There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey. -William Kingdon Clifford

This world is a big story.

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 collapsed response.

Both responses to stress and pain are understandable but neither are exactly excusable.

The old storyteller of accountability doesn’t vanish from our side when we choose not to do something. That becomes a part of the story he tells later around the campfire. What never happened is the part of the story that’s easier to miss. What wasn’t said is harder to track. What was left undone is often a bigger part of the pain.

I remember hearing a fellow, whose name I forget now, saying, “The greatest pain we live with is the love we fail to share.”

The memory of the woman you let get away by your inaction haunts you forever.

There’s no getting of the hook of being consequential in this world.

And restoring consequence to collapse is becoming more and more important in this world.

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 another, more direct way that collapsing causes harm.

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 in 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 still be giving one's gift. One cannot be addicted to attachment and remain authentic.

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 and self-righteousness there but neither of them belong nor stick around long when that old raconteur starts stirring the fire with his stick and recounting all the things they never did that that might have and ought to have.

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.

Overt aggression is labled as bad but passive aggression often gets a pass. 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.

This understanding is, perhaps, at the heart of restorative justice: that there is a bigger story to what’s happened that the terrible events of the moment. That harm was preceded by something which, itself, was given birth to by more things.

I understand that, when people are triggered they can engage in fight, flight or freeze. I affirm that all of those serve a noble purpose. I am also asking why we demonize one (fight) and the other two are so understandable and deserving of pity (flight and fright). Maybe it’s just easier to blame one person that to look at the wider system and try to change that. Maybe it’s easier to look at the loudest, most offensive part and remove that and hope it will all be better. Maybe it’s easier to try to eliminate symptoms than to deal with root causes.

Of course it is.

Collapse is tempting. Until.

It can allow us to hide (until we desperately want to be found). To go unseen (until the pain of being unseen destroys us). To avoid consequence (until we feel like we don’t matter to anyone or anything).

Collapse is a way of shutting off from life.

But that has it’s consequences of the rest of us.

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.

One cannot be cut off from eros, the vitalizing life force that blooms flowers and women, that gives men courage, and give one’s 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.

Collapse is not more noble.

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. The 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. And yet, who do we blame for the harm when it comes? And why do we feel the need to lay the blame in only one place and on one scape goat so often?

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. And perhaps the question of blame isn't the most useful one, 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) because they have bowed to the dictates and group think of whatever community they find themselves in. They’ve dedicated their lives to becoming allies, advocates and rescuers but at the cost of their aliveness. They give everything they can to the world except the gifts they came with.

I remember years ago, during the anti-globalization protests in 2001, going to Gazebo Park in Edmonton and seeing two young women leading chants, awkwardly, on the bullhorn.

“Do you want some help?” I asked.

They handed me the bullhorn gladly and I led the chants down Whyte Ave, 109st, across the Highlevel Bridge and to Ezzio Faraone Park.

I spoke with them after and they told me that they were only going to protests because it seemed like the cool thing to do, and they wanted to contribute but that they were soil scientists and that all they really wanted to do was be in the field doing that work.

And in modern society, lacking any understanding that we are born with gifts and any elders to affirm them, we can so easily collapse into the roles that others have for us.

As Audre Lorde put it, “If I didn’t define myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

And if we allow ourselves to be eaten alive, the world goes hungry.

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 hiding have its own necessity.

I’m saying it’s not more noble and that our rendering it as such has had untold consequence for our culture and keeps us in a cycle of harm that never ends.

And that’s become a part of the story too.

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(To read Part I go here.)

The Impact of How We Are Seen:

“Cha bhi fios aire math an tobair gus an tr’igh e. (The value of the well is not known until it goes dry).” - Scottish Gaelic Proverb

One rarely knows the value of one’s good reputation until it’s been well and truly lost or tarnished.

When it does, the consequences are immediate and visceral. All of the new age aphorisms about ‘choosing how we feel’ and how ‘no one can make you feel anything’ fall apart when one is one the receiving end of that gaze, guided by what they believe about us, of disapproval or disgust, or when the gaze ceases to register us at all but, instead, looks right through us as if we were not there.

The Irish discovered this gaze, that came to be known as The Liverpool Mirror (the way in which the Irish were reflected back in the eyes of the British). The enslaved Africans and Native Americans and their descendants have come to know it, and know it still, in modern day North America. And, in little ways, we’ve all come to know the consequence of how we are seen by others.

This is so well known that public punishments were “phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States.” (Ronson) Public shaming was too terrible in its consequence and it was ended.

Consider this excerpt from an editorial in the New York Times in 1867.

If it has previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. They boy of eighteen who is whipped in New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.” (Red Hannah: Delaware’s Whipping Post, Robert Graham Caldwell)

It’s not that punishment has been eliminated, but that public shaming has. It’s why we have laws around libel and defamation of character. Perhaps it’s why not ‘bearing false witness’ is one of the ten commandments.

If one’s reputation is impacted it can have devastating results to one’s career, relationships and self-esteem.

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The Impact of Reputation on How We See Others:

The story we have in our mind about people shapes how we hear and experience them. Their reputation, should it reach us before they do, will filter everything they say and do. Imagine you have heard that someone is a good person but, when you meet them, they are gruff with you. You might think to yourself, “Ah. They’re having a bad day.”

Imagine you meet someone who you’ve heard is a lying, cheating and conniving sack of shit and they are really nice to you and bring you gifts. You will immediately think, “What do they want?”

Reputation trumps generosity and good intentions.

Someone might meet you, love you and be incredibly impressed and then hear enough rumours about your reputation and begin to see all of your past interaction through that lense.

Reputation can be retroactive.

Gaming The System: On The Perils of the Short Cut & Trying to Be Trusted Without Being Trustworthy

Reputation is everything.

I’ve seen it over and over again in marketing.

People using marketing and selling tactics that don’t feel good to them because they believe there is no alternative. They have to do it. Even though they feel uneasy about what they’re doing, they also feel emboldened at the thought of getting what they want, a sale, and so they press ahead, unconvinced that their conscience’s attempts to slow us down or stop us have any friendly intent beyond stopping us from getting way we want.

And sometimes we are desperate indeed.

We are in a drought and we see water and we’ll do almost anything to get it.

And there are many who would convince us that we can get what we want immediately, without the hard work of cultivating the requisite skill and reputation.

In this modern world full of strategies and tactics to get people to say ‘yes’ to our advances, be they business or personal, to win every argument or at least win friends while we influence people, a time when there always seems to be some new approach to overcoming any objection that anybody might have to doing what we want them to do, be that buying from us, sleeping with us or marrying us, we have woefully lost sight of, or perhaps never been properly instructed in, the fundamental nature of reputation.

Reputation may be one of the most influential forces in human culture.

It determines who is trusted and who isn’t.

When those we trust tell us that another is untrustworthy, our trust in that other diminishes or evaporates entirely.

This all happens silently, behind the scenes. And this can’t be manufactured.

Reputation is made by our actions. It is made, in the long-term, by what we do and do not do. Too much of what I’ve come across in the literature of sales and marketing neglects this realization: that delivering and over-delivering on our promises, over time, is how a name is made.

We are not told this.

And, if we are told, this is not insisted upon as a core understanding.

So much in this culture whispers to us a more seductive story; that we can apply less effort, game the system and achieve the same results as if we had worked hard. Why study when you can cheat? Why have integrity when you can, more easily, seem to have integrity? Why admire from a distance when you can get close and prey upon those weaker than you?

What we are not told is that, in the long-term, reputation beats charm.

Reputation is everything.

Reputation will trump law of reciprocation. You might be the most generous person in the world and gift magnificent gifts to people but, should they hear untoward things about you from someone they trust more than you, they will slowly back away and vanish from your life.

There is a law of social acceptability and, should your reputation become too tainted, it might cost others too much to be associated with you. This is a hard but important thing to come to know. And we often don't know it until it's too late. They might really like you personally but they also know that they could lose status... and most won’t be willing to do that. Most won't tell you they’re leaving. You find out by waking up one day, the sunlight streaming into your room, to see them gone. You will walk into a room and see them and, instead of them running over to see you, full of excitement, there will be nothing. It might be too much work to engage in a conversation with you about something they so fundamentally have issues with. After all, they have no guarantee you'd even be open to hearing their concerns. It can be easier to just walk away. And most do.

Over the years, I’ve endorsed people who my clients have thanked me for introducing them to. And I’ve endorsed people who have cost me the trust of those on my list because of their less than ethical behaviour. And I've had to distance myself even though I like them personally.

You can hide the truth for a while, but people talk. Eventually they will hear it. The only rule of confidentiality in a community is that, if it’s juicy, you can be confident they will talk about it.

Reputation is everything.

And, once it is set, it is very, very hard to change.

Anonymity, The One-Night Stand and The Cold Approach:

Most of the literature in sales & marketing and the world of pick up & dating (both of which I was seduced by and am more familiar with than I wish I was most days) relies on the existence of a certain anonymity and the high-effort model of one of sales or, in this age of Tinder, the one-night stand.

It relies on big cities or vast online markets in which you can meet prospects or approach women who, because you live in some vast metropolis, you are unlikely to every meeting again. And so, reputation can't be used (they've never heard of you) and no reputation is ever earned (because you may never see them or their friends again). Every approach is a cold approach and likely the only interaction you will ever have. This basic orientation - one off interactions from a cold approach - is the 'great unspoken' in many of these approaches.

An example of this kind of approach is the application of social proof. So a business owner might get pictures of themselves with other respected people in their field and, perhaps, charm a testimonial from them. A man might enter a bar surrounded by attractive female friends to indicate to the other women that he is safe.

When there is substance there, there is no problem. But when this is used as artifice, as a way to trick people, as a way to cover up for something that isn't there, it becomes a problem and people get hurt because you're pretending to be more together than you are. You are posturing.

When these tactics and strategies are applied in a smaller community or scene, the kind most of us operate in, the results are often disastrous because the truth comes out faster because the anonymity required for them to work isn't there.

Words spreads.

“They’re slimy as fuck,” people say.

“They’re so pushy,” people whisper to each other as you walk by.

"They're so fake," the warn each other.

You don’t even know it’s happening but all of a sudden, the well of trust people have for you begins to dry up.

By trying to game the system, you’ve earned yourself a name and it isn’t good. You find out it’s happened after the fact.

Reputation is a Filter:

We all have friends who, when they recommend a band to us, we know that we would love it because they have a reputation as someone who has a taste in music we enjoy. The same goes for movies, books, art etc.

They have become our filters. If they say it’s good, it’s good.

I often ask people who come to my workshops to raise their hands if they read the entire sales letter for the workshop. Very few hands go up. How could this be? Why would they come to spend a day or even a weekend with me without knowing what they were getting into?

The answer comes when I ask the second question, “Raise your hand if someone you respect told you to come.” Almost every hand goes up. And then I ask, “Raise your hand if you’ve heard about my work from more than three people.” In cities like Toronto that I’ve visited a lot, a surprising number of hands go up.

My marketing was done for me all those other people.

Word of mouth is how marketing happens.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is the force that determines is a business succeeds or fails.

And reputation is at the heart of word of mouth.

So, how does one get a good reputation? And how does one avoid a bad one?

*

As Jason Connell pointed out in his article Why I’ve Lost Faith in Tony Robbins (And Most Life Coaches)

"The biggest problem in personal development is that most people who work in the space, really shouldn’t. Instead of giving life advice to the masses, they should be talking to a therapist in private."

It’s something I explore in my eBook Who Am I To Teach And Charge For It?. People will often express their doubts about their qualifications to do what they’re doing and I’m always so grateful to hear it when they do. Because there is every chance that they are not ready at all.

And if you go out into the marketplace making promises implied or explicit that you can’t keep, you will disappoint people at best and hurt them at worst. And you will destroy your reputation.

Being a better marketer is not the answer. You’ll only end up destroying your reputation faster.

And the consequences of destroying your reputation might be bigger than you imagined.

Earning Yourself a Name:

Author and storyteller, Martin Shaw points out that, even if you want your name to be Sweetgrass Woman, if you show up late to pick up your kids from school every, single day, that will be your name.

*

His name was Tits.

Well. That wasn’t hit full name but it was a name he earned during his childhood in the Gaelic community in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Even when he was older, people could be heard to call out, “Is Tits here?” at events.

He was four years old, and was one of many people on the Island with the same name. There were a lot of Mary MacDonald or James McIsaac’s around, for example, as people tended to named for their forebears (the first son for his father and the second for his grandfather).

This, of course, created a lot of confusion. What if you had three Emily Rankin’s in your community? And so nicknames were developed.

Michael Newton speaks of this in his fine book Warrior of the Word,

“To distinguish between all of these individuals of the same name adjectives were often added to their first name. These adjectives could refer to hair colour (such as ‘Raibeart Ruadh’ for ‘Red Robert’), relative age to distinguish between generations (such as ‘Aonghus Òg’ for ‘Young Angus’ or ‘Domnhall Beag’ for ‘Little Donald.’), distinctive features (such as ‘Ailean Breac’ for ‘Pock Marked Allan’ or ‘Ruaridh Dall’ for ‘Blind Rory’), occupation (such as ‘Niall Gobha’ for ‘Neil the Smith’) or the place of origin or fosterage (such as ‘Iain Mùideartach’ for ‘Ian of Moydart’ or ‘Raghnall Gallda’ for ‘Foreign Ranald’). A nickname (frith-ainm, far-ainm or leas-ainm) serves to identify a person uniquely and often eclipses the given first name of a person for life. It typically refers to a childhood anecdote, a distinguishing characteristic, or a memorable event. It is used most often within a community, but sometimes travels with the individual outside of his home area.”

And well, Tits, at the age of four, was in class and the teacher asked, “What is it that a cow has four of that a human only has two of?”

His answer branded him for life.

How We Know Things: Truth & Trust in Traditional Cultures

"Mas fhiach an teachdaire, ‘s fhiach an gnothach (If the messenger be worthy, the business is)." - Scottish Gaelic Proverb

In many indigenous cultures, the truth of a story was determined, not by written down records, but by who told the story. Certain people had a reputation for knowing their history well and others did not.

In Myth & Memory, Keith Thor Carlson writes,

“Among the Coast Salish, history is a serious matter. It continues to be used to validate social and political status, as well as personal and collective identity. The upper-class (which Wayne Suttles argues made up the majority of the population at first contact) is known in the Halq’eméylem language as smela:th - literally ‘worthy people’. When asked to define the meaning of worthy people, fluent elders typically explain that it refers to ‘people who know their history.’ Lower-class people, by way of contrast, are called s’texem, a term translated as ‘worthless people,’ because they have ‘lost or forgotten their history’.”

In 1992, during his eight-month contract with the Stö:lõ Tribal Council, a matter of contention arose as one community member was making a claim to have discovered an old Spanish Fort. The claim was not trusted by the rest of the tribe, despite evidence he claimed to have. In the end, this fellow, who was referred to as John Doe, was wrong.

“Significantly, for the purpose of comparison with Western historical methods, the various indigenous critiques of John Doe’s history did not necessarily involve the checking of his evidence. Initially, at least, none of his Coast Salish critics seems to have asked him to share his twelve-generation genealogy, to provide details about the Spanish fort (such as where it was located or when it was established), or to take people to the archaeological sites and cave. Instead, they generally asked, ‘Well, who did he get that stuff [information] from? I never heard that before. Who told him that?’ John Doe’s evidence was deemed unreliable not because he had failed to produce the physical evidence, but because he had consistently failed to use adequate oral footnotes to validate the manner in which he had acquired the knowledge. In other words, he was being discredited because he failed to trace his knowledge through recognized experts or authorities, and in this was proving himself ‘unworthy’ in some eyes. As one widely respected elder observed, ‘A ‘good person’ would tell us how he knows that stuff; who told it to him.”

The Etymology of Truth:

So much of trust works in this way.

And, in exploring trust and reputation, it is well worth looking into how understandings of truth have changed in the English language over the past centuries.

It’s worth noting that trust and true both share the tru root and are clearly related etymologically.

