How Many Days, and How Many Nights?

How many
pages, how many
notebooks, how many words
and characters, how many mornings and
how many nights, how many pens with ink in purple
and blue and black and red, and how many bursts to organize
time, how many resolutions in the new year to gain discipline, how
many books read on craft and character, how many for the love of fiction
alone and how many ideas started and stopped, how many born full term only
to rest in isolation, how many sweet scenes, how many sad, how many sweet,
sexy flashing bright contacts and how many spirits whispering secrets into sand and sea
and deaf ears, how many children meeting other children, how many conferences
or contacts with other writers and how many web sites and articles and wishes
and dreams and tears of frustration and how many blank pages faced
bravely, cowardly, tentatively, and how many ‘ly’ words slashed
unceremoniously and how many times on my knees before
gods and great spirits will it take to claim my writing
and put it in the middle
of my life?

We are off this morning (in the rain) to do a Bead People Event in Pine River, MN.  I think we are having a monsoon. Torrential rains yesterday and through the night.  Should be a fun (wet and chilly?) day.  As we have finally begun to catch up with old projects, rebuilding our website and work on the house, I am beginning to turn my mind toward “what now?”  I am still amazed at how the Bead People make me smile.  We have quite a few events coming up, but I can’t see them being my mainstay.  I will be so curious to see if my urge to write comes back.  It has been oddly absent the past few years–as if the editor has moved into her chair and the writer took a walk out in the back yard and isn’t sure if she wants to come back in.  Between Tools for writing and my two books, The Lonely Place and The Taming Power, I feel kind of spun out.  Day after day I go out to the pile of clay in my yard and begin screening the dirt, mixing the mud, applying the mud as if I am in a trance.  It feels good.  It feels magical.  I’m working on the thicker infill coat and the mud goes on in fistfuls and builds out from the wall in one, two, three inch applications.  Once I have piled a bunch onto a small section of wall, I start to work it.  It is thick, wet, moving.  I actually feel like I am touching skin and there is a body beneath my fingers.   I soothe it and smooth it until it conforms to the shape and thickness I want, nice and even across a three foot section.  It is incredibly hard work and takes forever, and yet it pulls me into this earthy trance, forming the body of my house.

Writing?  Who cares.  That is kind of where I’m at right now.  I’d like to know the exact number of hours, minutes, days, weeks that I have sat with a notebook or on the computer or staring at a page working on a story.  Now that my favorite novel is out (Taming Power), I feel more settled on the matter.  That probably will not last.  That probably is not the truth.  One day, we shall see, I’ll be walking out the door and down the steps and a thought will come.  It might be a single phrase, a title floating out there with nothing to attach itself to, or it might be an image, a bit of action, and I will be off again.  But I don’t want my life to be about “wanting” something to happen.  I want to be.  I think I will repost my favorite little poem here since it relates.

No Ordinary Day

This was quite a day.  I planted my first MN garden–and it looks beautiful.  I also completed a ten-year plus book project.  The proof copy is being sent for my novel, The Taming Power of Love.  This books has been such a labor of love.  This book talks about the transformation of the human experience on Earth.  In the story, two young Lakota boys find a strange woman asleep (unconscious) in the Badlands of South Dakota.  She doesn’t know who she is or why she is here.  As the story unfolds, we are caught up in a mystical story about how the characters have come together to do a renewal ceremony for Mother Earth.  Not one of them  knows what the next step is–they are forced to follow what feels right.

One day I heard the Lakota story of the “second cleansing.”  In the story, Unci Makah, (Mother Earth) grows tired of the violent and unruly antics of her human children.  She decides to toss them all off.  Before she does so, she takes a few inside of herself, and then tosses the rest off.  It is said that the ones she chose were taken into Wind Cave and they later emerged as the Lakota people.  This story touched me.  I wondered what Mother Earth (Unci) would do with this human family in this moment.  This was the birthplace of this story.  I thought that there was really only one thing that could save us, and that would be getting in touch with “great love.”

This book is coming out now.  I am so excited about it.  I hope all of my committed readers will find it.  I think you will love it as much as I do.

Jamie

Sketching the Male Protagonist

This is a little thing I did when I got stuck on a male character in one of my novels. I wanted to know more about Charles so I did a freewriting session to see what I could learn about him. It worked.

Sketching the Male Protagonist

Charles, like pudding, loose and soft, his shape never molding, he walks the frames of each scene like blue wash background. No stiff poke, no grit, no getty-up. The tender, perfect boy who slips into the back desk in the classroom and listens, never asking questions, never offering opinion, sprung from nothing into nothing, a cartoon without color or feature, no secrets, no sins, no sinister bottom note to the perfect top.
What could I add to this poor pasty man whose life unfolds around him in passive acquiescence? What would wake him up? What does he fear? He fears fire, he fears loss, he fears being left again among the living, he blames himself for mom and dad’s grief, and his little brother’s death. It was a spark, only a spark, a smoldering error never extinguished, never put out, still burning in his soul.
I like it, the helpless go along has a reason to not make waves, not engage, fully. Not worthy to have the care of innocents, the child beneath his roof, mustn’t father, mustn’t love. It deepens the man, puts the boy back in his soul. No, he is not pudding, but water and charred wood and a long stretch of scar tissue on the upper arm that failed to pull the little brother out through the window of his parent’s farmhouse. His fault. His secret. His torment.

How did the fire start?

Stupid, stupid, stupid, everybody knows model glue is flammable. Charles, seven years old, his brother younger, hidden in the tiny back closet assembling the model of a wooden ship to sail on great oceans. They work for hours, until dark, until little brother says guess I’ll light a candle so we can see what we are doing. And Charles, preoccupied, not hearing the little brother, steps out for just a minute, just one short, sixty second minutes and then whoosh, the world bursts into flame. Oh my god, oh my god, for the rest of his life he hears that oh my god scream from his own lips, and from the lips of little brother before he died.
Charles built the boat that carried his little brother across the sea to the other realms.

The punishment? To never be happy, never cover the scar, never wear long sleeves, or care for children. Again and again he turns from what will make him happy, from Rose, his pretty woman, from her children and the children they would have together that would make him whole.

Ah, this leads smoothly to the forest fire in my story, to the sacred ring where all children are kept safe by magic and grace. Now Charles must face his fear at last or lose them all, lose his own soul.
Later, after Charles has passed the test, little Emily, precious psychic child, sees the younger brother laughing and playing. She tells Charles he need not torture himself–little brother lives in a splendid castle on the other side.

