“We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.” -Martín Pretchel
The group of 22 adolescent orphans never knew a life of non-longing and neither did their parents or grandparents and farther back even. The longing grew stronger through the generations. Some oppressions and injustices were balanced and healed but the longing never was. It seemed that there was a larger missing piece that allowed the oppressive systems to keep sprouting up. The longing was for a culture.
Can we find true belonging outside of an intact culture? They would debate this everyday. Some would say why bother, it isn’t real, let’s not pretend and delude ourselves. Others would insist that we have to do something, albeit imperfectly. They would discuss the elements of what an intact culture consists of. Although there would be great variance in their debate, they would usually agree that a culture is led by percipient elders. Elders that have experienced and integrated multiple dimensions of their being through life’s ongoing uncertainty, grief and renewal. Elders who experienced more and more of their parts within themselves and without through the Other. Elders who could stay playful with the youth about their fears and reactivity. Elders committed to reverence and revelry. Elders who left the position of their childhood and stepped into their place as initiated adults. Elders who were part of bringing the youth into the fold both delicately and fiercely.
What the adolescents fantasized about was for an elder to take them in the night.
Without permission. Without total safety.
Bringing them in touch with the life force so they could step into their undeniable place.
Through initiation.
Risking their life to belong.
In an essential once-and-for-good rite of passage.
The stories of an old time where a culture was still intact were miraculously still passed down. A time when the elders were so life-loving that a child’s first aspiration was to prepare to be a good elder. When a person’s place was taken, the young initiates had to continually court the elder masters of their craft while they trained as apprentices and then artisans. The elders were often persnickety and sharp and also doting, witty and sincere. The young initiates thought they knew more than they did but they also inspired and challenged the elders to apply what they know to what the youth felt coming down the road.
What qualities from an intact culture can we apply without an intact culture? And worse, in the midst of climate catastrophe and soul-sucking artificial intelligence? We can commit unwaveringly to our soul’s craft and contribution. We can discern well between messages of movement-based awareness and freeze-provoking fear mongering. We can stay low and slow in ever-expanding grounded gratitude. We can take pleasure and delight in even tiny exchanges of life and nature. We can practice turning away again and again from what’s not good for us. We can center the voice, perception and needs of the most marginalized for the largest collective evolution. We can insist on leaning on one another through simple presence and not too much elusive enigmatic abstraction. We can aim to increase our capacity to know just enough, see wider and wider perspectives, feel with greater inclusivity of all human feeling and think with increasingly sound luminosity.