The Barnhardt Dictionary of Etymology tells us that the word 'true'…

“Developed from the Old English (before 899), West Saxon triewth, Mercian tréowth faithfulness, from triewe, treowe… Faithful, loyal, trustworthy. It’s not until after 1200 when this becomes to mean ‘consistent with fact, agreeing with reality’. “The meaning of agreeing with a standard or rule, exact, accurate, correct (as in true north) is first recorded in about 1550. Old English triewe, treowe (from Proto-Germanic *trewwjaz) is cognate with Old Frissian and Old Saxon triuwi faithful, trustworthy, Middle Dutch ghetruwe (modern Duth getrouw), Old High German gitriuwi (modern German treu) faithful, Old Icelandic tryggr, trustworthy, safe (Danish tryg, Swedish and Norwegian Trygg safe, secure), and Gothic triggws faithful. Congnates outside of Germanic are found in Old Irish derb sure, Old Prussian druwis faith, Lithuanian drutas, strong, thick, and Sanskrit dhruvá-s, from Indo-European *drue-/dru-, *drewe/dru- hard, firm”

In The Origins of English Words by Joseph T. Shipley we find that the words 'trust' and 'truth' both has their roots in the word deru: “Solid; hence wood and associated ideas, as lasting, holding firm.”

Consider that the baby name Treowe means ‘loyal’ and that treowman would mean ‘a loyal man’.

Think of the layers and braided meanings here: faithful, loyal, trustworthy, safe, secure, sure, solid, strong, thick, hard, wood and firm.

It could be easy to imagine that what the words are describing are the facts, 'the truth'; that the 'truth' is solid and strong. And perhaps that's true. But there is another level, easy to forget in our modern culture. I would submit that these words refer primarily to the one speaking, that they were people who were solid and upon whom you could rely.

If we dig even deeper into the etymological roots we find something even more mysterious,

“In the mother tongue of Sanskrit, the idea of motion that ‘passes or goes beyond’ or that ‘crosses’ comes from the observation of the apparent motion of heavenly bodies in space. To wit, in Sanskrit, the root tr designates both ‘star’ and the act (with an extended r, tr) or ‘crossing’, the typical motion of heavenly bodies. In all likelihood, the consonants t and d originally had the same meaning: ‘light’... As a result, the tr group, made up of the consonants t and the verb r ‘to go’ or ‘to move toward’, initially had to indicate movement of a light toward a point and, subsequently, moving away from a point to arrive… at another point."

In Indo-European, the consonant d meant light… The roots dr speak of ‘the arrival [r] of light [d],’ ‘to take care of’, ‘to respect’ or ‘to honour’. The root dru means ‘wood’ or ‘any wooden implement. In the Indo-European verb roots that begin with dh-, such as dham, dhã, dhi, dhu, dhr [as in dhruvá-s} and dhyã, the consonant d served the function of revealing the origin and essence of a particular phenomenon related to ‘light’, such as ‘fire’, ‘energy’, ‘heat’, ‘spirit’, ‘thought’, ‘soul’, ‘religious meditation’, etc.”

And so, perhaps, we could imagine there might be nothing more steady and sure than the presence of the night sky, turning but never changing. Perhaps it spoke to the trustworthiness of this world and that we might come to rely on the way the world is; never using guile or artifice to seduce or fool us.

Perhaps it is also speaks to the relational nature of all of this; that the sharing of news, stories, revelation, the ‘fire in the head’ insight, the light of illumination, the warmth that people might share with each other each night (as fire itself comes from wood), this passing on of understanding, was something that moved from one person to another, passing on from generation we have never seen, across the horizon of our lives and onto future generations we will never see.

Perhaps it speaks to the way that certain people in our communities become, themselves, the bright stars of our communities. They become the solid oak tree around which the village gathers. They become the fixed and magic-filled firmament of our cultures understanding. They become our chord back to where things all began; the umbilicus of our people, the carriers of its soul, loyal to our peoples and to the larger world that feeds us all.

It was not until after the Middle Ages, that 'truth' became related to abstract and absolute notions of knowledge.

As Empire, in its myriad forms, began to appear in these small villages in Europe with their sword-point imposition of 'the truth' (the one and only) that trumped the personal qualities of whoever might be speaking it, the standing of those respected and honoured ones, those treowemen in the community was made irrelevant. Once 'the truth' came in, village life, in all of its reliance on trust, relationship, mutual obligation and kinship came to an end. This notion of an independent, abstract truth was the crucifixion of a village-mindedness that depended on knowing the source of the story one had heard and whether or not it was reliable.

Reputation became nothing.

The Etymology of Reputation:

And so, we come back at last to 'reputation'.

And it’s worth digging into the etymology here as well.

The roots of reputation are ‘repute’. The re is a prefix which, in this case, means ‘repetition’, (as in rearrange, ‘to arrange again’).

What remains is the word pute.

In the Indo-European language family, the letter p relates strongly to purity (from the verb pu). It speaks of cleansing, making clear, and making luminous whereas puy and puteo is to stink and puter is rotten or putrid.

Peue means cut, strike, dig into, consider, think over, or prune. The Latin putare, putatum also, interestingly, relate to the word ‘account’ (which is another word for story just as the word ‘tally’ is intimately connected with another word for story - tale).

Curiously, the Latin puteus, which refers to a pit, well or cistern (a place where the purifying waters could gather).

The Barnhardt Dictionary of Etymology tells us that 'repute' speaks of:

“Suppose to be, consider, suppose. About 1399, reputen to believe; borrowed from Middle French reputer learned borrowing from Latin reputãre reflect upon, reckon (re- repeatedly putãre to reckon, consider… cleanse, trim, prune; also think.”

The putamen is the part of the brain associated with learning.

And so, perhaps, this word pute might, on one level, suggest something about meaning, story and account. It's good to remember, when we see a meaning like 'account' that, before numbers and accounting we had accounts of events. Before tallying ledgers, we had tales. We had stories to keep track of things (before we'd turned them into things, from relatives into resources). Reputation is about the stories we tell about one another about one another.

Consider these words that also share the root word pute.

• Impute (im in or into + pute) means something in the order of attributing and ascribing giving credit or responsibility (often negatively) to someone or something for causing. To say it differently, it’s to press, attach or imprint a story or meaning onto a thing.

• Dispute from Latin disputãre (dis apart, separately + putãre to count, consider). Another way of saying this is to say that you have different stories or meanings for the same thing.

• Putative (pute + ative the active form of this verb, tending towards, relating or connecting to something, designed to do something, the manner of being it has). Putative means considered, or reputed to be. Another way of saying this: the story in action or the story one is inside. (e.g. he was the putative father, he was commonly regarded as the father, he was inside the story of being a father or playing out the story of being a father).

And so we see this forest of meanings: purity, cleansing, making clear, and making luminous (with their opposites) to stink, rotten or putrid. We also find: to cut, strike, trim or prune, to ‘account’, dig into, a pit, well or cistern, suppose to be, suppose, to believe, learned, reflect upon, reckon, think, and consider.

Reputation in the Gaelic World

In the Gaelic word, one’s reputation was everything and many of the seanfhaclan (proverbs - literally, ‘old words’) speak to this.

“Am fear a gheibh ainm na mocheirich, faodaidh e cadal anmoch gu meadhan latha (The man who is known as an early riser can sleep late).”

"Is fhasa deagh ainm a chall na chosnadh (It is easier to lose a good name than to gain one).”

Reputations could be made or broken by the poets, storytellers and bards who, in poetic form, might compose praise poetry about you or, should your behaviour cross the lines, poetry that would ridicule you. In an oral tradition culture where words mattered so deeply, the effect of this was immediate and profound.

Let's explore four of the core words used to speak of reputation in the Gaelic language: ainm, cliù, meas, alladh and teist.

Ainm is the word used above for reputation. It literally translates as ‘name’ but also means ‘character’. The Old Welsh version is anu. In Sanskrit, an means to breathe, to respire, to live. The Greek ánemos, a wind and the Latin animo - to give life to, to animate.

Another commonly used word for reputation is alladh which means some weaving of excellence, fame, greatness, renown, applause, report.

Cliù means fame (good or bad), good name, character, renown or rumour. In Old Irish clú. In Old Celtic: klevos, related to the Greek klevo, which means a sort of poetically preserved fame, report, this is cognate with the word ‘hear’.

The word meas is an interesting one. One often signs a letter le meas, which means something close to ‘with respect’. It can also mean regard, esteem, fame, opinion, and honour.

The Indo-European root for M means ‘a substance with a limit’. Some of the central words that comes from this letter relate to mother, mater, matter. The mi refers to measurement.

But, if you dig deeper, you find that meas connects to the word ‘food’.

Middle English: from Old French mes ‘portion of food,’ from late Latin missum ‘something put on the table,’ past participle of mittere ‘send, put.’ The original sense was ‘a serving of food,’ also ‘a serving of liquid or pulpy food,’ later ‘liquid food for an animal’; this gave rise (early 19th century) to the senses ‘unappetizing concoction’ and ‘predicament,’ on which sense 1 is based. In late Middle English the term also denoted any of the small groups into which the company at a banquet was divided (who were served from the same dishes); hence, ‘a group of people who regularly eat together’ (recorded in military use from the mid 16th century). (Google)

Meas can mean, fish, salmon, fruit or acorn. The verb measach means ‘fruitful’, or ‘abounding in fruits’.

Meas can also mean measure, rod to measure graves, estimate, weigh, and calculate. It’s interesting to note, in terms of measurement that méter (closely resembling ‘meter’ a unit of measurement) is a variation of matter and mother. It is also connected to the Gothic mitan, measure and the English: mete, measure.

It can mean a weapon, point-edge, pair of shears that might be used for cutting and trimming which, should you be on the receiving end of defamation of your character, deserved or not, feels entirely accurate.

It can also mean wind (which brings us back to ainm).

Another level of it is: judgment, valuing, appraisement, consider, think, suppose, judge, impute, reckon, deem, and regard. The connected Latin root: meditari, means ‘think’ and the Greek médeõ - to look after, médõ - to worry about, to treat oneself (medically).

Teist has its roots in testimony, proof and witnesses.

Reputation is what we are known and renowned for (be that good or bad). It is given as a way of tending to the well-being of the community feeding the power of some and trimming back on the power of others. Reputation is the considered measure taken of our character. Reputation is a reminder of our substance and our deep consequentiality on the lives around us - that everything we do and do not do has some effect on those around us.

Reputation as a verb:

The prefix re suggests something that is happening repeatedly. And so, what is the putation that is being done over and over?

I want to, again, suggest that it has to do with determining the meaning and the storied nature of a thing.

I want to suggest that reputation is a nominalization, meaning a process that has been turned into a thing. If you couldn’t put it in a wheelbarrow (perhaps a very large one), it’s not a noun.

What this means is that reputation is never entirely fixed. By its nature, it’s always being reconsidered. Like breathing, which gives us life, it is never static. This means redemption is always possible.

New names can be earned and given. This is the re-putation in action.

Reputation: Feeding the Heart of The Village

Let's return to the letter p, related strongly to purity and the verb pu which speaks of cleansing, making clear, and making luminous whereas puy and puteo indicates stink and puter, rotten or putrid.

Perhaps reputation was a way that the well being of a community was cleansed and tended to; keeping it healthy by ensuring things were named properly so that we could know who to trust and who not to trust; a sort of cultural hygiene that when bad behaviour arose, corrected it with instruction (pruning) or, in the most serious of cases, met it with shunning or banishment (cutting).

Perhaps it speaks to the ways that our name is always under reconsideration, that meaning and story is constantly being reapplied to our name guided by our own actions. And, certainly, it is a reminder that our reputation is not us, but a story, the supposings of other people, that our stature in a community is not held inherently in ourselves but in the reckonings of everyone else in that community. A reputation is who others suppose or believe us to be and it is fashioned by the stories that others tell about us.

Perhaps those old ones knew how central self-esteem was to our health and how much of our self-esteem was derived from the people from whom we ourselves derive. Perhaps they knew, as deeply as the modern world has forgotten, how much we are made and unmade by each other.

If we return to what the Gaelic language tells us: reputation is the name (ainm) we gain from the testimony and witness of others (teist). It is a name that can animate or de-animate us. It can feed us or starve us (meas).

Resources Used:

The Comparative Etymological Dictionary of Classical Indo-European Languages.

The Barnhardt Dictionary of Etymology

The Origins of English Words by Joseph T. Shipley

Additional Reading:

On Promises

The Poverty of Believing in Yourself

Admiration: The Deep and Practiced Courtesy of Appreciating From a Distance

I recorded this interview years ago when Martin’s new book Scatterlings had been released and he was planning a tour across Canada. I just stumbled across it on my Marketing for Hippies website and thought it deserved a fresh reading.

You can learn more about Martin Shaw and his work at: DrMartinShaw.com and SchoolOfMyth.com. You can listen to the interview 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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Tad: Hi, everybody. This is Tad Hargrave from MarketingForHippies.com and various other endeavors. And I have the good pleasure and the good fortune of being here on the phone with Martin Shaw who is a storyteller and award-winning author who has written the book, A Branch from the Lightening Tree, Snowy Tower, and Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia, his most recent.

He is director of the West Country School of Myth in the UK and he has also devised and led the oral tradition courses at Stanford University. And I’m sure many other things.

I had the pleasure to meet Martin and see him at work I guess earlier this year on the west coast of Canada at Hollyhock Retreat Center. And was suitably impressed and amazed to be in the presence of one such as this with so many old-time stories brought alive in a new way in the world today. And so Martin and I were just chatting before we got started. He’s been working on his current book, Scatterlings, which we’ll be talking about today, for the last five years.

So, Martin, reading the write ups and seeing the video that you made about it, it seems like such a poignant book at these times. Because we’re in a world where localism, where shopping local, and local food are becoming more important. But we’re also in a world of immigrants. We’re in a world of digital nomads where it’s become sort of this idealized lifestyle that you can have the laptop lifestyle and travel anywhere, where home just becomes a feeling. But also this world of refugees because of the destabilization of climate and political realities. And here you are, this traveling English storyteller, with something to say about it. And so it seems like such an important time for a message such as this. So I guess I lay that out as the overture.

And I’m curious why the title Scatterlings, what that word means for you?

Martin: Scatterlings for me really is a term for everywhere and nowhere. When I was growing up, I think like a lot of people I come from a place — I come from the west country of England, from a county called Devon, where variants of my family have been there for 200 years.

But I realized that although my family were from a place, they weren’t necessarily of it. And so I began to suspect that being from somewhere might be a little bit overrated. I think by the time I was 20 I had lived in 14 different parts of Great Britain. And I would always use overly romantic terms to describe it.

I’d call myself a nomad or a gypsy.

But the truth is I wasn’t either of those things. I was a scatterling. And really what that means is, as I said, of everywhere and nowhere. You know, it was as though I had traded depth for endless growth. In doing so, my knowledge was three miles wide and two inches deep.

And as a storyteller and a mythologist, which is a very sort of endangered species type of profession these days, I realized that stories from everywhere are now available to us all the time. And with that, I realized that they are somehow ruthless and in fact as a storyteller I felt weightless to some degree.

So, about five years ago, I effectively drew a sort of chalk circle of about 10 miles around where I grew up. And I said, “This is going to be my mythography. This is where I’m going to dig in. This is where I’m going to begin the labor of finding out what wants to disclose itself to me right here and now.”

What does it mean not to claim something, but to be claimed by it? What does it mean to behold a story or a stretch of land, not just to see it? You know, when you and I, if I took you for a walk where I live, we’d go for a little while. And you and I would see a thistle. But William Blake didn’t see a thistle. He saw a small, gray, glowing man waving at him.

That’s called beholding, and that has a visionary aspect to it. And you know, one of the kind of modern hysterias is this feeling about how do we become indigenous again? Like it’s a pill that we can pop. And funny enough, I’ve never met anybody worthy of calling themselves indigenous. I’ve never heard that phrase being used.