Charles looks different to me now. I find an empathy with his heart, with his suffering as he finds his true place upon the page. He attracts me, awakens my healing heart that wants to smooth the scars along his arm. Now, he is ready for Rose. Now we can discover how the man with the heavy burden meets the magical woman under a Tucson sun. He will resist, sure, and move toward and away again and again, but oh, love is strong, and the pull of destiny is even stronger. Now the high tides in the blood ruled by the moon will move them. And he will lose the fight. And he will love her. And he will heal and learn to trust again that the world is a good place–even when it isn’t.
That’s the man I was looking for.

Women Write to Keep from Going Crazy

I found this in my file of “rants” and thought it was fun. Here it is. Jamie

Women Write to Keep from Going Crazy.

Last night I met Einstein’s wife on PBS. It slams me to realize I never gave a thought to the other mind behind the great mind. Her curiosity was as wide as his, wider perhaps because of the living physics of birthing babies and making milk—and yet she went crazy in the end, died of disappointment, alone, broke, broken. Her doors never opened like his did.
I felt kinship. It’s wild what happens when a woman’s mind is as hungry as her body and birth is not enough. And Einstein, foolish man, seduced by his male culture to see only his face in the mirror of fame and acclaim. It notched him down a level in my eyes. It put me on the side of his wife, scientist, mother, woman, peacemaker—a woman caught between a mother’s heart and her love of physics.
A woman gives a decade or two of her attention to the children and is punished and tossed away.
I tell the women in my writer’s group about Einstein’s wife. They are all older than me. When I mention that I will turn fifty soon, they call me “baby” and put age back in perspective for me. I read an edgy piece about a woman who lives in Tucson who steps out of a sunken tub, nude and dripping, only to catch sight of a woman’s body in the mirror, breasts heavy with life and grief, pubic hairs curling, a vagina proof to the woman’s place. In my story, the woman can’t imagine how she missed the fact that she is a woman.
The group reacts, relating, recognizing kinship with my character. One woman says there must be something about the southwest that makes women crazy. I lost my mind in Tucson once, she says, and didn’t want the good doctors to lock her up for being crazy, so she told them she was an alcoholic off the wagon, just a stumble, and could they admit her? This writer, this woman of seventy plus years, this mother and grandmother, slams me again. Ann, another woman, thirty years a teacher, says she lost her mind in Tucson once too. She doesn’t go into detail, but I wonder how often women lose their minds in the southwest or elsewhere. Carol jokes that we should amend the song to “I lost my heart in San Francisco—and my mind in Tucson.” The group doesn’t know my story that is set in Santa Fe this week will travel to Tucson next week where my female protagonist will loose her mind.
Women write to keep from losing their minds. Like Einstein’s wife. No need to feel shy about my edgy stories with these women. We reveal all the edgy things, once removed, honing off the sharp edges and making them less dangerous by writing. Gretta reads a story about a hit man who is after her son-in-law, a memoir. Ann reads a fuck-you story about a sorority of teachers who bar the doors when she walks by. Casey reads about Rachel whose boyfriend wants to get in her pants and later, about a father who did. Joline reads of two children asked to dig the bones of Rob Roy under an apple tree in a misty grove in Ireland. He has been dead and lingering these one hundred years. Joline’s ghosts scare her and so she must write about Robbie.
Women write to sort the envelopes of their lives like they sort laundry, to keep from going crazy in Tucson, to keep from cutting and burning, to keep from killing. We’re an optimistic lot, we women, rubbing salve on old scars, brave, enduring, ready to take it on, ready even to travel to Tucson if that is where the story begins—or ends.

A Noun by Any Other Name

It’s a funny thing, this battle I have in my life with process nouns. Technically, they are called nominalizations—process words turned into “things”. I am a wife, mother, grandmother, woman, teacher—writer–instead of wifing, mothering, grandmothering, etc.

When a process becomes a noun it is like flowing water that suddenly freezes. All movement is gone. We have to guard against these notorious nouns.

Most of us begin writing like we begin a romance—it is a getting to know you process where we probe to better understand our world and how it works. We scribble our dirty little secrets out alone in coffee shops or on buses or in our bedrooms late at night. Occasionally we are kissed by a particular phrasing, a series of words, a delightful expression and we sit back and say, “Damn, that is pretty good. Maybe I could actually be a writer.”

I think of the rambling, personal story I wrote out of the depths of my own frustrated first marriage. The poor woman in my story was ready to be hauled out on Tuesday morning with the trash. But I rather liked the story and it beat continually writing in my bitch book of a journal so I polished it up a bit, titled it “Going South” and sent it off to a Writers Digest contest. When I got an honorable mention it scared the shit out of me and I quit writing for six months.

Even now, as I write these words, I am conscious of a duel role here. First I am a human probing her private thoughts through the process of writing. Second, I am a “writer” who wants to make a point and communicate it clearly.

The writing me doesn’t think about whether you get it or not. I don’t care. This is for me. What I write is none of your business. If I catch you looking over my shoulder, I’ll send you “the look.”

The Writer, however, is much more socially conscious and socially conditioned. Hers is a public role and she continually worries about voice and point of view and whether her message will be heard and read by others.
Writing, in its process form, is consciousness itself. Being a Writer is self-consciousness. There is a difference.

When I was teaching myself how to be a public presenter, I struggled with extreme shyness and would get almost sick every time I had to give a talk. Then one day while talking to a group of campus wives, I had an “aha” that completely turned this around. I realized that I did not have to be a speaker. I just had to be me speaking. The same is true with writing. I don’t have to be a writer, I just have to be me writing.
In fact, I could banish all the notorious nouns. I don’t have to BE anything but a human being in the process of living her life.

In Front of the Fire

It grows colder and was snowing tonight.  We had a small party at our new house.  A friend, Gordy Pratt is in town to do music for Video Letters from Prison and he and my siblings came over and we played around.  Very nice!

Today I uploaded one of my novels, Washaka–The Bear Dreamer as an ebook on Smashwords.  Still some bugs to work out but I love this site.  Saves trees, saves shipping and the book is 1/4 the cost of a print copy.  Do give it a look at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/6713.  Many of you have already read this book of the heart but if you haven’t, you will want to.  We’ll see how it goes, but I am thinking of adding quite a few of my books to this site so they can be available.  Exciting!  You can even download 30% of the book to preview before buying.  A win win for all.

My writer friends–check it out.

