your reflections are welcome in the comments below.

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Leaning heavily on your goodwill, I am sending you this update on the fundraiser I’ve been hosting for Natalie Pepin.

You have all donated $1600 CAD so far and I’m beyond grateful. If you haven’t donated yet but would like to, here’s the new link to her GoFundMe. I’d love to hit $5000 CAD by the end of the weekend.

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation and helped make my 50th birthday so special.

Blessings on your head,

Tad

Here is the original post…

Tomorrow is my 50th birthday.

I’d like to use this day to lift up my dear friend, Kakisimow Iskwew, Natalie Pepin, a Metis woman with family roots across the prairies where she was raised.

Our paths have intertwined from our focus on supporting entrepreneurs in our early days to a shift towards culture work and deep history.

We’ve even run a few storytelling events together, unfurling the deeper layers of old European folktales. She’s incredible to work with.

Her work is so profoundly important for her people. I’ve rarely met anyone so diligent in their cultural work. And her last ten years have been harder than almost anyone I’ve ever known.

You can read a more in depth tribute to this good woman here.

ABOUT KAKISIMOW ISKWEW:

She is an Metis woman with family roots across the prairies where she was raised.

She shares traditional arts, hide tanning, food sovereignty and other land based cultural programs on the land where she lives.

Much of her work centers on reconnecting Indigenous people with the skills and land teachings of their culture and for so many this is a healing journey. for her, reconnecting with culture means not simply learning to bead, to cook traditional foods or start fire in traditional ways.

It means grappling with family history, experiences of colonization, kinship, loss of language, and learning the stories of one’s ancestors. It means getting to know the lands that they come from, and relearning language.

You can learn more about her work here.

THE FUNDRAISER:

This coming year, Natalie is taking further steps to support her community by training in Indigenous Focused Orienting Therapy.

This is a therapeutic model grounded in Indigenous knowledge and understanding of wellbeing. Rather than pathologizing people, it seeks to work with traditional tools to support Indigenous people on their paths to wellbeing.

This training relies greatly on connections to land, which overlaps with the work Natalie does already. She will participate in this year long program with other Indigenous people who are supporting their communities as counselors, social workers, educators and more.

Natalie has sold moss bags, tanned hides and star blankets to help pay for her tuition deposit in this program, but has $5400 CAD more to raise by February 15th of 2026 to cover her enrolment, travel to classes and childcare while she is learning.

**I’d like to raise all that money for her by the weekend.**

Will you join me in supporting this good woman?

You can send your donations to her and her good work at natalie@meetingmyancestors.com via PayPal. You can also donate here: https://gofund.me/7103eb578

Please leave a comment whether or not you do to boost the algorithm and, of course, happy birthdays are welcome too.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

Subscribe now

Share

Tomorrow is my 50th birthday.

I’d like to use this day to lift up my dear friend, Kakisimow Iskwew, Natalie Pepin, a Metis woman with family roots across the prairies where she was raised.

Our paths have intertwined from our focus on supporting entrepreneurs in our early days to a shift towards culture work and deep history.

We’ve even run a few storytelling events together, unfurling the deeper layers of old European folktales. She’s incredible to work with.

Her work is so profoundly important for her people. I’ve rarely met anyone so diligent in their cultural work. And her last ten years have been harder than almost anyone I’ve ever known.

You can read a more in depth tribute to this good woman here.

ABOUT KAKISIMOW ISKWEW:

She is an Metis woman with family roots across the prairies where she was raised.

She shares traditional arts, hide tanning, food sovereignty and other land based cultural programs on the land where she lives.

Much of her work centers on reconnecting Indigenous people with the skills and land teachings of their culture and for so many this is a healing journey. for her, reconnecting with culture means not simply learning to bead, to cook traditional foods or start fire in traditional ways.

It means grappling with family history, experiences of colonization, kinship, loss of language, and learning the stories of one’s ancestors. It means getting to know the lands that they come from, and relearning language.

You can learn more about her work here.

THE FUNDRAISER:

This coming year, Natalie is taking further steps to support her community by training in Indigenous Focused Orienting Therapy.

This is a therapeutic model grounded in Indigenous knowledge and understanding of wellbeing. Rather than pathologizing people, it seeks to work with traditional tools to support Indigenous people on their paths to wellbeing.

This training relies greatly on connections to land, which overlaps with the work Natalie does already. She will participate in this year long program with other Indigenous people who are supporting their communities as counselors, social workers, educators and more.

Natalie has sold moss bags, tanned hides and star blankets to help pay for her tuition deposit in this program, but has $5400 CAD more to raise by February 15th of 2026 to cover her enrolment, travel to classes and childcare while she is learning.

**I’d like to raise all that money for her by the weekend.**

Will you join me in supporting this good woman?

You can send your donations to her and her good work at natalie@meetingmyancestors.com via PayPal. You can also donate here: https://gofund.me/7103eb578

Please leave a comment whether or not you do to boost the algorithm and, of course, happy birthdays are welcome too.

All the money raised from your pledges to this Substack go to support the work of indigenous, cultural activist Kakisimow Iskwew.

Subscribe now

Share