But one of the things that I think makes a huge difference between being from a place and of a place is your capacity to behold it. A long time before I became a storyteller, a long time before I wrote books, when I was about 23, I took myself to a stretch, what we optimistically call a mountain.

You wouldn’t call it a mountain. You’d call it a hill. It was in Snowdonia in Wales, there’s a mansion called Caer Idris, the Seat of Arthur. And if you spend a night alone on Carta, you come down mad, dead or a poet. And so I went up for four days and nights without food to make absolutely sure, to see what would happen.

And I had quite unexpectedly, a deep and protracted mystical experience. I had an experience that doesn’t fit in the self-help books. It doesn’t fit in modern books about rites of passage. It was like something out of some Siberian anthropological report from the early 1900’s.

And it happened to a white kid on a Welsh hill in 1996. And so I was left in the detritus of that experience, wondering how on earth — how can a doorway like that still be open? A doorway where you can walk out of this century altogether? That’s what I did really. And the last 20 years has been a slow walk back from that into the village. Because you know, the epiphany of the wild is not enough.

I say to my students, don’t make a marginal life out of a marginal experience. Initiations tend to take place on the fringes of things. But there is a secure route back into the middle. You know, people like Yeats was political his whole life. He didn’t just sit there as a poet at a great distance. He got amongst it.

After 20 years of stories, 20 years of witnessing and traveling stories from all around the world, it felt important in the time I had to realize I had been claimed by a small stretch of land, a place called Dartmoor. And to do something about it. To do the labor and do the work.

In some small way, I wanted to be a good little Shetland pony for the 10,000 secret things that riddled around me all the time. And so that’s what Scatterlings is.

Tad: Now I can imagine some people pushing back and saying, “Yeah, but part of the benefit of the time that we live in is it’s this globalized world. We exchange cultures and it’s so diverse and so eclectic. I can eat food from a curry shop over here, I can have a burrito over here and then I go to an African dancing class over here. Then I go to my Zen meditation over here. We’ve got this big, eclectic global world. And so globalization is wonderful. We get to travel, and that’s part of the benefit of being in these times. We don’t have to be so rooted anywhere. You know, we get to have this globalized experience, and isn’t that adding to the richness of our life to be in this more globalized world?”

And I’m curious what you would say to that?

Martin: I’d say all of that is true, but it is also leading to an addiction to severance. It’s an addiction to severance we get. It’s easier and easier to walk away from situations, from relationships, from people and from cultures and from ideas that we don’t see them through anymore. We don’t see anything down anymore.

I think when I meet many people bereft in their emotional lives I see them as almost sort of paralyzed by choice. There’s a tyranny, actually is the word I would use. A tyrannical element to choice that is distinctly unerotic. It doesn’t feed life. It actually paralyzes you.

And the kind of globalization you’re describing means in the language of the romantics, and I’m definitely a romantic, it means you experience a lot of eros, but you don’t experience amor. A lot of eros, but you don’t experience amor in the sense that I can travel to Marin County or I can travel to the tundra of Siberia.

I can travel with the Kalahari Bushmen and I am moved and thrilled and interested. But when I am on Dartmoor, I am in the presence of something entirely different. And my body feels different. The tempering of my heart is different. And I’m very grateful that I have that relationship and that I can discern the difference.

Without that, I will move from flower to flower to flower to flower, experience to experience to experience, and I will marry nothing and my hands will touch nothing. And then I wonder why I want to blow my brains out when I’m 50. So, for me, that is part of the entanglement that comes with all of this endless opportunity.

I’m not an idiot. I understand all the good things about it. You know, it will be a long time before I’m rude about growing up on Sesame Street or listening to John Coltrane or going to the cinema or any of those things. I’m not a ludite. But I am aware that there is a tremendous price tag attached.

Tad: That opens up a lot of loops. But one of the things that occurred to me as you were speaking is, certainly in a lot of circles I work with, there’s a sense of — of course most of my friends want to go to India because you have all the sacredness there and the Ashrams.

You can meditate there. And a lot of them want to go to South America and of course in South America you can do ayuhuasca and you can hang out with Mayan shamans and you can hike the Inca trail. And then people want to go to Asia and Thailand. Meditation! The full moon parties! All these other places.

Especially it seems for people of European descent, but maybe there’s something about this modern world. Because I imagine there’s a lot of people of a lot of different cultures that could relate to this sense. There’s always somewhere else.

And I can tell you that when I think of spiritual Mecca’s in the world, places you might have a transcendent experience, Devon is not one that would come to mind.

Martin: Yeah, and I’m relieved about that because that means it’s a secret.

Tad: There’s a woman named Grace Lee Boggs who was an Asian woman in the States, an activist. And one of the quotes she said, there are two that come to mind. One of them was, “The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put.”

The other one was, “You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it; unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.”

But this notion of being in a place, that you found something extraordinary in a place that other people might look at and see as ordinary in some way. And it seems like there’s an invitation in what you’re saying for people to perhaps stop seeking the sacred in these far-off places and to draw that imaginary chalk circle around a certain place for themselves and to find something there.

Martin: Yeah, that is true. That is true. Scatterlings is the end. You mentioned the other books, A Branch from the Lightning Tree and The Snowy Tower, and then this book Scatterlings. Scatterlings is the one, and it’s very much the end of a trilogy. It’s the most urgent of the three.

And it is a very gnostic book. It is a very esoteric book. It pulls no punches. But it absolutely does offer, in its own strange, circuitous way, something of a map that whether you are living in Detroit or in a fishing village or you know, in a city or anywhere else, there is something you can do with this. I don’t quite know what, because I don’t like franchises and I don’t like bullet points.

It doesn’t do any of that. But it’s got a taste to it, it’s own undomestic language. And language is important to me. The guy that you would have seen me with in Hollyhock, Stephen Jenkinson, is a great pal of mine. And he’s someone who really relishes his language. He believes that language has moved like reindeer over tundra to get into the meadhall of your jaw.

It’s that you matter. That you have a degree of consequence. And that when you are feeling things deeply, you need to elevate that to a point where you nourish more than yourself when you speak it. That doesn’t mean it has to be high faluting. It just needs to have a kind of truth in it that the old gods recognize.

So staying still for five years, you know, and I travelled, but my psychic world was here. You know, the intensity of my creative life was here. Raising a child was here. You know, that’s the most important part of anything that I do, is being with my daughter.

So all of these things were relatively undramatic, undramatic. And you know, many of my friends like yours were gobbling ayuhuasca or hanging by their testicles off trees in Sri Lanka or whatever the hell it was. Raising kids, dealing with the ignominity of living in the west. These are kind of private but very real mythological struggles for me.

They are what I would call ordinary grandeur. And I just knew that that was what I was going to focus on, rather than anything else that seemed too dramatic. I wasn’t going to get thrown off the chase anytime soon.

Tad: So a lot of people I can imagine who are hearing this would say, “Well, I haven’t left my damn neighborhood in 20 years. I would never have this kind of mythical experience.” I’ve been traveling and I’ve been in a place and there was no chalk circle, but if there was, I wouldn’t have left it. And yet I haven’t had this experience of being of this place, rather than just being from this place.

And so what do you make of that?

Martin: Well, they sound tacitly or explicitly depressed. And one of the things that I would have recommended is, as I sort of referred to briefly at the beginning is that this all comes out of an experience called wilderness rites of passage. Where I got profoundly shaken.

I was shaken to such a degree, I had absolutely no idea whether I would come out of this alive or not. So when I talk about the process that’s in Scatterlings and actually long before I wrote Scatterlings, I spent four years living in a tent on a succession of English hills. Exploring the notion of does wildness and wilderness even exist in Britain anymore?

So I did the hard yards and that kind of thing. I turned my head in that direction. So no, if your idea of your neighborhood is waddling down to Starbucks and back, no, we’re not on the same page. We’re not talking about the same thing. Absolutely not.

You know, the book asks more from you than you will want to give. That’s for sure. And I can talk about that on the phone, you know. But the main thing is to read the book and see the price tag attached. And most people would not want to do it. You know, Rilke the poet, he says really the function of poetry, real poetry, is saying this to you, “You must change your life.”

You must change your life. And so the book and my particular stance in the world is not designed for a mass market. But what it is saying is that mythological intelligence, in other words, your capacity whether you’re living in a city or a suburb or out on some farm or you’re part of a traveling circus, your capacity to recognize not just that you are in the presence of the gods but that you recognize which gods are speaking to you at which particular times through conversations and circumstance. That is a skill that you can develop. What Seamus Heaney would say, he’d say, “You need to tune your ear.” You need to tune your ear. And if you are living in a place and you are profoundly stuck, your ear is not tuned to it. And there are many different ways that people go about that.

And again, in the ’90’s and the early part of this century, anybody that I met that presented themselves as a spiritual being thought language was rather out of fashion. Everybody was trying to get to the place beyond language. And so to become a storyteller felt a very antiquated act. You know, a very strange thing to do. But because I believed that language was a kind of holy currency, it was a way of bartering with weather patterns and claiming some sort of intimate relationship with oak trees and ravens. And I believed also that when you did that, in some strange way, what we loosely call ancestors would roll up and have a look. This all seemed to be part of the move from the fromness to the ofness. Language was actually a bridge into that for me.

Tad: Speaking of language, you made a distinction in the video. You referenced it here between wilderness and wildness. That had me wondering. Because some people live in the concrete jungle, and there is no wilderness around them. And yet you seem to be suggesting that wildness is still available.

Martin: Yes it is. It is. Now there are different types of wildness. You can be thinking of wildness like the long grass that is growing up between two tenement buildings. You can look at, if not a wild environment, then a feral environment, when you’re looking at street gangs.

I’ve spent, many, many years working with what we loosely call at-risk youth, and in prison sometimes. And you see versions of wildness or attempts at wildness trying to show their hands all the time.

I mean, interestingly for me, I believe that discipline is the dance partner of wildness. That actually I don’t want to be experiencing expressive dance or interpretive dance all day long. Sometimes I want to see a flamenco. I want to see steps. I want to see discipline. I want to see homemaking skills. You cannot be a decent storyteller without homemaking skills.

Because in the Gaelic and Celtic tradition, if your life isn’t beautiful enough, if you are not a kind of little trembling bird of sound, then stories simply will not land on your shoulder. There’s a whole maintenance program designed to curate and look after stories. Otherwise they’re simply not interested in turning up.

You know, you’ll see this in Scatterlings. The stories in Scatterlings are not auditioning for our contemporary polemics. They don’t care. They do not care. They have an agency all of their own. I travel about and people are always saying to me, they say, “Oh, you know a bit about stories. Can you give us one mono story for now? Can you just procure it out of the ether with all of the complexity of everything we’re living through? Can you do that for us?”

And my feeling is the stories we need arrived really perfectly on time about 5,000 years ago. They’re stepping forward now. The first thing that I recommend is, if you’re interested in stories, you need to live a life efficacious enough, humble enough and beautiful enough for stories to actually show up. Stories are not interested in us just beholding beauty. They want to see us make it. They want to see us make beauty and then they get interested and then they show up. And then they start to, as I said earlier on, arrive in the meadhall of our jaws.

Tad: Is there some relationship for you between beauty and wildness?

Martin: Yeah, there is. There is actually. And I think most people can understand that very quickly. But civilization is also not the dirty word for me that it is to a lot of my contemporaries who would just be done with it. They would just like Rome to burn all day long and that would be the end of the matter.

And I’m not interested in that either. You know, it is a paradoxical time that we’re living in. You know, there’s no one that I know that on some level is not a hypocrite. Nobody. And you know, I would say this: at this point, for you and I, our incompleteness is our authenticity. It is. You know, I’m not saying we stay there. I’m not saying we stay there, but for me anyway, my incompleteness is my authenticity. Anything else is just hubris. And then I try to work at it in my own stumbling fashion.

Tad: Well, you mentioned the relationship between storytelling and homemaking. And I’m curious, because that word ‘home’, of course, gets used in a lot of different ways in this culture. And it’s come to mean a lot of different things. So I’m wondering, what does home mean for you? And what does homemaking mean for you?

Martin: I think there’s some practical stuff attached to that. Seven or eight miles from where I’m talking to you now, my dead are buried. You know, my aunt is buried, my grandpa is buried. My great-grandfather is buried, my granny is buried. My other aunt is buried. So there’s something to do with bodies in the ground. That’s partially to do with home. I can’t access that sensation by the Pacific Ocean. I can’t access it in Norway. You know, I have to be in a particular place.

You know, it’s funny how we talk about the difference between a house and a home. ‘Home’ I have to say for me is also a lot to do with books. I’m an enormous reader and I’ve lived in different places. But certain books, certain images, certain paintings, they orientate me, but I do not mistake that for what someone would call an axis mundi. That’s not my Yggdrasil. That’s not my holy tree.

So I have a sense, wherever I go, to some degree, I feel stabilized. But without question, when I am entering Devon, it’s to do with the smell of the air. It’s to do with the seasons I have witnessed over and over again. It’s to do with the child that I’ve raised. It’s to do with the rain in my face. It’s to do with all the failures that have landed on me in this place over the last 44 years. It’s a really nuanced confluence of things that for me give me a sense of home. And it’s not even a comfortable sensation. It’s just a thing. You know?

Tad: So is homemaking a skill, do you think, that we have to develop? Is it an innate human capacity, this idea of making home? Because for some people of course, maybe they’re a refugee or something else, or maybe they’ve moved for a different reason and now they find themselves in a new place that is not home. And some people have never known home in the way you’re talking about it: the bones of their ancestors. So then we’re left with this, I guess we have to make home.

Martin: You do. And how does one do that? One of the things I found so fascinating about spending five years ruminating on your home ground, from where I come from, Devon, is when you go deep enough into the local, you find the nomad. There’s always a nomadic agency at the very center of the local. For example, a few years ago on a hill very near where I lived, a place called White Horse Hill, we discovered the burial cairn of a young girl. She was 14 years old. And she died about 4,000 years ago, or had been ritually executed. I’m not sure. And there were bearskins in there. And there was all sorts of jewelry. But the reason why we knew she was a big deal was that there were 200 little amber beads right there on this remote Devon hillside. And where did those amber beads come from? The Baltics. The Baltics. So that was going on 4,000 years ago. Trade was going on 4,000 years ago. One of the things I do in Scatterlings is I collect language that has remained outside of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, but was being used by farmers and sheepherders sand rural people in Devan for hundreds of years. And without question the root of their language for calling animals is Aramaic.

You know, so in other words, one of the things as I’m trying to get soaked into the local, the further into it I go, the more and more scent I get from cultures from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. You know, I mean Dartmoor itself is 365 square miles of wilderness, but, for a long time, it was the bottom of an ocean. For a long time, it was a redwood forest. For a long time, it was covered by hyenas and elephants. I love the idea that an elephant is more indigenous to Dartmoor than I will ever be. I think that’s very charming.

So I don’t lock in too quickly. I stay curious. Put it that way, Tad. I stay curious about what the word ‘local’ is. Because actually, and I’m sure this is the same way you are, there’s a hysteria around the word local that after a while I find unattractive. It’s just become another word, you know. So actually one of the things that Scatterlings has to own as a book is local stories, local myths, local legends. They do not do what a Russian fairy tale does. They do not do what a big Irish saga does.

They are much more low-key. When you really do get a story that is based and locked into a particular stretch of the dark river, that oak tree with the moss on the northern flank, the information it gives is discrete and quiet and really requires you as a storyteller to bring people into what I call the mnemonic triggers, the landscape triggers of that story.

You don’t travel the world with those stories. You don’t tell those stories to 4,000 people. There seems to be an invitation the other way in saying — and that’s what happened with the book. It felt as if the land was saying, “We will disclose these stories to you, but the condition is if you’re actually going to tell them you have to tell them in place.”

And so that’s what I can see as part of my practice over the years with this book. It’s actually working with quite small groups in Chaw Gully or by the great weatherstones or wherever these stories actually arise out of the ground from. There’s a wonderful phrase from a writer called Sean Kane and he says myth is the power of a place speaking. is the power of a place speaking. Not that myth is people speaking or an oak tree speaking or a jack door. It’s the place. And you and I can be part of that place briefly, sometimes. But I’m touched by that. That’s enough for me to go on.