One day soon I will sit down and write a more thoughtful post.  Too much in a hurry these days.

Jamie

On This Thanksgiving Eve

Isn’t it an interesting thing that our “economy” is holding its breath hoping that we will all go out on the day after Thanksgiving and spend lots of money on things we don’t need.  I’m feeling bashed by the ads encouraging me to spend, spend, spend.  I keep thinking about the words I wrote in Re-Visioning Adolescence (which I recently uploaded here chapter by chapter)–about how we are teaching our children to become consumers instead of contributors.  Children need so much more than stuff, and I really think they need to find their own value as human beings participating in this thing we call life.

Today, at the college center, there was a memorial luncheon going on when I got there.  The memorial was for an amazing young man who taught classes for us and whose wife was formerly a student of mine.  Dacotah was 29 and working hard to maintain a traditional Lakota life in this fast-paced, modern world.  He died suddenly from a seizure.  I was supposed to be doing final testing for students but suddenly it felt like were were all in a sacred chapel and testing was the last thing on my mind.  I listened as Dacotah’s mother talked about how when her son was 10, he decided he needed to Sundance.  His elders tried to tell him that he was too young, but he insisted he needed to do this.  During the Sundance, when Dacotah was struggling to go on, two of his relatives (both ten years old) made flesh offerings to help Dacotah sustain his strength for the duration.  This was an amazing young man willling to sacrifice much. 

I guess, on this Thanksgiving Eve, my thoughts are with this powerful young man and the family he left behind.  We all need to make more sacrifices and be willing to do the difficult instead of just what is easy and pain-free.  There is so much that needs to be done to make our culture strong and healthy again.  Keep your wallets in your pockets and let your children (or yourself) discover who you are without all the stuff.  I think we pack it in because we are afraid to look at who we are on the inside.

Do something for someone else tomorrow.  And the next day, and the next day, and the next.

Good night and many blessings for all. 

Jamie

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Conclusion

CONCLUSION

 Before writing this book, before Hellinger, even before my children became adolescents, I had a vision. It came to me after listening to an ancient Lakota story about Makah, Mother Earth (mother of all), and the second cleansing of the earth. In the ancient story, Makah has become displeased with the people. They war and fight, take no care of her living body and no longer listen to the Elders. Makah, in her displeasure, brings only a few of the people deep within her body and then ruthlessly shakes the rest off the people off the planet. This event, the story says, is called the “second cleansing.” Later, those who were taken inside re-emerged from her belly as the Lakota people and, once again, began populating the planet.

When I first heard this story from a Lakota Elder many years ago, I began to think that Makah must certainly be frustrated once again with her angry, unaware, warring children. Perhaps she prepares to do a third and final cleansing. What, if anything, would keep her from shaking us off once again, I wondered?

The answer?  Love. Only love, massive amounts of love could convince her that we were worthy of living on her beautiful body. Love for each other, love for the earth, love for all other creatures. Love.

I began writing a story with the main plot con­structed around a revolution of love happening on planet earth. In my story, Makah is disgusted and displeased, ready to toss us off again when, unexpectedly, her sweet granddaughter asks for the opportunity to give the people one more chance to prove their ability to love. Makah agrees to let her try and sends her granddaughter down among the people in a human body.

I put the awakening scene in the beautiful Badlands of South Dakota because it seemed that here, for sure, magic could happen. Then I sent two small Lakota boys to discover the strange woman asleep under an embank­ment. Next I saw the spirits flying in like racing storm clouds from all corners of the earth to assist Makah’s granddaughter in bringing about this revolution of the heart.

At this point, I fell deeply in love with my own story. Its characters were people just like me trying to find the Good Road, but not always succeeding. I loved the image of the Ancestors, the Great Beings, the Sages and Saints, the Shamans and Medicine Men long gone, and the spirits of great human souls all arriving, unseen and invisible, to help save us from our own foolish selves. In a final scene, the two boys gather around a drum at the base of Bear Butte, a sacred mountain, to drum the new rhythm for all time.  They are surrounded and assisted by these Great Beings.

Today, as I read this beautiful story again, I see it not as fiction but perhaps as reality. My sight has grown keen. I see those wise ones all around waiting only for us to humbly ask, “Please help us.” An invisible hand is at work in the world; it guides this purple pen as I write, it inspires the amazing works of scholars like Senge, Fritz, Pearce, LeShan and others. I see it at work blurring the lines and bounda­ries between scientific study and spiritual pursuit, creating the crossover pioneers like Hellinger, Erickson, Bohm, Dossey, and many, many others. It is a revolution of the heart.

To all of these invisible beings, I ask humbly and directly, “Please help us to fashion a culture that supports its little ones, that reveres its old ones, and cares deeply for Mother Earth.” Our culture seeks a deeper solution than our task forces and small problem-solving armies can provide. We need the special language of the heart, embedded in story and ritual that only the heart speaks. Help is all around if we only ask.

On the day I wrote these final paragraphs, I had a phone call from a man in Iowa who heard one of the Oyate programs. Actually, he had heard the show a while ago, scribbled the number down on an old receipt, and then stuffed the slip into his glove box. When he called our 800 number, he couldn’t recall why he had written the number down so he opened the conversation by ask­ing me, “Do you know what you do?”

Of course, some days I ask myself the same question, so I laughed and said, “Yes, I think so.” As soon as I told him about the Oyate series, he immediately remembered hearing the program. He told me that when it began he had to pull into a parking lot to listen. Then he said something like, “I heard your heart in that program.”

His words touched something in me and, instead of taking an order, I found myself telling him about constel­lation work, kids and culture, this book-I even told him my astrological sign. We had an animated conversation that lasted nearly forty-five minutes. He agreed to help spread this work across the country.

What I didn’t tell him was that the night before I had asked all those unseen beings to help me with this work, to find the right people who can find the right people who will make a revolution of love. And then, a stranger was calling me from nowhere!

Let’s find each other, you speakers of the language of the heart who are out there reading books, praying, talk­ing to the spirits, and raising your children to be awake and aware. Lets put our heads together, our hearts together and make our families and culture strong once again. This is no time for sitting on fences, walking the middle road, or keeping your truest thoughts to yourself.

The next time a little girl falls in the hot sun, let’s catch her quick, before she falls.

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 9

Counting down to my son’s wedding and the chance to see all of my grandchildren.  We leave Wednesday and I can’t wait. 

Jamie

 

CHAPTER NINE

What is an Elder-Based Culture?