Tad: That reminds me of an experience I had 10 years ago. I was at the Gaelic College and I ended up connecting with a storyteller, George McPherson up there. And he had all these stories that were so particular, like this rock. You know, what you were saying has me thinking. So much to say.

One is how this culture becomes very — identities can become so Puritan and so pure. So “I’m from this country,” or “I’m from this,” with no sense that the ancestors of those places came from other places at some point. And there’s been all this migration over the years.

People say, “I’m Scottish,” and it’s like from this place. But you know, where? When exactly? So there’s that. And, of course, we see the toxic bloom of that coming out in the United States right now with the rise of white supremacy. Which is this sort of toxic white as a pure thing, which of course has a larger story of often coming and fleeing from Europe.

And then a sort of freezing of this cultural identity of you know, Scottish or Irish or whatever it is. And it makes me think. One of the things Stephen Jenkinson said once was that the main capacity of storytelling is actually story hearing. The ability to hear stories.

So part of what I’m hearing of what you’re saying is there’s this notion that people in their communities, when we really look at our communities and neighborhoods and where things came from, each of those things has a story. And that if we can look at everything and say, “Where did you come from?”

Look at the dandelion in North America and know that they came from Europe. They got brought over. I’ve even heard people make claims that earthworms were not here, that those came over from Europe. You know, cattle and all these things. So there’s a capacity, even in looking at one square mile or one square foot almost, one could want to know, “Where did you come from? How did you get here? What’s the story of you? What’s the story of us?”

And then it just seems like there’s some — that seems connected to the capacity for homemaking.

Martin: I agree. In this book I wrote, Snowy Tower, the epilogue of the book is called Foundational Stones to Myth Telling. And it’s all about that. It’s just saying, “Try this out, try this out, try this out.”

It makes people a little worthy for a while. Do you know that expression? Worthy? So you’re a bit anal. You’ve got people kind of wandering around with jackets that are sort of pressed in vats of their own urine and things like that. They’re a little humorless for a little while, but you get past it.

I mean, I have students who for example, there will be a small room in their house and everything that is in that room they know entirely the story of that table and how it was made. Or the shoes or the musical instrument. They can go right back to the source of it usually because they made it themselves. So, that’s a mighty task. It’s a wonderful task. But if people want to work in that manner, that’s a place that you can go. You can just say, “I’m really going to get to know how it is to handle wood, or to build a boat. I’m going to dig into this.” And the further you go, as I’m sure you’re aware in your own life, you get paid back pound by pound exactly what you put in. And you will know that you are on the right trail with it when you are no longer enjoying it for a period of time. And you continue. I mean, that’s one of the things in Scatterlings I’m talking about for a lot of this book. The book was not written on a crest of euphoria. You know, the book was a very diligent, slow, trucking through four very difficult winters.

Trying to find my way across Dartmoor without a map. So in other words, I would find a story or a story would find me that still had a beginning and middle and end that was describing a particular section of the moors. And I would go up there and I would walk — I hesitate to call it that, but you could see it almost like a song line. I would try and find my way from one end of the story to the other. And the commentary on the stories was not a kind of exegesis in comparative religion or comparative mythology. It’s what happened on the walk. It’s the belief that when you start not only listening to a story — you know, the suggestion you were saying about how we listen to stories, not just tell them — it’s also how we walk them. You know, to walk a story, to walk the geography of a story. To try the myth line of a story. And you do it in such a fashion that what discloses itself on the walk, whether that’s animals you encountered, people that came towards you, you know the way the weather turned, it’s all a form of divination, for me anyway.

And that’s kind of my disclaimer really, is that I am of a mystical disposition. And so it’s not necessarily that these are things that would work for anybody. But they are sincerely laid down in the book as well as I can, as well as I can do that.

Tad: Do you think that not being at home is connected with not knowing the stories of things and not knowing the stories of a place?

Martin: Yeah, I do. Because the result of not knowing the stories of things means you do not know the story of yourself or your place in it. And when you don’t know the story you’re in, you in the end will be victim — and I do say victim — to enormous floods of anxiety. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. None of that matters. It’s absolutely crippling and debilitating. So you know, you end up in a very bleak place. I mean, I’m sure with pals of yours one of the discussions at the moment is around the word despair.

People are saying to me, “Is it legitimate? What do you think about the word despair? Is it good to feel despair for the world?” And I’m cautious about that word actually. I’m cautious about it. I think sorrow is one thing. But true despair, true despair, that is a very, very terrifying proposition.

And to bring it back into the realm of stories again, you know, the myth teller — there is such a thing as a myth teller’s contract. In a tribal community, stories are the nutrient that are going to hopefully get you from one end of the winter to the other. You know, it has survival at its core.

And the stories that we remember are the ones of significance. Someone asked me the other day, they said, “Why isn’t there a story about the day that nothing really happened?” And I said, “Well that’s a good question.”

The reason why is that stories that come from oral cultures come from a time where we didn’t have an iPad that we could continually put down information into. We had a finite memory. So the stories we remembered were impacted with really important, vital information, psychic information about how to function in this world with dignity and a little bit of style.

And with all of that in mind, the contract of the myth teller is to get a group into as deep a place as you possibly can. In other words, into the arena of ritual. To the bottom of the well if you’re going to use a fairy tale term. But you are contractually obliged to get them out again. That doesn’t mean you say, “Ah, you know, and then it was just a dream and then everybody woke up and la, la, la.” It’s not that. It’s not that. And it’s not quite hope either. Or if it is hope, it’s a very sophisticated version. But to some degree, you do not leave people in the wound of the story as if that alone is enough. Because it isn’t enough.

Your wound does not edify the gods. You know, again something I think in the book I talk about is I meet a lot of folks these days and I say that they are experiencing what I call the seduction of the wound. If you’re growing up in an anesthetized culture where nothing really is happening, to get in touch with something that feels painful feels truthful.

You know? So, for me, the first place that I wanted to go when I was a kid was the mosh pit. You know, that’s where I wanted to go. If I was launching myself off a PA system 12 feet in the air above a screaming bunch of punk rockers, I was alive. And it was going to hurt when I landed, but it would be a trance-breaking kind of hurt.

And it was a form of contact, because I was banging up against people in a peculiar kind of dance. But that in itself is a move towards waking up, but it is by no means the end of the story. You know, that might have temporarily edified me, but it didn’t edify anything else. And with my own students, part of homemaking skills — we’re coming back to that theme again — part of homemaking skills is saying — say you’re a writer– waggling your pen around in the ink of your pain is a seduction. It’s a seduction. There has got to be a more vital form of nutrient than that.

And so with the stories that I’m involved with, the stories that have claimed me, the ones that I’m telling, they have some very hard, what I would call prophetic, not pastoral information. We don’t need more pastoral stories telling us we’re doing all right. We’re not doing all right. If Trump has a possibility of being elected, we’re not doing all right. If England is under the hallucination that leaving the European Union is a good idea, we’re not all right. So I’m curious about how we raise our game with our artfulness in the years that we’re here.

Tad: You know, when you talk about wounds, it strikes me that one of the ways we can deal with wounds, certainly there’s directly addressing them. But there’s also giving them some bigger context that they’re in, which seems like one of the roles that myth has played. You’re not the only person to have felt this way and that there’s a bigger story at work around this thing.

It’s not just that. And so there’s this notion of being inside of a story. And yet, that seems so antithetical to our times, which our times — we’re so hungry for freedom and yet the way we define freedom in this culture, this modern world, seems to be about a lack of limits. So freedom means no limits.

Which of course has the consequences of a rootless and weightlessness. And so I’d be curious to hear your understanding of freedom. Because in the words of Stephen Jenkinson again — we’ve referenced him a few times — he has a line he says, “We are modern and we are confused by freedom.” So I’d be curious to hear your understanding of freedom.

Martin: Yeah, I mean I don’t think about the word very much to be honest. It doesn’t register. You know, as long as I remain curious, curiosity is a more interesting word to me than freedom. Because what does freedom mean? Does freedom mean that I’m not indebted anymore? You know?

Does it mean that I don’t owe people stuff? I hope I owe people stuff. I want to owe people stuff for the rest of my life. You know, the old Platonic — in Greek thinking there are these modes that they call growing down. Growing down into the business of living. And one of them is you know, that strange troubled nest that is your family.

Accepting that there is some sort of divine principle at work. Or if you’re an orphan or wherever the hell you grew up, there’s some dynamic principle working from the beginning trying to get you to remember something. And there’s an indebtedness to that. There’s an indebtedness to a small stretch of land.

And it goes on to these four modes. But it culminates in creating a life to approach the unpayable astonishment that one should have at the experience of being gifted a life at all. So I want to be in the presence of unpayable things and I want to try to pay them anyway. So freedom, in any conventional sense, it’s just not on my radar I’m afraid.

Tad: It just strikes me that in this modern world we want to be free of everything, which includes free of a story. You know, “I just want to be my own person. I want to be an individual. I’m not a part of this bigger story that you want to tell. I’m just myself.” And yet the loneliness that seems to create in these times.

Martin: I know. If you really want to make people uncomfortable when you’re having a gathering and people are talking about words like ‘initiation’ or words like ‘indigenous’, talk to them about the word submission. The function of submission in a rite of passage worth its salt.

There comes a point where you have to find out what it is like to bend your head. And at that moment, the polemic of your feelings matter not a jot. I remember a few years ago a guy rang me up and he said, “Yeah, I want to do your wilderness fasting, but I have to eat all the way through. We’ll just clear that up now so I can eat.”

And I knew the guy and I said, “Do you have a particular book on your shelf?” And I knew he would. And I said, “Go and open the book up.” I had it too. And I said, “You see page 82? You see this aboriginal ritual going on where all those guys are lying on the ground and every third or fourth guy there’s like a white stick coming out of the ground?”

He said, “Yeah, that’s really weird.” He said, “They’re out in the desert doing something like what you do.” And I said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Do you know what the white sticks are?” He said no. It means they’re dead. It means that guy died in this experience.

“And you’re telling me you’re going to rock up with a McDonalds and a Frappachino and expect to have an equivalent experience?” You know, ring me in eight years. Which is actually exactly what happened. He went out last summer.

So you know, I don’t know. Strange times that we’re living in. And you know, I’m very aware with Scatterlings and I’m very aware as a British person living in Britain, my situation with landscape is not the same I would suggest as an American of European origin living on Turtle Island. It’s different. And we have all sorts of gradient of relationship up until the present day, that Scatterlings has to tackle. It’s not as if I’m sitting here thinking, “Well you know, 300 years ago the red man was sitting in the forest next to where my house is.” It’s a different crisis. It’s a crisis of equal weight, but it’s slightly different. So one of the things the book has to do is deal with what I call English liminal culture. In other words, even through the Industrial Revolution, even through the political spheres, where were the pressure points? Where were the acupuncture points in British history when people were trying to reach out to the mysteries?

They were trying to reach out to what David Abram calls the more than human world. When was that happening? So one of the things is I hope for folks whose names maybe end in MacGregor or Vaughn or O’Brien, there are all sorts of clues in that book about this is a place you could go. This is a place that you could check out.

This is a place where you could raise your game, raise your wisdoms about what stands behind you.

Tad: I suppose that leaves me with one more wondering, which is a big one. It seems like so much of this coming to understand and find this bigger story that we’re in, this capacity for homemaking, this capacity to be of a place, has a lot to do with the relationship we have to the particular things of the place.

I didn’t get the sense you were sitting in Devon on a hill overlooking everything from a distance. But you talked about really walking through it. And in particular that moss on that rock and this tree and the way the branch is broken and that way.

And so there’s something about particularities, which of course could be just as true in a concrete inner city environment. There’s particular things to be seen there too. And yet one of the things you said in the little video you made for the book is this whole thing is about courting.

And one of the things you said earlier in this conversation was, you used the phrase what wants to disclose itself to me? And you made the distinction between beholding and seeing. And so it seems like there’s something about our manner of approach to the particularities of where we find ourselves that determines what we find.

Martin: Yeah. I mean, for the longest time, the forests where I come from have all the glittering, gleaming eyes. You know, when you go into a wild place, there’s many more eyes looking at you than anything you think you’re looking at. You’re always being looked at.

And what they have seen for a long time is us coming and looking at ancient trees as 2×4’s – as planks rather than a tree. They’ve seen us planting. There are whole new growth pine forests on Dartmoor that were entirely planted for the construction of warships. And so the very reasoning for those things to be there is for an act of war.

And so for 20 years I have often gone into wild places and I’ve stopped eating. One of the reasons you do that is because it is a primordial set of manners the wilderness understands. Because it means you say, “For a while, I am no longer devouring, but being devoured. I will be devoured.”

And I place my sword on the soil, and I bend my head. And you recalibrate yourself for a while to the humors of that place. To the hearing and the listening of that place. And so that’s why my relationship began to change.

Because quite frankly I was vulnerable when I was out there. I was cold, I was frightened. I was unpractical. I’m not a practical man particularly. So it was always a struggle for me, that kind of thing. But I did it with a particular type of humility because the old ones can smell if you’re on the take. They know. And they go, “Oh, it’s you again.” And so the manner in which they disclose things, the manner in which you move from seeing something to behold something is simple. Lay down your arms. Lay down your arms. And that is the beginning I would say of a different kind of conversation.

Tad: Thank you. I’m wondering if there are any last words you’d like to say. You’re about to go on this huge tour of Scatterlings all across Canada and be sharing this book with a lot of people. It will be a part of your life the next little while. So I’m just wondering, are there any last thoughts that you’d like to share?

Martin: I’m thoroughly looking forward to coming. And I’ll read you something from it.

Tad: That would be wonderful.

Martin: This is just a little bit. Two or three minutes. And it’s really the beginning of going out and looking for stories looking to get claimed.

I went out looing for stories in dark places. In caves, hundreds of feet into the base of hills. The immensity of tree roots and stones suspended above my fragile head. I leant slow words down there. Words flushed deep with water and bolder dust.

I took myself to dreaming places, forgotten places. Places deserving of shrines. I built small shelters in ancient solitary haunts and sealed myself into the dark for days and nights. It was in those places I learnt many holy names for time. Time is malleable as a concertina, as robust as Irish cattle, as slippery as the trout escaping the hook.

Each of the secret words was true wealth for my parched tongue. They required payment in full and I was not sad to give it. I went looking for stories in the palace of the birds, the pastoral murmur of the wood pigeon. The thrilling blue calls of the tawny owls in their midnight kingdoms. I learned feathered words up there, sounds that whittled a new and fragrant shape to my jaw.

For a little while, I was a boy of the moonlight, cloaked and rooted by the base of great trees. It is no great brag to say that a part of me is still there.

So yeah, there’s a bit of the book.

Tad: Thank you so much. So if people want to know more about the tour, they can go to — there’s a website DrMartinShawCA.wordpress.com.. And if they want to find out more about you and your work and about the school and learn more about you beyond this tour, where should they go?

Martin: There are two websites. One is called DrMartinShaw.com and that has a lot of my wider work. I do a lot of work with Celtic translations. I’m just finishing a book of translations of Lorca the poet. Various sort of stuff I’m involved with. I also lead a conference called the Great Mother Conference every year in New England.

And then the other website is SchoolOfMyth.com. And that’s my little school, my little hedge school that I have down in the west country where people come and study with me from really April to December. We gather five times for three days at a time. And we go very deeply into the kind of areas that we’ve just briefly discussed this evening.

Tad: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. I know it is now 11:00 PM your time and you’ve been very gracious with your time. May your travels be wonderful and full of unexpected delights in every stop, and the seeds of many good things be planted in your life and the life of everyone who comes to your events.

Martin: Okay, thank you so much.

Tad: Take care. Bye.

In my last post, I lifted up the possibility that our path (as settlers from Europe, to belonging here in what’s now known as North America) might be best found in the willingness to stop trying to escape from our status as guests (uninvited though we are).

But this question of, “How do I belong?” lifts up a question about who the subject in that sentence is. Who is the ‘I’? And what we find is that there are at least three different levels of that for white people: there is the individual ‘i’, the collective ‘i’ and then the universal ‘i’.

What follows is an essay I wrote years ago on the topic of whiteness. At the end, I’ll do my best to tie this all together into the topic of belonging.

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The Three Levels of Identity:

For years, I wondered why white people, myself included at one time, responded the way they did to racial issues whenever they came up.

It was like there was some secret script being passed around from which we were all reading when confronted by a person of colour or even when the potential of such a thing was in the air. There were two kinds of responses. Always the same.

And then one day, it clicked.

The seed was planted during a diversity workshop in Vancouver, at a round table with my peers. All of us, 15 years or so younger at the time, faced a task of creating something with lego. It was a fun icebreaker but also acted as an unexpected set up for an exercise about identity.

The crux of the workshop was that there were three equal but different levels of identity: Personal, Collective and Universal and that they overlapped each other like circles in a Venn diagram.

"There are some things about who you are," she pointed out. "That are only true for you. Ways you are like a snowflake, utterly unique in the universe - this Personal level of who you are. There are other ways in which the Universal level is true and we are all one. And then there are the things we share culturally and in groups - the Collective level. For example, there are things white people experience may be different from the things indigenous people experience. Women will have different experiences than men."

After she spoke, we were asked to create something out of the Lego together and then, when it was done, to name it. Out Lego sculpture was clearly the best one in the room and we took great pride in it when it came our turn to introduce ourselves. Our group took on the sculptures name as the identity of our group.

"That's how fast it happens." the facilitator pointed out. I think she wanted to lift up how fast groupings can become exclusionary and inward looking and how fast this Collective Level of identity can be set and the dangers this can bring.

I sat with what she said for years.

It became a useful lens to honour the different things I was seeing without making any of them wrong.

And one day, after sitting in one too many circles of people in which a person of colour was expressing their frustration with white people and white people were getting predictably defensive and offering up the same two responses which caused more upset and resignation from the people of colour, something struck me about these three levels. I saw something I had never seen before and the seeing of it struck me forcefully.

White people do not have a collective sense of themselves.

Not in any felt or meaningful way. Perhaps it's because whiteness has a history that is so recent and shallow. Perhaps it's because almost everything in this culture is steeped in whiteness and so white culture has simply become culture. White culture is simply 'normal'. Perhaps it's because whiteness has no capacity to carry deep memory.

In her book The Prisons We Choose To Live In, Doris Lessing puts it this way,

"People living in the West, in societies that we describe as Western, or as the free world, may be educated in many different ways, but they will all emerge with an idea about themselves that does something like this: I am a citizen of a free society, and that means I am an individual, making individual choices. My mind is my own, my opinions are chosen by me, I am free to do as I will..."

Later in the book, she suggests that the mechanisms of obedience to a group does not only apply to political parties or religions but also to

"those large, vague, ill-defined collections of people who may never think of themselves as having a collective mind... The underlying assumptions and assertions that govern the group are never discussed, never challenged, probably never noticed..."

The spark that lit the fuse for this bomb of this awareness came in noticing how often white people would say, "I have no culture." as if there could be nothing truer than this sad, pitiable fact. As if whiteness was not, itself, a culture.

I noticed it, though wouldn't see it clearly until many years later, when one day, my friend Waz, a black man from the United States, said, "Y'all need to deal with your racist shit!" during a heated conversation about race in a circle of mostly white, American, young people in Santa Cruz, California. When he spoke, all of the white people in the circle were devastated and gave those same two responses.

And then I saw it again when my friend Evon Peter was speaking at the Bioneers conference and spent 10 minutes welcoming all of the people in the audience beginning with the other indigenous people there, the people of colour, the LGBTQ community and then said, "You may have noticed that there was a group I left out. So to all the white people here, if you are wanting to help us to protect our land and ways of life, you're welcome here. But if not, go back where you came from."

After he spoke, a middle aged white woman came up to him crying and asking him, "Why are you trying to divide us?" which is code for "We're all one!" and I'm sure other white people in the audience were sitting with guilt as if he had personally indicted them for the genocide of his people.

Evon's response was to lift up that he wasn't creating any divisions but simply holding up a mirror to the divisions that were already there. He was simply being a faithful reporter of how things are for his people. The divisions aren't the problem, the refusal to acknowledge them is.

And so there are two responses that white people bring again and again.

Response #1 - The Universal: "We're all one."

The first is: "Why are you trying to divide us? We're all one! We're all connected. We're all human. We're all divine. You're making this about race and our differences. Why can't you feel my heart? All Lives Matter. I don't see colour or race when I look at you. I just see a human being." (the Universal). This sounds so noble and loving. And it produces memes like this.

On the surface, who could question this? Why would we want divisions? But, perhaps, we should also be aware of any ideology that refuses to acknowledge differences in the experiences, realities and ancestral stories of others. Perhaps the dogmatic ideology of oneness vanishes important things.

This point of view says, "Do you understand that labeling people based on the colour of their skin is the root of the problem?" is also a way of undercutting conversations about race, ancestry and history. It is a way of refusing to talk about how people from Africa became 'black' and people from Europe became 'white' and what that history has to do with the present state of affairs in the North American corner of the world.

This point of view looks at racism as being 'treating people differently because of the colour of their skin' but refuses to see the history behind it and how racism has to do not only with prejudice but power.

I recently posted this meme,

And someone replied, "It's amazing how racist (and illogical) that statement actually is. Not because I'm a white male and 'offended' by my 'privilege' being questioned. It is offensive because it is blatantly generalist and purposefully racist. As far as I have seen, life is inherently difficult for every living thing. Segmenting, grouping and then ultimately judging (good or bad) a group of people based on common traits, can be horrifically stupid and extremely damaging. (As is in this statement you have shared). Life is hard all over. These terms you are using of 'white people' and 'black people' are extremely barbaric. Yes, some people are more oppressed than others. Most people are severely oppressed all over the world. When addressing a group of people such as:'attention white people' is a simple racist remark. My concern is that these terms do more harm than good because they divide us instead of unifying us. Who are 'they?' Perhaps 'they' should heal from 'blackness'? (Sounds quite stupid doesn't it?) These terms you are using are so muddled, so foggy, and incredibly misdirecting that you have to spend a considerable portion explaining what you're not saying, instead of saying what you want to say."

The unwillingness to see how I am treated because I am seen as 'white' and Waz is treated because he is seen as 'black' is the inability to see how history is alive right now.

The fellow who wrote the comment above was concerned about what happens if we use these terms? My concern is the opposite - what if those terms describe the current state of affairs perfectly and we refuse to use them? Perhaps it is one of the most telling hallmarks of 'whiteness' to resist seeing collective levels of identity.

And then I posted this one,

And a friend, a white man, replied with the question, "Am I a white person?"

After some back and forth which showed me that I clearly need to write up a blog post on how I am defining 'white' and 'racism' I replied to him, "I would say you are white yes. And I would say that your response here is typical of what I laid out in that piece. The move to say 'but not all white people!' and 'I'm not in that boat! I'm not like that.' This piece, I imagine written by a person of colour, likely black and in the United States, is trying to say something. It's trying to lift something up for our consideration, as white people. It's trying to give us an insight into how we are seen and experienced, on the whole, as a group, by people of colour. It's saying something about not only a lifetime of experiences but generations of experiences. It's not speaking to you as an individual. It's speaking to the group you are a part of and trying to point out the troubled reputation this group has. It's trying to show us a pattern. Of course no pattern is absolute. Of course this would be more accurate if it said, "What many white people consider to be racism". Sure. But the defensiveness of 'not me!' is, in my mind, a part of the issue. Another response to this could be, "Wow. Yes. That is true of many white people - more than I wish it was true for." Do I think this author believes this is literally true of every single white person? No. Do I think they're trying to make a point worth considering? Yes. Do I think they're justified in making sweeping generalizations based on their experiences? I do. I don't blame them. And I don't take it personally. I know this isn't an attack on me. It's as if what they're trying to do is to say, "If I had to generalize and make all white people into one person and describe that person, based on my life experiences, they'd be _______. It's not healthy for a white person to take this on or take it on personally as the gospel. But I don't think it's healthy to ignore it either. Our experiences of people of colour are often based on a handful of experiences. But their experiences of us are often in the hundreds. Their experiences of us swamp ours of them. They see us constantly in every TV show, movie, in public office, on the news, in law enforcement etc. And it's not only their experiences they're reporting on. It's their grandparent's and parent's experiences too. It's not coming from nowhere."

In June of 2016, I sat at the University of Calgary at RedTalks where my friend Melina Laboucan-Massimo was sitting on a panel. A white man who looked to be in his sixties posed his question, to the panel. "When can we stop have this all be about race and start just treating each other equally."

I took a sharp breath in and saw her eyes widen as she looked quickly at a friend. The panel sat, a bit at a loss of how to respond and Cowboy Smith X passed the microphone directly to her to handle it.

"I come from a collectivist culture," Melina said. "So the framing of the question is hard because it's asking me to separate myself from my culture and where I come from and just be 'Canadian'."

On the back of the sincere question, asked to help create a new future, were the same assumptions that had created the tragedies of the past. The unwillingness to see all of the ways that racism is alive is what keeps racism alive. The need to move past it before acknowledging its past, present and likely future, is what keep us from being able to change it. The unwillingness to sit with the immense grief and discomfort that comes from having no idea what to do about any of this is what stops the solution from appearing. The desire to reset everything and start fresh is what keeps us from seeing how deeply unequal things have become.

So, that's the first kind of response: "We're all one." It comes from a very strong, allergic reaction to anything that seems like it might be even hinting at any sorts of differences or divisions at all.

*

One of my friends, who is one of the finest men I know, wrote this on Facebook recently, "It's time for us to come together foremost as a united species of humanity and everyone needs to identify with that as their primary identity. Religion is the adversary that divides us into faiths and tribal alliances that feed egotism, hatred and war, not to mention that most organized religions are patriarchal, regressive of authentic liberty and subtly encourage ecocide by viewing the Earth as a fallen realm. For sure there's beauty to religion and it's not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater but we need some bold and radical steps as a species to meet the radical challenges of our times. It's to relegate religions to the past and give birth to unity consciousness. To a spiritual science revolution! We're all one!"

It's not that it's not true (though I have no idea what's true) it's that this kind of statement can be used to ignore and invisibilize the other two levels of identity. It's not true in this man's case but I've seen too many people in my life passionate about the idea of getting everyone under one umbrella... as long as they are the ones holding the umbrella. I've seen this become the most brutal form of control and silencing, more insidious because it comes across as love and unity. In the hands of men less astute than him, it can quickly become a sort of spiritual totalitarianism or privilege protected by the deflecting robes of Universal unity.

Amen to unity but the unity doesn't seem to appear all at once. It seems to appear as diversity. Diversity isn't the opposite of unity. It's the expression and embodiment of it.

*

Another colleague of mine, a speaker and author steeped deeply in the New Age scene, said this in response to the notions raised in this blog: "HOW ABOUT WE JUST START REFERRING TO OURSELVES as human. Let's start a movement, so there is nothing to polarize about. If everyone called themselves Human, then the form would be irrelevant. In my mind, over lifetimes, we've been everything anyhow, which makes referring to differences kinda ironic......who we are had nothing to do with the body, nor chemicals, not even beliefs...........so done with fighting of all sorts............that's my rant for the day. xoxoxo Tad Hargrave appreciating you."

On one level, it seems like there's not much to argue with here. How can advocating for our oneness and connection be a bad thing? What's being said, explicitly here is that differences don't matter because this body and this world isn't really real. All that's real is Spirit. And, there's only one God, by the way, not a diversity of Gods. In this world, there's nothing particular or local to be celebrated. The fact that you have the nose you do because of those who came before you means nothing. The fact that your culture is different and unique from mine? That means nothing too. And the fact that you are treated differently because of the colour of your skin? It's easier for me, as a white person, to ignore that it's happening because I'm refusing to see colour. This is an argument against diversity as anything important to be celebrated.

*

Another Facebook friend posted this comment on a Facebook message I'd directed to #DearWhiteMen. He said, "Sort of humorous, but partly because it shows the foundational issue; categorization into & of humans no matter what the subject or objective is. The natural universe has no color or categories enabling controls or agendas, so what makes it?"

Of course, the universe does have colour. It is overflowing with colour. And, while he's exactly on point that categorizing humans into discrete groups in order to control them is a big part of what has created the mess we're in, what seems missed here is the beautiful diversity of human culture.

But there is a larger issue missed when we call for 'oneness' which is about time and place. This call for oneness is happening in a particular 'where' and a particular 'when'. It's happening in these times. It's happening in times when people of colour are targeted and oppressed and white people are privileged. To call for oneness without acknowledging this is an immense dishonour to our times. It is a vanishing of the experiences of anyone who isn't white. A more honest rendering might be, "We are all human and yet it seems that not all are being treated as such and so... what do we do about that?"

And the good Bayo Akomolafe spoke beautifully on this in his Facebook post entitled, 'We are not one':

"With no apologies.

This may come as a rude shock to some who have heard me wax poetic or write generously about entanglements, nonduality and relational ontologies. Having listened to me, some say these ideas boil down to one thing: we are all the same, united behind the ephemeral antics of the material, cut out from the one fabric of things, citizens of a harmonious mandate not yet fully disclosed. We are one, they conclude.

But I am wary of that reading of things. Let me share why.

Whiteness is the terraforming, racializing principle that enacts a hegemonic ordering of bodies – pressing many to the ignoble and dark ground and anointing some to float in the gushing light of transcendent purity. The excruciatingly painful losses suffered because of this flattening of lives, this decimation of landscapes, this scratching of mountain faces, this sanitization of unwieldy time into a militaristic temporality of progress and arrival, is well understood today. One way to respond to this burden of pain has been to read eastern cosmologies and popular renditions of quantum dynamics in a way that dismisses the vexed subject of race altogether and does away with differences. They say: don’t talk about race. Race is just a social construction. It has no physiological basis. It’s not real. Be nice. We are all one.

But lies are no less real in their material effects than the matters we label truths. And the attempts to banish any discussion of imperialism in its dynamics or a critical conversation about race and racial matters because of said conversation’s purported divisiveness – as if the notion of nonduality presupposes a smooth world without bumps and grooves and shadows – only reinforces the flattening stability of whiteness masquerading behind the relatively recent algorithms of one-world-ism.

Ironically, saying “we are all one” risks occluding the unintelligible prestige of my vast body, wiping away your histories and mine, reducing my wildness to the disturbing quietude of inclusion, and pathologizing differences as if they stood in the way of something more important. Oneness – at least one iteration of it – seems to reinforce the metabolic rift, the dissociative distance between bodies and the grounds they are indebted to. Whiteness raised to the nth degree.

Decolonial politics must be compassionate in response. But this compassion is not the kindness many are used to. It is not being nice. It is speaking with strange tongues to relieve the subject of the tyranny of his subjecthood. It is piercing the flesh with a thorn and refusing to take it out. It is the ferocious spitting of a Yoruba trickster-healer who must traverse worlds to advocate for his client. It is the gift of confusion, the smiting of the thigh so that a confident gait gives way to limping. It is burning the lips with coal so that eloquence gives way to a lisp. Compassionate politics is the decolonial attempt to relieve whiteness of the sole burden of world-building. It is not niceness. It is the shock of the dissensual that says there are other ways, there are other rooms, there are other worlds – yours is not the only one. This black ground, this dark hole, you press my face into in your bid to ascend - it is powerful too.

We are not one. The pendulum need not swing so far between polarities as to miss the universes in the middle. Our “choices” are not between an exhausting order of whiteness and a homogenous soup of unblemished spiritual sameness or a "diversity" that merely multiplies grids and jail cells. There are rumours of a politics that does not care so much for ones and twos: a politics that dances with the indeterminate. I want to sit with the trouble of that invitation. I want to “find” new mistakes to make, new problems we don’t know about, new colours we haven’t yet named, and new integers that would bring me to you – and you to me – as strange companions in “a world” too promiscuous for words to articulate."