 

Throughout this book I’ve made frequent references to our need to return to an Elder-based culture. It occurs to me now, at the end of this writing journey, that I haven’t actually defined that clearly for you or myself. Elder-based culture-it certainly sounds good, but what does it mean?

On the surface, the meaning is obvious. Elders are the old ones, the members of our families and communi­ties who have already passed through most of the life stages except one-death. In smaller traditional native commu­nities, these Elders have real status. Our experience in Indian country bears witness to this. The Elders are given first voice on issues. The children of the community are taught to bring food and drink to the Elders at any gath­ering before taking what they want. Elders are consulted on important policy issues and mediate conflict between younger tribal members. When we look again at main­stream American society, this status is not so apparent. Oddly, like our youth, the Elders have lost their rightful place in the world.

In the current culture, the Elders have become Elderly, often seen as frail, sickly, unable to contribute, and a burden on society and their families. This is a very sad indicator of the decline of a culture. I recently saw a Cheyenne quote on a website that said, “A Nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground, then it is done. No matter how brave its warriors or how strong its weapons.” Perhaps the same could be said about the nation’s Elders. When the Elders are left out of the vital loop of life, no longer charged with the challenge of contributing their wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to the younger generations . . . they simply get old and culture declines as a result of it.

In early tribal cultures, the task of surviving from one day to the next was so arduous that the younger members of the tribe, those of childbearing age, were expected to provide for the food and safety needs of the others. The grandparents and older aunts and uncles were the primary caregivers of the little ones. It was also recognized that these more experienced members of the tribe had both more patience and more wisdom to give to the children. The circle of the family rippled out around the children in a sphere of care and influence. In Lakota country, this extended family is called the tiyospaye.

In many of the modern Indian communities we visited, this is still very much the general practice. Sadly, there are also a huge number of little ones in the care of grandparents because the parents got caught in the deadly web of alco­hol, gambling, or violence. This is true not only in Indian country but in all communities. When the grandparent takes the full role of parent, they lose their place as grandparent and Elder.

This topic, the erosion of the Elder status within families and communities, certainly deserves its own deep exploration as it echoes through the generations. Like our youth, the Elders have increasingly become a target of the drug companies. Recently a friend’s mother was in psy­chiatric care for depression. Over several months her medications were switched, rotated and stacked, one upon the other, until the poor woman finally went into a toxic overdose. She ended up in a coma in the hospital. Many Elders are under the care of multiple doctors with several medications being prescribed and no one overseeing the entire regime.

Like youth, our Elders need challenge. John Ratey (2001)1 in A User’s Guide to the Brain, wrote about an inter­esting research project done by David Snowdon, a University of Kentucky professor.  He studied a group of nuns living in a monastery in Mankato, Minnesota who were living into their late nineties and early hundreds with strong minds and bodies. Snowdon wanted to know why. He discovered that the nuns, operating on the belief that “an idle mind is the devil’s plaything,” had numerous weekly programs intended to stimulate the mind. They held reading groups and debates, brought in speakers, wrote in their journals, and had study sessions. Ratey (2001) wrote, “Snowdon, who has examined more than 100 brains donated at death by nuns in Mankato and other School Sisters locations across the nation, maintains that the axons and dendrites that usually shrink with age branch out and make new connections if there is enough intellectual stimulation, providing a bigger backup system if some pathways fail.”

It appears that the brain, like a muscle, atrophies without active use. If we shuffle our Elder parents and grandparents off to the side, limiting their involvement in our lives, the effects on their health and brain functioning can be disastrous.

This poses a great challenge to our culture. Our families are scattered like leaves in autumn. Even in my own life, my grandchildren live ten hours away. It is painful for me to not be available to assist my daughters during these early years of their marriage when they are both in college and still trying to find their way in the world. My place is near them. I feel that in my bones, and the telephone is a very poor substitute. As I’ve worked on this book over the past several years, it’s become clearer to me that to create a true Elder-based culture, families need to stick together. Holidays twice a year simply don’t cut it.

In this new millennium, the Elders are living longer, living alone, and living far from their families. We have this strange belief that when we finally get the kids out of the house, it’s our turn to play. Just as our culture is rife with social assumptions about our clueless kids, we have social assumptions that the relatives should butt out of the lives of our young ones. Strange. Like the missing rituals for adolescent rites of passage, it occurs to me that I have no clue what an Elder-based culture would really look like.

We operate under a notion of independence that makes no sense and serves us poorly. We act as if we don’t (or shouldn’t) need each other, and then wonder why we feel isolated and alone. However, creating this Elder connection is not the same as the undeveloped adult running home to have Mom and Dad take care of life for them. Except for a few very close-knit and small native communities I’ve visited, I have no model in the current culture to draw on.

During one of our collection trips to southeast Alaska, we met a Tlinget woman named Marge. Marge was probably in her early sixties, a beautiful and vibrant woman. As we talked with her, she told us that she was being prepared and initiated by her Elders to become an Elder herself. Marge was not taking this action lightly. Being an Elder in her community, she explained, was a true commitment and responsibility that is not simply given but must be earned. As I listened to her, I realized that, rather like the president of the United States, the fate of the younger generations rested on her ability to make wise and careful choices. In Lakota country, people are taught to consider their decisions based on how that deci­sion would effect the next seven generations.

As we’ve seen through these discussions on levels of development and the maturing brain, we don’t automati­cally get wise when we get old. We must strive for it. To become an Elder we must also be initiated into that status.

On our final night in southeast Alaska, we had supper with Marge at her house. After a wonderful meal of freshly caught halibut, Marge explained that she would like to perform a song and dance in honor of our visit. She put on her own mother’s button blanket, took up an eagle feather, and did a slow-moving dance in her living room while she sang. Her sincere offering touched my soul deeply. I’d lost my mother just six months earlier to illness and was still grieving her loss. Something about Marge and her slow movements evoked that grief within me. When she finished her dance, I started to sob. I was a little embarrassed but the tears were beyond my control. Marge was very sweet and comforted me.

When I woke up in the hotel room the next morn­ing, my lower back went into spasms. The pain was incredible. I found a chiropractor and a massage therapist, but the spasms only worsened. Thankfully, we were at the end of the trip, and I crabbed my way across airports and parking lots and finally made it home. I was completely taken over by my pain. For the next two weeks I couldn’t seem to do anything to relieve the spasms.