Response #2 - The Individual: "I didn't do it!"

The second response is: "But I wasn't there. I didn't own slaves. I didn't take your ancestors from Africa! I wasn't there. Why are you so angry at me? I didn't slaughter the buffalo. I didn't scalp your ancestors. Why are you attacking me? My life is hard too." (the Personal).

One woman, who I do not know, commented on the above meme on Facebook:

"Yes, whites oppressed blacks and it lasted much longer than the day slavery was abolished. But I didn't do it. I feel terrible that it happened, like all other terrible things in history, and I hate racism that continues today. Nowadays, the people holding themselves down due to their race are themselves. There is nothing we as white people can do to change it. We've apologized, we've given money, we've built social programs, none of those things work. They breed entitlement. And that gets you nowhere. Pick yourself up, go to school, work hard, get a job, don't run out on your family, don't spend more than you make, and stop voting for people who say you can't do any of those things."

If you engage in these conversations for any length of time, you will hear those two responses, "We're all one!" and "I didn't do it."

Both of them are, in essence, saying, "Can't we just pretend the past never happened?" or, far worse, unaware that it ever did. What they were saying was that they were unaware of the unique and devastating constellation of privileges and poverties inherent in whiteness.

"RACE DYNAMICS: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RACISM Years ago I was sitting with a Native American elder in a cafe. There were about 30 people enjoying their coffees, teas and treats. Everyone was white except for him. A young black man walked in and you could feel the white tension rise as their eyes followed him. The Native elder said to me, "These white folks see one black man and feel threatened; he sees 30 white people. And the funny thing is this - they don't know there are thirty of them. They don't think they are together. They are all isolated." - David Bedrick

When Waz said, "Y'all need to deal with your racist shit." I don't think he was talking, in particular, to the people in the room (though I suspect he wasn't not talking to them). I would guess that he was speaking to them in the hopes that they were faithful representatives of this well established, larger Collective group of White People.

But, lacking this Collective understanding of themselves, they could only hear his words as either a personal attack directed to those people sitting in the room (the Personal level) or some misguided hurt he had due to his being lost in the illusion of separation (the Universal level). If the former was true, then the answer was obviously to make sure he was clear about their personal role or lack of role in the racism he had experienced. If the latter was true, then, bless his heart, he needed some healing for his anger before he caused more harm.

It is worthy to note that neither the Universal or Individual ways of identifying ourselves have any roots in place or time. The Universal say 'we're all one and we've always been one so it doesn't matter when and where you're born' and the Individual level ignores the context around it. 'It doesn't matter when and where I was born.' it says. 'I would have been the same me, the same person regardless. Time and space are not the boss of me. They have no influence on me. Who I am is inherent and indwelling.'

Lacking this Collective lens, they could only hear his words through the Personal or Universal filters.

When he said, "Y'all need to deal with your racist shit." I don't think he was speaking just to the colour of the skin of the white people but to the culture and history that had become, like an unwelcome bur in the your clothing from a walk through the fields of history, stuck into the fabric of their days. Like something spilled on a carefully tanned and softened piece of white leather - perhaps red wine... or blood - that wasn't coming out any time soon. A reminder of something that had happened a long time ago. A crater, evidence of where a bomb had gone off a long time ago. In the one phrase he seemed to be indicting all of that, pointing to it and putting the responsibility for addressing it squarely on the collective shoulders of those whose obligation it was to do something with it.

When he said, "Y'all" perhaps he was speaking not so much to the people in that circle but through them to everyone they knew, and might one day know, in the hopes that his pleas might reach their ears too. Perhaps he was hoping for well informed ambassadors from this group who could hear his words and nod in sober agreement saying, "Yes. All of what you say is true. We do need to do that." aware of the faults and failings of their own people without falling into a pit of shame because they also know the history of persecution and economic poverty that created the conditions out of which the racist shit grew.

He was hoping for messengers but was informed, instead, that his package was unfit for delivery or worse, that there was no one to deliver it to.

"We don't understand," the group seemed to be saying to him, carefully lowering their spectacles and peering at him over their rim, trying hard not to sound frustrated. "This address... 'White Culture'... I'm afraid there's no such thing. Is there someone particular you were trying to reach? And are you sure this message isn't for everyone? How can I help you?"

Tying It Together:

At the universal level, we all belong to the universe and the Earth. But it can take a lot of work to know that in our bones beyond regurgitating platitudes we read in a book.

At the personal level we belong to ourselves – we have sovereignty and autonomy. But it’s worth noting that it often takes a lot of listening to and paying attention to ourselves to really belong to ourselves and know ourselves beyond platitudes we heard some teacher say.

And, for modern people (and I speak primarily from the lens of being a white man in North America), the collective level is absolutely gone. We have no meaningful sense of ‘us’ and we are unlikely to ever get it. But we might, one day, become a source of it for those yet to come.

In response to my last post, most of the responses, often from people who hadn’t even read it yet, was a reflex, “but as human beings we all belong to the Earth!“

That’s a reaction.

That’s a defence mechanism.

Questions of belonging and questions of whiteness both trigger the same kind of reflex because they’re both expressions of Empire.

That’s a testimony not to the spiritual magnificence of the society we find ourselves in, but to the other lack of any sense of collective culture, and our lack of intergenerational relationship to any particular piece of land.

The lack of a collective and cultural understanding of ourselves (as distinct from psychographic identities that we hold) is one of the most characteristic hallmarks of modern people.

And it’s why it’s so important to remember that we already do have a people we belong to through our ancestral cultures and we can, at least in part, root ourselves there. We have places we come from. We have songs, stories, dances, art, and all manner of crafts that were familiar to our old timers. There are places and traditions that our body remembers, even though our minds don’t. Our hands remember crafting even though our minds don’t.

Again, there’s much more to be said about this topic that ought to be said.

The notion that we can go from guest to local with no labor, no patience, no waiting, no protocol, and no extended periods of paying attention and learning to give us the information we need to court that which we desire is an expression of Empire.

The instinct to get what we want, including a sense of belonging, immediately, is not us trumping the dominant order of disconnection, but our deepening and extending it. The elimination of any distance between us and what we want is the heart of Empire. The willingness to admire what we yearn for from a distance until the timing is right and we are invited in, is at the heart of culture.

Additional Reading:

6 ways allies still marginalize people of color — and what to do instead

Converting Hidden Spiritual Racism Into Sacred Activism: An Open Letter To Spiritual White Folks

Why Pretending You Don't See Race and Gender is an Obstacle to Equality

Citizens of Nowhere

Identity Based Politics Are Not The Problem; Identity Based Oppression Is

Michael Welp: White Men's Blindspots

Pegi Eyers - Taking Issue With "We Are All One"

On Saturday morning, in the lead up to the 10th anniversary of the book Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, I sat down over zoom with its author Stephen Jenkinson to have a conversation about ‘culture work’ which seems to have been a thread through all of his endeavours.

Culture work is underwritten by the notion that most of our maladies aren’t personal in nature but cultural but that the very culture that harms us has become invisible to us.

I won’t say too much more. You can hear the rest in the 75 minute interview.

TAD HARGRAVE: Welcome, everybody. It's Tad Hargrave here from marketing for hippies. And I'm, sitting here virtually on zoom with, Stephen Jenkinson, with whom I've, studied and learned since 2014, in his awesome wisdom school. He's a cultural activist. Ceremony list advocating for a handmade life and eloquence. An author, storyteller, musician, sculptor, and off grid farmer is the founder principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada, co-founded with his wife, Natalie Roy in 2010, and also a sought after workshop leader articulating matters of the heart, human suffering, confusions through ceremony.

And Stephen has written, a number of books. I believe six in total, with another one coming. But when I look at your books, money and the souls desires die wise come of Age Generation's worth and reckoning in particular. It strikes me that they're all engaged in a culture work. They're all coming to very human scale troubles through the the lens of culture, or using them as a doorway to look at the wider culture or, as you often say, as a prism.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Right.

TAD HARGRAVE: For culture. And that's, that's the theme I'd to dive into today. Is this this, theme or understanding of culture work? It's appropriate timing, of course, because it is the 10th anniversary of Dei Wise. That book came out, 2015, was the year after I joined the Orphan Wisdom school.

And I distinctly remember being in, in a van. we were all driving to the school, up on, Cortez. And Ian had an advance copy of Die Wise. Was much thinner, than the final one ended up being. But he had this, and it was a hallowed. we were all had this numinous quality.

TAD HARGRAVE: We were all deeply envious of him that he had this advance copy of it. I remember when the when this was first coming out. And, it's the 10th anniversary of that. You've got a new book coming out called Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart at Work. And then, of course, we'll talk maybe later about, but yourself, myself and Kimberly and Johnson, cooking up our can craft.

It's the working title in November, in New Mexico, that's all the. That's all the preamble. I'm curious, how is it for you ten years after the book Die Wise came out? How how are you? How are you feeling about it all?

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Your life doesn't occur to you with the, beautiful orchestration that you alleged that it has, that mine has. This is all a debris field in the rear view mirror, what you described. And I. By debris, I don't mean, not useful. I mean one's life is a scattering of sorts, isn't it?

And, sometimes arbitrarily, the odometer has a zero and the end of it, and you employ that moment to, to linger or to hover or to indulge in the evaluation, something that. books ten years on and it's still in print. Go figure. That's the first Morrow and, and that I continue to hear from people about it.

All I can really guess about that is that somehow it found its audience, or I would to say it found its people, and, and people let me know that it has. it's, it's, it's, it's gone out as a, as a prodigal would and, it's written home to tell me not to worry that things are going .

TAD HARGRAVE: Yeah, t's a beautiful book. I understand why it's had the, staying power of that it that it has. It's interesting. Over the years, people for the marketing work that they do, a number of people have said, Tad, it's easy to hire a ghostwriter and you knock these things out and and what are you waiting for?

And of course, there's ghost writers and there's ghost writers, and some are much better than others, but it's, palpably, it's such a labored over crafted piece, both in the architecture of it and also the the incredible wealth of stories. It's a it's one of those books when I see it in people's homes, it's often has a pride of place.

It often has evidence that it's been read dog eared. And I understand why it's lasted. For those listening to this, if you haven't had a chance to read these. It's an incredible book for everybody who, tries. They might will fail to live forever. the highly recommended if somehow you missed the the the train first time around.

It's still in print. You can still they'll come and get it.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Immersive first ten years. Yeah. Do that the book actually was born more or less, as you described it, in your admiration? That is that, it was born in an extreme circumstances that resemble more than a little bit. The times I find myself in now, I was, having trouble breathing and, took myself to a risk for allergies in Ottawa.

And I thought, since I'm going to Idaho, I might as fly somewhere because it takes it's such an ordeal from my house to end up anywhere. You've been there, how that works both ways. And, the rest probably say you can't go anywhere. You've got one third lung capacity, one third as I try to breathe through a straw, basically.

And, I thanked him for his advice and I went to, to Mexico on basically a one way ticket, assumption. And, it sounds dramatic because it was. And Natalie and I went there and, as far as we knew, we were going there to to kiss this arrangement goodbye. Really. And I sat on the rooftop the very next morning, in this, small town.

And all I did was wonder what became of, my old understanding of what my allotment was. And, if you will, how much time I still had to do, how many things I was dreaming. And them and it didn't seem likely. And, I was a little more than a little troubled. And I fancied that, some people would try to be in touch with Natalie.

When the word got out of my demise and, seeking after some a little bit more or something. And that may be a flight of fancy on my part. And I might have been wrong at the time, I don't know, but I was trying to figure out a way of heading that off the to pass as, as a husband might do.

And a father and on. And, I started to write, by hand in these, This a book, that scale, that size, ? And, I went after it. I didn't know what I was doing. I was writing every story I could remember in what I came to call the death trade.

That's all I did. writing the stories down. Then this happened. Then this happened in no effort whatsoever to try to string them together in some formal way or, but, as can happen from time to time. Maybe by the third day, something was occurring and I could see, the web growing between them that wasn't there as I wrote the individual ones down, but they grew some affinity, one for the other.

And that affinity turned into the substrate that became wise and became the manifesto element rather than simply narrative storytelling. Element. It's it's those two things married, you would say, and extreme circumstances and, and obviously my prognostic powers were off, I did I lasted or got a second wind, maybe literally.

And and off it went. That's half the Marvel. Excuse me. The other half of the Marvel is that, copy that you were talking about at the end. Had we knocked off, 50 of those. We're complete frigging amateurs. we knocked these things off to to say, I don't know, it was a vanity project, probably.

And, it didn't look that pretty, as as, do it yourself, things can look, it wasn't that pretty, but it found its shape already. And there was a particular Thursday, it was that I was to press go or print with the printer I had lined up for, a big print, a big print run of maybe 500.

And, something told me, I say something euphemistically. I know what it was, but I'll say something. Told me to check my emails before I made the calls that morning. And I thought to myself, that's a strange way for the other world to behave, tell me to check my emails, of all things. It's a little mundane, but I did.

And, there was an email waiting for somebody I hadn't heard of. I didn't know, said I'm the acquisitions editor for such and such a press and, been following your work for years, which, strange sounded strange to me at my ears at the time, since I didn't think I'd been doing anything for years. And did I have anything?

I was thinking about writing as one does in the moment that, I said, What's up with this coincidence? And of course, some part of you is already prepared to take flight. The rest of you going to come on, come on. Don't get all worked up on this. This is goofiness. I back and forth and I cut the story short.

We went back and forth and I. And I was a dick. I have to say, formally, in the sense that I said to him, I appreciate the interest, but you guys take too long and I don't have too long. I still had that sense of purpose and occasion that drove the thing in the first place.

I said, I can't wait. I don't want to wait. And I know what that sounds to you. And I don't apologize for it. It's the way it is. He wrote back and he said, how long would you give this? And I thought, I'm going to, all in. I said, I'll give you a week.

And, and they got back to me in three days and said, we're in completely with the book as it is. Let's go. I said, I'm not waiting a year. That's your timetable typically. And it came out, in eight months or something that. They humoured me or the gods line them up or, or the timing was right or, or I'd finally done something worth the trouble or, are all those things together and, and die wise became a child of some remarkable fortune.

As as a manifestation of that fortune.

TAD HARGRAVE: Both a manifestation and a manifesto. Yeah, one of the reasons it's endured is because it's heavy on, story and not on theory. It's not a book of, here's how it should be, or here's how we fix it. But but, remembering. And remember, years ago, you and I were speaking about the etymology of this word, heft because I was reading a book in, about shepherding in northern England, you do the James Reed Banks Shepherd's life.

And here it opens up with the etymology of heft. But it was spoke about as tradition, which was puzzling for me because it's normally about weight. I would think gravitas, but it's time about tradition. And then you'd said, it's probably also connected with Heath and Heather, which if you dig deep enough, it it clearly is.

There's something about land and weight and, and tradition. And it struck me that when we say some of these words have heft, and this is a book, that has heft, it's, it's that the person has spent time on the territory they're describing. They've wandered those heaths and those heathers. the it's a, a reporting on what was seen in a reflection on something real that happened.

There's a great book or the I've only read part of it, but the title is good it was called the If This is Your Land and where are your stories? Oh, yeah. Which, says the whole thing, that you have this territory that you wrote about, about death and dying, but full of stories.

And that's why it's one of the reasons, it's it did. I've heard you describe and heard your work described as culture work. And I'm curious what that means for you. This, this term of, of culture work.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: It means it's antidote. As much as it's anecdotal and the antidote that I was seeking or the malady I was seeking an antidote for, was the gross interiorization of every conceivable vaguely nuanced, worldly proposition. The world itself, by the time I was, formally educated and, and beginning to be engaged this way as it grown up, the world itself had become a figment of how we feel about the world in the West.

And, even without the benefit of tutelage on that particular matter, intuitively, I had a feeling not that that was narrowing, but that it was including that it was the, extinction of of illumination to interior ize the world in that way. Psychology is everything, dynamics and friggin archetypes. And I'm not saying that stuff doesn't have a place and doesn't belong.

And any tool you can you can find a legitimate use for it. But it's not the world to some extent. It's what the West in its fearfulness has done to its corner of the world. And we live in a time now, of course, where the kids are, are, they live inside the the echo chamber is is in the round.

And, of course, I fear for them and, a lot of stuff that I've done before there. There. Retreat from the world in mind. And, given, this is, this begins to open up a vast thing, but let's say for the moment that if I were 20 and I was obliged to consider the end of the world as not something symbolic or metaphorical, I might be tempted to believe in nothing more than my feelings about things.

As much as anybody would. But maybe as a generational hiccup, that it wasn't quite the case when I was in the formative years. And, my obligation as it came to me was to, in, inflect whatever capacities I had in the direction of seeing to it that the world was reinstated in the proceedings. And that's what happened in with di ways.

But I can tell you the, the, the, the vector that drew that to it. That, I'm talking with dying people, many of whom don't understand themselves to be that. that's always a concussive moment, that you have an understanding of their lives that they don't share with you and, and are unlikely to and have a vested interest in not doing .

And they're, They're doing everything they can not to die while they're dying. And they're being spoken to and engaging in the same language in such a way that, that the fact of their dying and the, the deep embodied reality of their dying was the first casualty of them trying to talk about it to anybody else or to make themselves understood.

In other words, the language was not much culprit. The language was, broken. And it's it's consequence when it was employed was to continue the breakage. the dying disappeared. When dying, people tried to talk about it. And I realized early on that I had an obligation to them that they would never ask me to fulfill, and that was to find a way of speaking.

Where they wouldn't lose track of where they were in the arc of their lives. That simple. Can I find a death ready language? And if I can't find it, can I make one? And, at the risk of sounding rather self-important, I got pretty close.

That's a that's a cultural undertaking. One one ravaged human at a time. But I really didn't have their inner life. You see what I'm saying. I didn't have their inner life in the crosshairs. I wasn't talking about their families and their growing and growing up years. And there wasn't time for all of that.

And I didn't think it was called for what was called for, to see if I could plant the person in the labours that the dying was pleading for them to undertake, or while they still could. I should say, Ted, because the clock's ticking, you see, and you don't have, you don't have the largesse any longer of health or vitality or give a shit or really anything.

And you got to go now, as a woman putting together an event out here in Joshua Tree for myself and for Kimberly. She called me yesterday. Can I talk to her? What's up? My father is dying actively right now. Estranged. And, not a lot to work with and, not a lot to feel about.

And I don't do this work anymore. People don't call me for that for the most part, and, and walk this walk with them. But I did yesterday. And is it riding a bike? Absolutely. Yes, it is for me, because I was born to do that. Other things too, but certainly that.

And that's why it's available to me. Still not out of habit, but there's a detonation that happens when that supplication comes my way, that, the things that were entrusted to me, language wise, intuition wise, and on. And a sense of purpose that, that I wasn't asking other people to corroborate all of that's available to me again and yet again.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: And, it makes it believable that, it makes it, that it somehow belongs in the particular time to which I belong. And it's hallelujah time, isn't it? That, I found what I was born to do, and I've got documentation to, to that effect. That's what doorways is. Doorways is the parchment upon which my purpose was was inscribed.

TAD HARGRAVE: Seems true that in this time of, I don't know, cultish mob mentality on one side and hyper individuation on the other side. Somehow there's a lack of ability to see the wider culture that we're in. I remember reading day wise and you speaking about the seeing how.

How much of what was happening wasn't. Isolated or individual was a manifestation of a larger culture. And that the book was, among other things, helping people to see the culture as it appeared, as the dominant culture, society of this North America, how that appeared at the dying time. Is that a fair rendering?

STEPHEN JENKINSON: The word helping is a little benign. I wasn't really not the helping guy, if things I did were helpful, that's a corollary benefit, but it certainly wasn't the VMO. No, it was it was much more obligatory than help. Honestly, that's my tone. My tone is hortitory. Not a word that people use anymore, but it's the same root as to exhort, to make a plea and to to, to be pushy. I had a sense of the urgency of things. I every time I came within, the sway of the desk work, I had a sense of, not of purpose, which one can mistake for self-assurance and things that, but I had a sense of, urgency in the foreclosure of possibility is.

It's it's occurred to me quite a long time ago. That what another human being is, is an intrusion upon your capacity for infinity.

That's what we are to each other. We're limits. And when you crowded somebody else's life or back into it, the limits that they didn't suspect they were labouring with, they begin to suspect they're laboring with. That's what happens. Yeah, that's that's the valuable public service we provide each other is a check and balance on on that grandiosity that things can last for as long as we're ready for them to last, including the big one.

And I had this sense of, drastic, which is an alchemical word, by the way. Drastic desire doesn't mean bad. It means, potent medicine, basically. I had a sense of urgency, you see, that didn't require despair to fuel it.

And I didn't personalize it because it wasn't my death. That's at the time. But it was my witness, and it was my my charge, my obligation. And it was, I understood to be a, social obligation, principally, and not an emotional or, relational one, but, I'll put it another way that's going to sound very self-serving.

Somebody, a lot of people had the small story in view, and God bless them. And it's great. And you need that to. But at the time, somebody needed to see across the range of the small stories to see if those beads could be strong. How did it get this way? In other words, because the small stories don't help with that.

They're examples of this way. But how did it get this way? Could be helpful while you're still able to breathe and think as a dying person. And it's not wallowing as they were fearful it to be, and the word that we have to bring in now to make the whole thing sit as a architectural piece, is grief.

Grief was, nobody was talking about grief. I can tell you in those days that we're talking about now. No, because it was understood as a synonym for sadness or depression. There's a lot more grief literacy now than there was. But that's not saying a lot, because there was Jack ten or 12 or 15 years ago. I, I enthroned grief.

I pretty explicitly tune I understood it to be a divinity on par with death in terms of its consequence in and, its valence. And I took it upon myself to see if I could translate grief, claim in the proceedings. And that became that's the cultural work to articulate. How did it get this, and where from whence comes this grief, illiteracy that we've settled for at the time?

TAD HARGRAVE: Strikes me that much of your work has been about. Helping insistent, on the old gods being seen. about how, you wrote a book come of age. And somehow, in the presence of coming of age, Elderhood vanishes, is somehow eclipsed in the getting older. Yeah. That there's clearly this, generational span. And yet the differences between generations get collapsed or eclipsed.

And you're supposed to be young forever. Or young people are supposed to be the elders now, and there's no differences, and that's all flattened. And then in your book on matrimony. There's lots of weddings, but matrimony has disappeared. And it strikes me that in much of your work, you've been bringing, giving a seat at the table to death, to grief, to matrimony, to the difference, differences entrusted to generation and, and to Elder Hood, who even in the presence of what should evoke the recognition of them there, they don't seem to be there in the occasions where they should be acknowledged and welcomed and obeyed.

They aren't I don't know if that, resonates with you at all.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Sadly, it does. It's what you've described is a unlikely haunting of the contemporary post humanist Western tradition. What is we're haunted by stuff that ain't there. It's not the usual haunt, specters and goblins and, apparitions in the hallway. That's the norm, but we don't have any of those.

We have a sense that something's slipped from view. Something's been lost. Something's been cast aside, but nobody remembers doing. Those kinds of things, the way I try to describe it from the matrimonial point of view is: who would settle for a 15 minute wedding for, for an event that's supposed to be fundamentally transformative?

And, it makes you cock your head or me in a way. as is my want, I answered the question. I didn't let it be rhetorical. What the frig did happen? And where does this instinct come from in me to not imagine, but almost to be able to hear and see the once was ness of things.

you could say, and you wouldn't be wrong, that it's me wishing. But I'm not very nostalgic. I really I'm really not. I'm not looking back. I'm looking in. I'm not trying to have things as good as they once were. I don't think we have the capacity for things to be good.

That's a pretty naked declaration there. I still have a few. I don't think we have the capacity to live the good life that much self-exploration is designed to, to generate, because you have to inhabit that stuff, you have to move in.

The confetti, the aisle, the procession up the aisle, the people waiting for you, the notion of giving away the apparition of gifts. Where are they supposed to go and to whom and where are they supposed to come from? What do they mean? And the timing of the giving of them and the seating arrangement and which direction you face?

I could keep going, but I didn't make any of that stuff up right. We're we're heirs to it all . We don't know what we're heirs to. We're more custodians than heirs. We're more janitors than we are progeny of that stuff. I simply said to myself, these are pieces of something. They're not something unto themselves.

And because they're pieces of something, you can, with enough archeological instinct, begin to hold this pieces in some proximity to see whether or not they, once upon a time, were adjacent, in terms of cause or purpose or tradition or rumour or customer language, that's the repertoire for reassembling them. And as you do, occasionally you get very lucky and you realize in the snakes and ladders reckoning fashion, that this piece once upon a time went alongside that piece in sequence, say, ceremonial sequence or something that.

And, and from this you can infer, you begin to infer what the shape and heft of the original container could have been. And I came to understand these things as shards with an implication or a memory of the chalice that they were.

And that's where the matrimony book came from. And that was my M.O. in. And that's how I wondered, I took my God given instinct to wonder about these things and trained it upon something in a disciplined way. And lo and behold, I was rewarded.

TAD HARGRAVE: Have you read the book, The Valley At The Center of the World by Malachi Tilak.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Man, the guy's name alone means I should read the book.

TAD HARGRAVE: He's from the Orkneys.

But there's a there's a line in, it's a fantastic book, a story and beautifully written, but there's a line about a farmer who basically hasn't left this valley. His whole life. This little valley and this little, island. And he says, in the book, “He didn't look towards the future the way others did. But nor was he stuck in the past. David seemed to live in a eternal present, looking neither forward nor backward, but always somehow towards the land.”

And it strikes me that this is, some of what you're describing, that, in it was a here's what's happening and then bringing the wandering of how did it get to be this way?

Or the land looks this, but how how did it get to be this way? There's this shard sitting here. How did we get to a point where there's only a shard left? Or as you've spoken about etymology before, the. We have a word that means this now, which is almost the opposite, or some strange inversion of what it used to mean.

Right. And how did the shift happen?

Which brings me to this question, aside from the incredible high pay that culture work brings, the riches and fame and the, the adulation and there's that.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: There's all of that.

TAD HARGRAVE: I'm curious what for somebody who's thinking about getting into culture work, they're drawn to it. They've seen you do what you do. They've seen people making mad attempts, and they feel, against the odds, some draw to it. I'm curious what what are what does culture work cost the culture worker? Maybe we'll start with that.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: It costs you the easy, imagining that you're doing something. First of all, that other people welcome and intuitively have regard for, realize themselves to have been waiting for what you're doing without knowing that that's what they're, all of that stuff that's all gone. When I did these weddings that that ultimately produced The Matrimony Book, you can't, this is rhetorical.

You can't imagine the shit show that ensued from simply trying to do it. Otherwise. I became a living shit magnet in those enterprises, in real time, Tad. Not receiving emails about it as I was doing it. Bear in mind, now I'm getting this flack from people who were invited to the event by the people who asked me to do this transaction.

There's no hesitation whatsoever. And people sliding up to me and saying, is this a real wedding?

I know that the same person never went to the front of the hall or the front of the chapel or the front of the generic event space, and that's the man or the woman in the corner. Whether this was a real wedding, that never happened. of course, the question becomes, why am I getting that treatment?

Since what I'm doing is explicitly as called for as the more official officiant was doing. Nobody goes to a wedding to change the world. Ten.

But they could. And that's the way I proceeded. I became, a anarchy brigade of one or at least one at a time. I proceeded this could be otherwise. companionship is the next casualty. Deep running companionship. A lot of people let me know that they were right behind me, but far behind me that I couldn't see.

Why? Because it was fucking dangerous. That's why. Because a lot of flak was coming. That's why. Because it hurt to stand there and see if it could be otherwise and plead with people to proceed we're in a circumstance of such fundamental poverty that it's a transgression to contribute to it.

That we have to seize upon that love that these two people have for each other, and see if we can oblige it in the direction of culture. what do you become? You've become leader, right? You're in the blasted heath and you're saying never, never, never. You've become some, bizarrely romantic figure that no one wants to marry, that no one really wants to be with you.

You shoulder something that you've not been asked to do. I hope this doesn't sound heroic. it to sound mournful. And, and broken and you're a spirit mechanic. And the vehicle hasn't moved for years. It's been sitting in a field with the weeds coming up through the steering wheel for years.

And somebody says, I got to get to the hospital. Quick. Can I use your car?

And you do what you can to get it running again. That's culture work.

TAD HARGRAVE: At least the pay is good.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Is it?

TAD HARGRAVE: The. if somebody, despite all the troubles and all of this that can come, I've certainly seen it when somebody, attempts to not even break this bill gently suggest that there might be a spell that we're under. Right. There's some defense mechanism in the spell that rears up its its thorns and there's that, to contend with.

But with all of this, if somebody says, I get it, it can be lonely, it can be dangerous, it can be immensely rewarding, enriching. All of this. What might a curriculum look for somebody wanting to engage in this in a way that would be trustworthy and not freestyling and not anything goes? Do you have any sense of of what a trustworthy curriculum might look .

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Of a curriculum for wellness.

TAD HARGRAVE: For culture, work?

STEPHEN JENKINSON: When by curriculum you mean how how you might engage in being fundamentally radically educated about the matter? what, you mean?

TAD HARGRAVE: Yeah.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Of course, if you have to ask the question, you've been derelict of duty up until now because the opportunity to learn it has been there. if you, you and I've spoken this very theme before, it is, the sound that you make upon awakening, the spirit awakening that we're talking about now, the sound that you make is not.

Hallelujah. It's not finely, I get it. It's not at long last freedom. It's not. There's no heroism or victory available. Not now. If you awaken at the level that you've asked this question of me, the sound that breaks your lips. Is is some anguish, some personal grief, some clear implication.

You are implicated. How could you not have seen this before now, how did you proceed? As if none of this was when it was, as you now know.

As a rough ride, man, there's reasons that people don't see this stuff, because in the short term, it doesn't pay, all joking aside, it genuinely it doesn't work. And yet the fact that you and I are talking about it is a quiet whisper campaign. Claiming that it does work, that it must work even better. you proceed with no evidence.

That's the repertoire. If you can't do it with no encouragement, you probably can't do it with it. It's the it's the intuitive reverse of what people imagine with enough encouragement bolstering education, exposure. Elders in the wings, etc., etc. you're armed, down into the furrows you go. You never go down into the furrows without all that armament.

First of all, you'd look the Michelin Man, way too ready, right? Yeah. Nothing subtle about you at all. You're bloated with capacity. Yeah. you realize, oh, man, it's the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that that would have you come up alongside these parties that we're talking. In other words, they manifest, they visit you first as your own little wrinkled self that you become dissatisfied with, but not particularly harsh towards.

And you somehow realize that certain limitations have visited you, that you've settled for.

A how did it get that? You weren't always this way. Oh, you probably were. Come on now. You probably were always this way. But that realization is exceedingly valuable. Because description is not the same thing as prescription or prescription. Right. You've you've blinked a lot of times. Yeah, I know, me too. But if you're asking, you start with the poverty that was entrusted to you.

Yeah, but how how do you start doing that? No, no, no, it's not the right question. Start with the poverty. Stop trying to get out from underneath the poverty long enough to feel less impoverished. The feeling of in poverty, the the distinction that Chappelle made in one of his jokes between being poor and being broke. Poor is a character logical deficit that you never get out from under, right?

Broke is a possibly temporary condition. That's the distinction I'm making here. Now. When I used the word poverty, cultural poverty is is an indictment as long as it's unchallenged and unrealized, that the moment you really glimpse it in its three dimensions, it becomes something much closer to an obligation than it is to an indictment.