Finally, one night I was explaining to Milt that I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so sad-for no reason, I told him. He gently reminded me that my mother had just died and that perhaps my experience with Marge and my mother’s death were related. His words opened up this deep pool of grief. I started to cry again. I cried for hours, even crying myself to sleep that night.

I missed my Mom. I wanted her back again in physi­cal form, back in her chair in her little house working crossword puzzles and waiting for me to call. When Marge wore her mother’s blanket across her shoulders, sheltered and warm, I think my soul began to cry out for that. After crying the night through, I woke up the next morning and the back pain had completely disappeared.

Hellinger says we need the strength of our ancestors and our parents behind us if we are to stand strong in the world. I once heard him speak about low back pain resulting from not taking the support of the parents and ancestors. When we don’t feel supported, or are unwilling to take that support, it makes us weak. Honoring the Elders is not just a social nicety that says we should honor them. No, it is a deep need in us to have them back us up and make us strong.

In my work as a facilitator of family constellations, one picture I find particularly beautiful is to see a woman standing with seven generations of women behind her, or to see a man with seven genera­tions of men at his back. When we stand in this place, we see that our generation is just a small foothill in the great mountain range of our ancestors. We feel their strength.

One of the Ten Commandments of the Jewish and Christian religions is “Honor Thy Father and Mother.” Too often this commandment is taken as a social rule or courtesy (not deeply felt) that we extend to our parents out of respect. My understanding of this has changed with the study of the orders of love as observed by Hellinger; we honor our parents not for their benefit-but for our own. Our strength in the world comes from the two portals of our parents from which life flowed through to us. We need our Elders-they do not need us.

In many tribal and other cultures around the world, the spirits of the ancestors are treated as real entities that exist and surround us. The Elders take their guidance from this direction in prayer and ceremony, beseeching the spirits to assist them. The true genius and pioneering courage of Hellinger’s work has been in his willingness to consider that the influence of the ancestors and past gen­erations can extend beyond the grave into the present generations. In some religious and scientific circles, this is a cause of uneasiness.

This discussion, while seeming to stray off into the Mysteries, is of particular importance for if we are to define an Elder-based culture. Each member of a system must seek guidance from the ones behind him or her. To the three-year-old, an older brother of ten is an Elder. To a twenty-year-old, the parents or grandparents are the Elders. If you are eighty, your Elders may be in the spirit world. The stairway to heaven is generational, and only those on a higher tread can show us the way.

This natural order is dictated by the soul, not the head. Your head may be full of yes-buts. Yes, but my parents weren’t successful or smart, my grandfather was a railroad worker, my daddy a drunk. The soul doesn’t speak the language of yes, but. It knows life has arrived in this body only from these two parents. The deeper structures of the family system are like a giant reservoir far upstream, the larger body of energy that Hellinger chooses to call simply “the greater force.” The ancestral line and the two parents who give life are like the place in the dam where the water is released and allowed to begin its flow downstream.

The river of life is a river of love. It flows down to us from above. Without our Elders we, quite simply, wouldn’t exist.

 

Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage, Chapter 8

This is one of my favorite chapters.  I think it places a 911 call to our culture to pay attention and to begin to search for real solutions.  I’d love to hear from you.

Jamie

  

CHAPTER EIGHT

What Shall We Do Here?

 The first teacher I had in my study of the family con­stellation work was a German named Heinz Stark. For one year I followed his work in the United States, and I even did some organizational work for him. I always loved the way he would first face a client in a constella­tion group, look at them, and say in that strong German accent, “What shall we do here?” His query was so simple and non-threatening, so open-ended that we would natu­rally begin to allow for any and all possibilities to unfold as we entered the work.

So, what shall we do here? These are our children. These are the little ones we guarded, watched over, and nurtured as babes. Every heart should break when one of them dies because they could find no reason to go on living. Every heart should break when we pick up a newspaper and see a lousy three-paragraph article about a child who has shot and killed another child. These are not juvenile delinquents, not wasted remnants of a no-good society. These are our sacred children! In Lakota country, there is a saying common in ceremonies: Mitake Oyasin. It means we are all related. One could say we no longer live in tribes-or one could say the tribe just got larger.

I had a friend who, when she was feeling down or apathetic, would say she had the “why bothers.” Our society has had a bad case of the why bothers for too long. We have to solve the right problems and not dump endless resources into trying to solve the secondary problems that arise from not solving the true problem. But when it comes to adolescent behavior and develop­ment, we are like the blind men describing the elephant. One will say it’s a long, flexible appendage; another will say it’s a huge wall with a rough exterior. And while we are all attempting to determine the nature of the beast, we have an ever-growing population of angry, disillusioned young people who thirst for honest guidance.

We have traveled quite a distance in this book, you and me. We’ve wandered around Indian country, and we’ve taken a look at what is left of our mainstream rite of pas­sage rituals. So, what shall we do now? Let’s start talking, and figure it out.

 Mental Models and our Current Culture

A few years ago I borrowed my stepson’s car to run an errand. It was after dark and I only had to go to the store. At the time he drove a sporty silver Mazda with heavily-tinted windows. On my way home a patrol car came up behind me with lights flashing. I pulled over and waited until the officer had approached the car before I rolled down the window. I still remember the look on his face when he saw he’d not stopped a punk kid but a forty-plus grandma. I’d not been speeding or doing any­thing wrong. The officer stumbled awkwardly through checking my license and registration and then mumbled, “Have a good night, Mrs. Lee.” After parenting six young people through the teen years, I knew why he stopped me. He figured I was a young person up to no good.

Peter Senge (1994), a management consultant and author of The Fifth Discipline, said that in order to build a learning organization, in this case a learning society, we must challenge the underlying assumptions or mental models that flow beneath the decisions we make. Mental models, according to Senge, are “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.” (p.8) He goes on to explain that most often we are not even aware of the mental models that rule our actions. They must be made visible.

 What are the cultural and social assumptions under­lying our treatment of the young? What do we believe? How have we constructed mental models that push our young out of our care?

 Several underlying assumptions are increasingly apparent. One is that being an adolescent has nearly become a crime in our society. The juvenile centers and jails are full of young people. The insurance companies penalize young people for getting a speeding ticket by bumping their insurance rates sky high. We look at the young with suspicion and distrust. A second apparent assumption is that adolescence is in danger of becoming a psychological disorder in our society. When a child does not fit within the tight parameters of “normal,” we diag­nose them as disordered rather than widening the parameters to help us understand them. A third assumption flowing under public attitudes is that young people are clueless. We need to take a moment and  challenge each of these assump­tions with great vigor.

 The Criminalization of Youth

One year at my children’s high school, security peo­ple were hired to wander the parking lots and to enter any open car to search for drugs or weapons. My son, Tom, said one of his teachers had left his keys in the car and the security guard brought the keys to the teacher during a class. The teacher was outraged that somebody would enter his unlocked car and search his glove box. He claimed it was a violation of his rights.

Periodically, the school goes into what they call lock down and all the students and teachers are required to stay in their rooms while the school is searched. The students have no idea whether the lock down is a true crises situation or a routine search.

We need to guard the rights of our children as we would any other innocent person and protest when they are harassed and invaded as if they are criminals. That officer had no real call to stop me the night I drove the little Mazda. He was just looking for trouble. I’m not naïve about these powerful energies that arise in adoles­cence, but I do object to making it a crime to be young. I believe that the harassment is worse for adolescent boys than it is for girls, but both are targeted.

What shall we do here? We could take notice in our neighborhoods. We could begin to challenge our own beliefs and assumptions about our young people. Are we automatically suspicious and distrusting of a person sim­ply because he or she is an adolescent? We should resist irra­tional fears and policies that treat our young as if they are up to no good.

Once when my son was in high school, he came home with a new ID card that he had to scan into a machine at lunch to make sure that he was on campus and not out there up to no good. We had a good laugh because the picture on his ID was not that of my son. Later, a security guard literally cut the pass off of him with a knife, and then sent him to suspension for not wearing his ID.   Can you believe that?

 Adolescence as a “Disorder”

There is a massive advertising campaign going on to put people on very expensive drugs for social disorder, uneasiness, sleeplessness, and on and on. Patients have literally entered the doctor’s office having made their own diagnosis and practically written their own prescription based on some cute television commercial. My teacher, Heinz Stark, once told me that “All diagnosis is a hypnotic induction.” Remember that we need all of the subtle signs and signals of the body in order to steer a course toward the life we want.

Our health care system demands we have a diagnosis in order to be treated, and so we have millions being diagnosed with one disorder or another. Children are the current targets of many marketing campaigns by the pharmaceutical industry.

A large percentage of the popular media have wholly accepted the idea that depression, ADD, bipolar disorder, and many other disorders are caused by chemical imbal­ances in the brain. This position is quicksand, unsupported by the data, yet we have all bought the advertiser’s message. The human brain, by its chemical nature, is constantly in varying states of balance or imbal­ance. Skip breakfast and you’re imbalanced. Get only three hours of sleep and you’re imbalanced. Worry about a test and you’re imbalanced. In fact, we are seldom, if ever, in perfect balance.

Peter Breggins, in his book Talking Back to Prozac, (1999)1 points out that all of these powerful psychotropic drugs have been tested on the normal brains of animals. Essentially, their effect is not to cure a chemical imbalance but to cause one. He tells a most surprising story of the original FDA chemical trials of Prozac. Breggins says that the popula­tion chosen for the FDA clinical trials was cleared of anyone with serious depression or suicidal tendencies. Additionally, no old people and no young people were included in the study. Additionally, the published results did not include the fifty percent of the tested population who dropped out of the trials because of the severe side effects. The theory that depression and other mental disorders are caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain is being seri­ously challenged by current research, but the public thinking has already drifted in that direction.

We have what amounts to designer disorders being created to establish a viable market for the drugs that are being designed. These drugs introduce powerful and extremely toxic chemical compounds into the fragile developing brains of our youth. It is a dangerous situation because of the vulnerability of child and parent alike. Having the problem identified as a disorder does some­thing to relieve the guilt parents feel that they have some­how done something wrong.  However, it stops all genuine inquiry into the direction of soul building and development.

What can we do here? Just say no. We can begin to take the signals and cues of the body and brain seriously, reading them for meaning and texture and discovering what language of the soul they speak. An agitated, depressed youth is a billboard. His symptoms don’t arise from nowhere; they come from something happening in the life around him. If a teacher bores her students, should we drug the student? Parents, adults, teachers, and the general population have an obligation to educate themselves on the realities of these so-called disorders and discover what is truth and not truth.

Adolescence is not a disorder. It is a natural and potent developmental age that carries the young person to the next place in life. They need guidance, support, resources, and challenges from the Elders around them.  They do not need to have those adults place the burden of a troubled society on their young shoulders.

 Adolescents are “Clueless”

A third trend that is on the rise is the social assump­tion that teens are somehow clueless. This damaging image is promoted and pushed on the ridiculous television programs and in the advertising that we have today. Movies with a deeper content like Good Will Hunting or Dead Poet’s Society are rare events.

One night my son and I were having the strangest conversation. He was about ten at the time. He said, “God is everywhere, right, Mom?”

I didn’t know what he was thinking about, so I said, “Yes, as far as I know God is everywhere.”

Then he said, “Well, if God is everywhere and in all things and people, do you think he ever gets crowded?”

His words entranced me. I thought about the under­lying constructs of what he was asking. Not only was he thinking about God, he was thinking about the ultimate comfort-or discomfort-of being God.

Young people are not clueless. True, they are given little opportunity to express or explore these higher realms of thought and philosophical inquiry. Like initia­tion, they hunger for it. They want to know how the universe is built, where they fit in the larger scheme of things and what, if anything, it all means. Is there Good? Is there Evil? Is there some omniscient operator some­where running this software of human life?

This deep inquiry is an example of the earthbound mortal self trying to extend itself into larger realms, into the unexplored and massive interior of unused brain cells that are the key to unlocking mystery, fostering under­standing, and extending the human capacity to create the kind of world we all want. Somehow we’ve very cleverly constructed a negative public relations campaign aimed at adolescents in our society. How could this be?

What shall we do here? We should think and speak well of the young. Rupert Sheldrake (1995), a well-known biologist and researcher, pushes us to understand more fully the power of the “expectancy effect” in scientific research. Study after study indicates that what the scientist expects, he is likely to find. The same is true of parents, teachers, and adult community members who deal with youth. This negative public relations campaign encour­ages adults to expect very little of our young people. Likewise, it encourages youth to expect very little of themselves-or the adults around them. This is a dangerous attitude that, sadly, produces results. If I expect my adolescent to be clueless, I’m likely to get what I expect.

I once joined a task force for a program called “WISE” (Wise Individualized Senior Experience)2 that creates a way for high school seniors to select, design, and undergo a program of their own making. The program, designed to beat the senior blues, is a mentorship and apprenticeship program that builds a bridge between high school and real life. As I got involved in our local WISE program, it became clear to me that we need more programs like this, and we need to intensify their efforts to encourage students to take charge of their educational pursuit and not sit like robots in a classroom. WISE students have built handcrafted canoes, worked with doctors, EMTs, and fireman. They’ve crafted programs for themselves that bridge the uneasy differ­ences between adolescent youth and the adults of their community. Both have gained from this experience.

We can build more bridges of this type. We can give each young person a chance to stand and be counted, to prove that he or she is not clueless and is, in fact, a deep well of ideas, thoughts, and resourceful thinking. The next time someone rolls his eyes as if he knows all about parenting a teen, simply say, “It’s the most wonderful part of parenting, to watch my young child become a man or woman before my very eyes. A miracle!”

When I entered the Master’s program with St. Mary’s University in Minneapolis, I was stunned by the learning experience they offered me. Rather than follow a set out­line of courses, I was encouraged to chart the course of my learning. I was told to “Do no busywork.” For two years I followed a program of my own design, trashing what didn’t fit or work for me, and adjusting my course accordingly. Because I could enter deeply into topics that were of profound interest to me, learning was easy. My courses were not slotted into categories but integrative, all encompassing, taking small side trips into topics that related to my main subjects.

With the internet and the need we have for inte­grated learning-the push to get the brain to access those marvelous frontal lobes-I see no reason we can’t employ this with students as young as sixteen. If I were asked to redesign the educational system, it would be in this direc­tion. Sadly, programs that allow a student to pursue his or her subjects independently are reserved for the “at risk” student and carry a stigma.

 Creating a New Public Relations Campaign for Youth

One day on my counter top I noticed that the large and pretty bowl of tomatoes I’d picked in my garden was swarming with fruit flies and had a bad smell. I gently began pulling the tomatoes out of the bowl and washing them under cold water. They were so beautiful. Sure enough, one large tomato had ripened too quickly and was causing the problem. With this rotten tomato I had to take serious measures (I threw it out), but the rest were still perfect. I also had to recognize that it was my own neglect of the bowl of tomatoes that had caused the problem.

It’s so important not to paint all young people with the dark brush and palette of a few unfortunate or trou­bled teens. This public relations campaign against youth must be contained and controlled by any or all means possible. We act as Dr. Frankenstein must have reacted when his creature first sat up on the laboratory table; “Oh my God, what is this I have created?”

Much of the problem-solving our society engages in has to do with trying to squash symptoms rather than resolve fundamental cultural issues. Rising rates of teen suicide, gang membership, violent crimes perpetrated by young people, teen pregnancy, overflowing prison and juvenile centers all point a hefty finger at the need for a lasting cultural change. We can’t afford to wait. Every year, the already-staggering amount of resources required by our society to deal with these overwhelming problems increases.

What shall we do here? A few suggestions:

  •  Allow a natural, strong image of the young person and his or her role in society to emerge and grow stronger.
  •  Listen more and stop blaming the young for what they did not cause and cannot change alone.
  •  Recognize our loss of power as parents, and stand again in our place behind and not against the youth.
  •  Offer respect and honor for their stage of life and not poke fun or ridicule them.
  •  No longer allow televisions and movies and maga­zines to create the common image of the “teen werewolf.”
  •  Give them their right place within our society.
  •  Challenge our social assumptions and redefine the normally developing energy of the adolescent as magnificent.
  •  Redesign our educational systems to encourage brain development and not stunt it.

  Adolescence is poetically layered with the language of the soul. The questions, Who am I? Where do I belong? and What is the cost of my belonging? lead to deep feelings. Sometimes these feelings disguise themselves as depres­sion, sadness, despair, anger and grandiosity. This is the stuff of soul building, the directional finder that leads the way toward greater integration and wholeness. The call of the higher realms of thought and being are the carrot in front of our cart. It’s important we not judge the disguised appearance of the soul’s deepest movements.

While researching the themes of this book, I stum­bled across another book by Pearce called Evolution’s End, (1992)3. Pearce is a thorough researcher and has been a favorite writer of mine over the past decade. In the pro­gression of his books, he has perhaps looked more deeply and holistically at human brain development than most other individuals. After writing The Magical Child (1986), he came back with expanded understanding of what he calls postbiological development-or development beyond biology-and wrote The Magical Child Matures. Evolution’s End extends his understanding even further. Pearce is always interested in what nature had in mind for us. What is her blueprint? What has been coded into us  regarding our own human development?

In the book on evolution, Pearce suggested that the brain is not just a processor but a receiver linked into larger bodies of information which he lightly calls “soup sources” that exist beyond the body. With proper growth and development and an adequate push from the envi­ronment, the brain can actually extend its neural receptors to receive information from these larger sources of information outside the body. This was the goal of tribal Elders when they took the boy to the mountain and left him there for three days without food or water. They wanted not a compliant, good boy but a young man con­nected with the ancestors and the realms of spirit and soul.

Initiation and the rite of passage are not only about contributing to the community; they are also about finding the powerful links between this, the mundane world, and the larger realms of spirit, soul, and the greater forces of creation itself. This moment of human devel­opment cannot be forced. It can only be prepared for, like tilling the soil in preparation of the later harvest. The opening of adolescence is the beginning of this moment.

 A Cultural Resurrection-Reinstating Initiation and A Rite of Passage

I never did build a rite of passage ritual for my daughters. As I’ve explained here, we took off on the trail of our ancestral line through the constellation work, sto­rytelling and initiation. However, I did slowly become alert to what I call “initiatory moments” in my adolescent children. In fact, as I think about it, it is exactly what I do for my clients and workshop participants. I watch for a soul on the move toward some new level and try to sup­port that movement whenever possible.

As parents, our job is to make them face the difficult questions head on. We can push them out when things get a little too soft. We can close the pocketbook quietly and ask them, “What is your plan for getting that car/trip/stereo that you want?” We can tip the balance scale of give and take back in our own direction-give less, ask (or demand) more of them. Additionally, we can get more involved in our communities and neighbor­hoods and speak up when the negative public relations campaign against youth gets too noisy.

I’ve asked many adults what they think about youth and they say such conflicting things as, “Age envies youth” and “Age idolizes youth.” It seems ironic: if we envy or idolize youth, why do we treat them so badly? Perhaps the truth of this is that we adults are clueless and uninitiated.

What are those dreams and visions that you had as a young person that are as yet unfulfilled? What is your greatest fear, and what could you do to test and challenge that fear? What is it that you long to be doing but are nto? What stops you? When I ask this of a group, I don’t allow them to use time or money as convenient excuses about why they can’t seem to bring about the kind of life they most want.

One of my spiritual teachers says that the only thing we can give to another is our own state. We cannot give what we have not obtained. We need to hunt our own whale. As adults, we need to look inward towards our own soul-building and our own development to find the gaps and fill them in like chinking in a log cabin. We need to discover our own sense of self, our own courage and responsibility. How can we teach accountability when lurking in our purses and pockets are credit cards maxed to their limits? How can we teach restraint and self-disci­pline when we overeat, over drink, and overuse the resources of this planet? How can we teach compassion and understanding when we so quickly dismiss our own young people? We must complete our own initiation.

In the current state of our culture, it’s as if the young people are to blame. Senge says that a common archetype of organizations is to “shift the blame” to another part of the organization. Have we taken the problem of our own lack of initiation and laid it on the shoulders of our youth? To challenge the assumptions that are breaking down the foundation of our culture and society, we need to look into the mirror to discover what fears and unre­alized longings are sunk deep into our own hearts. We need to strip down to a loincloth and a bare stretch of ground and have our own vision quest.

It has been my experience with clients, both young and old, that a step back is easier to make than any step forward. Forward movement takes a tremendous gather­ing of resources and great courage. When confronted with the possibility of bringing forth our brighter, higher nature, we are faced with a fear that is so universal as to send us running for the shadows again.

Initiation is not an event but an ongoing alchemical process. Each fear, doubt, and pocket of self-hatred must be brought to the surface and burned. We need to be purified and tempered in the fire of experience if we are to gain any strength of soul or self.

Do a personal inventory and be painfully honest with yourself. Ask yourself the following questions:

  •  Am I able to build and sustain intimate relationships with my partner or other people?
  •  Am I giving any of my vital energy to old angers, resentments, and relationships that have ended?
  •  Do I have work that satisfies all parts of me and supports me in the world?
  •  Do I have patterns that take me to the edge of something brand new only to pull me back again, and keep me in the old way of being?
  •  Do I have a future vision that extends beyond this week, or this month? What is it?
  •  Am I able to take the strength of my ancestral line on both my mother and father’s side? Do I respect and honor their fate without childish resentment?
  •  Am I a victim of circumstances-or do I have a sense of strength, power and choice in my life?
  •  What do I have to contribute to my culture, and am I doing it?
  •  Am I able to do my life without addictive support from substances, gambling, shopping, etc.?

 If your inventory reveals the uninitiated youth in you, consider that buried within your own soul is an unfin­ished child or adolescent seeking a way out. We find our way to those lost aspects of our Self by examining our darkest thoughts, our fears, sadness and grief, and the greatest yearning of our own heart. We don’t wander into our stored memories to uproot or remove them or to find whom to blame, but only to complete what may have been left incomplete so that we can re-engage our own initiation. We approach our past with respect and curiosity to discover what those hiding younger parts might want from us. We, essentially, initiate them.

Another revealing technique for self-discovery is to scan the qualities and characteristics in others that irritate and infuriate us. For instance, if your boss is stubborn and must always have her own way, perhaps you are stubborn and insistent on having your own way. If your four-year-old leaves his junk all over and it makes you crazy, see where your own junk is. This simple mirror technique asks, “How am I just like that person who irri­tates me so much?” It can sometimes be painful when we uncover our own flaws and weaknesses, but it is worth the effort.

Finally, don’t forget to discover and strengthen the parts of you that are vitally alive and burning like warm flames within you. Look to your own creativity, the sim­ple desires, the love of beauty, nature or music that sleeps within. I remember when my daughter had her senior picture taken we pulled my old senior portrait out and were both stunned to discover how we resembled one another. It was most shocking to me because I think of my daughter as pretty and very loveable. This was not a feeling I ever had about myself at that age. I’m not sure why, but I was never enough to myself: not thin enough, smart enough, ambitious enough. It’s a lesson I’m still learning as I continue my own initiation.

When I was in my early twenties I decided to attend a writer’s retreat to see what it felt like to be in the com­pany of writers. I was a closet writer and had been for many years, but I was afraid to test my tender talent before the eyes of real writers. For three days I went to the phone to register for the retreat. I’d lift the receiver only to drop it again in its cradle. It was awful. I was terrified that I’d somehow find the tiny flame of my desire doused by criticism. I spoke harshly to myself saying things like, “Who do I think I am, anyway?  What kind of a fool . . .”

The self-torture was terrible. Finally, like the seventh grade me who finally tried out for the play, I made the call and even entered a short story to be critiqued by the experienced writers in the group. I attended the retreat and was stunned (and elated) when the older woman who critiqued my manuscript called me an accomplished writer. And, almost miraculously, for the first time, I believed that about myself.

Initiatory moments require something of us. In all we have explored, the rite of passage must have a test or challenge if we are to win the prize of the initiation. We have to do that thing which scares us, which we think we are incapable of doing, which some nasty voice in our head tells us that we are crazy to even attempt. Go ahead and start that business, take that trip alone, go back to school, or take up that paintbrush. Just do it.

When we have done this, then we may, at last, have something of value to offer our young ones. The care of the young soul, whether it be our own or that of our child, includes supporting them through the anguished periods of darkness without judging harshly-and without automatically thinking that we must be doing something wrong as parents. This is a selfish stance concerned only with our own measurement as parents. If our children are in a dark moment of the soul, it may mean we have done it exactly right. In our deepest fears and longings are our greatest gifts. If we never turn in their direction, the gifts remain undeveloped and languishing. This can only lead to real despair and depression.

When we have attended to our own inner initiation, we could also consider what, in this modern society, is the whale we must hunt? From studying many of the futuris­tic books that predict the trends of the 21st century, we can see that our children need to be able to think freely with those little-used frontal lobes of the brain. Our chil­dren need to see beyond their own small world and to think holistically and systemically in order to better judge the effects of a decision in the moment. They need to be flexible, able to cope with changing economies, changing careers, and a constantly shifting global society. These are the whales that our children (and yes, we ourselves) must hunt.

When the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed during the terrorist attack, my son pointed out to me that the date of the attack was 9-11, the same num­ber that we use to call in an emergency. Tom was already looking for patterns that connect and speculating about what the larger meaning of this date held for our society. He was beginning to hunt his own whale.