And that's how you start. You start with what you think is nothing. It's the old joke that, you're a jokester of the highest order, right? you you'll appreciate this. The the joke. I'm going to tell it real quick. it's going to joke is going to suffer, but it goes something in the order of here's God and the smartest man in the world.

And they've been living together in the with everybody else in the village, and they pass each other routinely and, lots of high regard and high fives probably. And then one of them gets it into his or her head, who knows which one it was. They should have a bit of a contest to give the people some weekend entertainment.

And the contest they're going to make is who can make something from nothing. That's a throw down. I can see I got your attention. because because you're in that game who can make something from nothing. they agreed to meet in the town square the next morning, fully prepared to do this, that their lives, in fact, have prepared them to do this.

And, smartest man in the world says to God, you first. And God says, it's always been me first, man. Let's let's break the spell of me first. You go first, and I'll see if I can see you. Never mind. Raise you, but you go first. No pressure. And the smartest man in the world reaches into his pocket and flourishes lint from his pocket and begins to conjure.

Or is, begin to enter into a fit of conjuring over this lint gutters. Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Modest man says what God points the lint between the man's index finger and thumb. He said, what are you doing? Yeah, this is the nothing that I'm going to conjure from. God says you have it. That's mine. Nothing. You got to conjure from your own.

This is two friggin good. You see, that's what I'm saying. You got to conjure the culture that you would have your children be heirs to with your nothing. Not your personal nothing. Then. Nothing that's been entrusted to you that's different. Not personal inadequacy. That's not what we're talking about. No, we're talking about you looking around and awakening to the facts.

The hard awakening, the hurtful. That is a beginning, though. God knows it doesn't feel it. And I've begun that way many times. And you could say, yeah, look what it's done for you or to you and you wouldn't be wrong. It's costly, but you're asking me top drawer questions here. You're not asking me how to get by.

I'm $12 a day thing.

TAD HARGRAVE: I'm. I'm struck by. How part of the curriculum is seeing why you've not seen the curriculum that was already entrusted to you.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Ain't it, though?

STEPHEN JENKINSON: It's a parable. You see. That's why the Jesus is of the world. If I could use the phrase. That's why they spoke that way. It's not to be tricky. It's not to be elusive is to find a way to do justice to the the workings of the world. In how you talk about that you talking about it or you hearing me do is not a break from the action.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: It's the action. And that's why we love the poets, really the good ones, and the storytellers. We really do love them. We're fairly ready to crucify them, to if they, become a drag. Before it, somebody is going to come up to you. Ted is going to say, said real magic. And you get to say, baby, what are the kind?

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Is that right?

TAD HARGRAVE: The that also strikes me. And what you're saying. That the truancy we have around learning, the poverty's the troubles of our times are very specific to each of us, in a way. They're born of the times that we're in, they're going to be. It'll be different in Alabama than it will be in Alberta. And. And how much of the curriculum is, is looking at the heath and the heather that we've grown up on and and being educated by this, that the, the notion of looking for some curriculum here's the book on how to be a culture worker.

There's probably, of course, much that can be said and much that you do say on this. But it strikes me that, that there's, there's a poverty in looking for this globalized approach to culture work. Yeah.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: what you do instead of starting. Right. It's another reason you're not starting is you're trying to find that one size fits all thing. Because all the voices of discontent and they are friggin legion. Now, all of them appeal to a, global constant, a global norm, a global, book of supposed to as if the particulars of culture, yet again, are friggin problems to solve.

We get to the the pen guy of the whole thing. And really, I can't believe it needs to be said, but it does needs to be said that,

It looks the particulars are where the haunts of the gods are. Not the exclusive particulars. The manifestations, the articulations, the executions. That's where the mojo is. That's when it's turned into something. It's not waiting to become something. You were born where you were, and you're tall. I was born who I was and ain't. And, you get them high, I'll get them low thing.

We don't have to do the same work. God almighty. Come on. We don't have to agree that we're working in some harmony that's yet to be determined. Maybe it's not that required. Maybe harmony is way oversold. Maybe simpatico is welcome, but not mandatory. Maybe simpatico is a consequence of undertaking the work, not a precondition.

Yeah, but you said it better than me.

TAD HARGRAVE: Yeah. I'm also struck by that. The poverty and the troubles. If we approach them as problems to solve, that's different than approaching them, is as curriculum as, a chance to learn how. It is a chance to to. Yeah. To learn.

If somebody is wanting to be a culture worker, there is a craft to it. And I'd be interested to hear your understanding of what some of the tools of the trade are that you've seen, in your own life and in culture, workers you've admired, what are tools that are probably good to have in the tool belt when engaging in this work?

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Endurance. Endurance, an appreciation for the limitations that your body is thrown for. An understanding that you only get many kicks at the can. That everything's not going to work out. That you don't get to see the consequences of everything you try to put into motion during your allotment. The willingness to realize that the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago.

Not now. And then the willingness to sign up for the fact that if you plant a tree now, you will be the 25 years ago. Someday. That deferred gratification is not punishment, that your willingness to work. Is not mostly willingness. It's mostly being broken down. Maybe it's not the right word. Maybe not reduced. I don't mean reduced. That your brittleness is tempered out of you. That's what, that beautiful formulation that came to me towards the end of writing, come of age about the wine and how do you end up with wine? And the answer is the depth, the the the the discernment that wine implies, the, remarkable achievements over time, that the wine is in evidence of.

Is it, you can call it depth of various kinds. How is it achieved? And the answer is you lost in volume. But you gained in depth. There's less of you, but it's all you now. It's a beautiful thing. it's a beautiful thing. And, you don't get there. You don't get to start that way. But you may get to finish that way.

Between now and then, you got to proceed that's possible. But it's mostly work, isn't it? It's perspiration. It's knowing how to, proceed, not being able to. That beautiful back at formulation. Sometimes you're going to have to be able to go ahead, not being able to go ahead. You're going to have to go. Excuse me, I botched it.

Sometimes you're going to have to go ahead not being able to. And that's a human thing. And we got to stop asking God to be less godly, less confounding, less, less trying. It's companionship with the divine. Is not a good entry level encounter. That is calamitous in the extreme. And all the world's mystery religions know that.

And they all warn you about it is calamity. God's doing us a favor by not living next door. because of the volatility of the same, you recognize that there's a certain psychic distance between yourself and everything that feels the source. But maybe that's not. It doesn't imply that there's been a transgression and a sinfulness and a breakage and a rupture and all that other stuff that we're heir to.

Maybe it's compassion at work. You work where you are. The say and we'll work with we are. And occasionally we'll pass each other in the night.

We're probably to wrap up time here. I'm wondering if there's anything that you would to read from your new book. That comes to mind? I had a chance. Kimberly sent me a little advance copy, and I was. I was reading through it this morning and, enjoying it very much. She texted me a few, illegally of course, a few, excerpts from it, which I thought were wonderful. But I'm wondering if there's anything that comes to mind you'd to pull out.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: God. There's a self-contained. It's a chapter. It's called, Salt and Indigo. It's about halfway through and it's my recreation of a moment of the pure embodiment of the spirit of trade. The spirit work of trade, which I say is the template for the matrimonial event we call wedding. That the spirit work of trade is manifest in the in the giving away and the acquiring of a young person to deepen and, introduce variety into your gene pool. That's that's how far back that goes. And it's, if I, if I may say it's, the chapter is a beautiful summit summoning up of a of the Spirit of Trade, where these two groups of people, the salt traders and the indigo workers, never meet. But the the holy ground is where they leave their wares.

And the exchange happens mysteriously because nobody's there to witness the transaction. The transaction occurs in the presence of the gods. You could say, and the willingness of the workers to step back from the product, from the fruits of their labor long enough that it becomes a, spirit speech to the possible receivers, to the to the partners in the trade.

That's the template, as I understand it, for where matrimony comes from. But I don't have it in my fingertips, ? But it's it's it's there.

TAD HARGRAVE: For you to speak about it many times in the book is coming out in August. Yes.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: August 12th, . Something that. Yeah.

TAD HARGRAVE: That sounds true. Publishing will be putting it out. Yeah. yeah. For those interested in buying the book, if you're on the email list at Orphanwisdom.com, you can hear more about it. And also, you have this die wise 10th anniversary event coming up, and I'll be sure to put the links to it when I share it.

TAD HARGRAVE: But, would you to tell us a bit about what you've what you've got cooking with the.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Yeah. It's a simple thing that I lived long enough to see. Something I'd done ten years ago. Still seemingly viable, and I thought the book deserved a recognition that wasn't simply congratulatory. Where I would get a letter from the Prime minister or something that? No, I'm joking about that.

But, what I decided to do was to sit down with several dying people and record the encounters. To see. To see. I've done that already. I did that last month. And, they they are part of the package that the registrants receive. In other words, for better or for worse, they hear me in action.

They hear me doing the die wise thing. They hear me die wise. There you are. And, that's part of it. And then the the actual weekend in question is, me sitting on the Saturday with one, luminary and then the Sunday with another people who've come into my little life and towards here as I occupy the third act of the arrangement and, I don't know what they're going to talk to me about any more than I knew what you and I were going to talk about.

Really. And, one of them is a filmmaker, and he was a consultant on Grief Walker way back in the day. Manfred Becker's name is. And he's a, remarkable guy. And he's making a film about I and immortality. And I was the first one he interviewed for the film. I had anything to say about that stuff at all.

But, I can find different ways to have nothing to say. And, I pulled it off enough that he was very compelled and has let me know repeatedly since then that he was very compelled by that. we're going to talk about probably those things and other things besides on the Sunday and on the Saturday.

I'm talking with a good friend of mine in Spain who, Alex, who, who I engaged early. He's the one that brought me to Paris in Italy last year. He's the executive director, is his title of, the Perry Institute, maybe, which is a , science and humanities thinktank that meets, or and often they meet in,

When the news got out about the diagnosis that I'm laboring under now, he was one of the first people to be in touch. And very quickly, the conversation, left behind the, smoothly orchestrated sounds of compassion and and concern and turned into, an exercise in.

The elegance of hurt.

That's how it started. And, which is the younger man than I, And I wouldn't be surprised that we've spoken together a book, and 15 or encounters that we've had of 90 minutes or, and each time and, he's, he's my other partner in, prompting me to some eloquent capacity that far has eluded me.

Perhaps that's where we'll get. But it's all in the name of, basically looking at, the the stance that Di Di was occupied at the time and to what extent the passage of a decade, ordinary decade in ordinary life. And then the particulars of, of, what's come to get me more or more recently, what it makes di always look or sound to me now.

I'm looking forward to to rumination of that kind, really. And that's what's coming in, a couple of weeks or months from now or thereabouts, a couple weeks from now.

TAD HARGRAVE: I'll have the dates and all of that linked, below this interview or somewhere in there people can see it be putting this out on my Substack. It's good to see you, Stephen. I'll release you back to, San Diego. We'll be in touch down the road.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Let me say something to you. If I could. In case this doesn't happen again. I forget in my, little sorrows, I forget how good things are in many places and with many people. And talking to you today reminds me how much I missed the school. And you've done me a great favor to remind me of them because as much as anyone that I know, you took the school to heart and are properly one of the heirs of what I tried to do. I'm really gladdened that I lived long enough to tell you that.

TAD HARGRAVE: Thank you. Stephen, there's, there's a lot of us out there that are in the missing with you. Comes up in conversation many times. The. Can't believe it's over feeling.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Yeah.

TAD HARGRAVE: And really wishing it were otherwise. And when have said it to many friends of. Can you believe what we were in on a times that we got to have the things we got to see that, no one else will in that way in those times. And it's.

It's, the, the, the grief around it is. Yeah. Right side by side with this incredible gratitude and bamboozled. How it happened. A lot of us look at each other who were there and say, how did we get in? We can trace it. There's a sequence of events. But why us? Why did we hear this? Why did we hear this interview? Or see one of Ian McKenzie's little films, or come across your book, or have a friend say with this guy Stephen Jenkinson and, and, I know it's formed and it's shaped much of, of course, my life and my work and many others and I wish it could have lasted forever.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: Yeah. We did have a little bit of for them.

TAD HARGRAVE: We did.

STEPHEN JENKINSON: It. A little taste of it, man. That's what forever is also .

STEPHEN JENKINSON: for a while, certain things seemed possible that weren't even weren't even there a year before. tell. Thank you. Tad.

TAD HARGRAVE: Thank you.

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What I didn’t say at the start, which I properly ought to have, was that I am 49 years old and in very little position to be speaking about elderhood with any authority.

What I share is based on what I’ve learned, largely from Stephen Jenkinson and from others and from my own experiences of seeing people older than me in action.

I suspect things might look different when I am in their shoes.

But, with that important proviso out of the way, I am happy with how the conversation went and look forward to hearing how it lands with you.

You might also enjoy this interview I did with Stephen Jenkinson on the topic of elderhood.

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First of all, thank you so much to everyone who left a comment on the last post as to why you think the story of Briar Rose was kept alive.

The other week, Robbie sent me a message on Instagram, asking if I’d be open to being a guest on his podcast to speak about this cultural work I’ve been doing and, particularly about the notion that there is wisdom, indigenous to Europe, contained in fairy tales - that these old folk tales are seeds of culture.

Anyway, he invited me.

I told him I’d be delighted.

And, after our 85 minute conversation, I remain glad I said ‘yes’. His introduction to the interview clarified some important pieces and he extended a great courtesy to me in the understanding that though my language and his might differ on certain matters (e.g. my use of the term ‘spell’) there was a seat at the table for multiple approaches.

In a sometimes pedantic and ungenerous online world, I’m grateful for that kind of hospitality.

I hope you enjoy the interview. You can find it on Robbie’s Substack.

We’d both love to hear your thoughts.

If you’d like to interview either myself and/or Kakisimow Iskwew, please let us know in the comments.

Important Note: I forgot to attribute the following quote as being something that I learned from Kakisimow Iskwew (who in turn learned it from a Blackfoot elder Narcisse Blood): “So, I don't mean to talk glibly or loosely, or imagine that I know how it is for everyone, but I can just say largely what I've seen, and generalizing dangerously. So, when I'm using the word culture, I mean, culture are the teachings that we need to live on the land, sustainably.” Telling the story of things, including where we heard things, is an act of cultural regeneration and so is apologizing which I have done.

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

We are offering our Briar Rose & The Indigenous Memory of Mother Europe in a variety of formats. Join us for an online version of our three-hour intro session on Dec 12th (30% full), live in Edmonton on Dec 22nd 2024 (30% full) or our six-week, online course (20% full).

Learn more, get tickets or join the email list at the link below.

Upcoming Briar Rose Events

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On August 17th, I found myself sitting next to one of my dearest friends in the world, Kakisimo Iskwew, sharing, as best we could, our thoughts on ‘culture making’ on the land of Nathalie Jackson for an event entitled Remembering the Village - The Revolution, Aug 17-20, 2023.

We were greeted by an old-time courtesy, long-forgotten in most places and rarely practiced even when remembered by the two wranglers of unlikely beauty and the motley crew assembled in that gorgeous, 30-foot yurt, Michelle Christine and Caroline Stewart (two locals worth paying attention to in the coming decades).

I opened with two poems.

One of them was this small beauty by Antonio Machado entitled ‘Thirst’

It is good knowing that glasses
Are to drink from;
The bad thing is not to know
What thirst is for.

Kakisimo Iskwew shared with everyone what she’s learned from an elder she’d studied with that culture was a set of instructions for living on the land in a good way. A particular piece of land.

And so there’s no globalized ‘culture’ because each place is different.

We delved into the role of the culture in the soil and in our guts of metabolizing the messes of the world into nourishment for the world.

Without the microbiome, we starve.

Without food, the microbiome starves.

And so what is the food for human culture? I proposed that it is our troubles and messes we make - all of the hellos and goodbyes, the frailties and limits that visit us, often seemingly too soon - their apparently earlier-than-needed arrival being a part of their style too. Our stupidities and selfishness, our clumsiness and blunders. Our often loudly clanging attempts at being ourselves. All our failures.

It’s all food, compost, for culture.

I shared the old traveller tale The Beatin’ Stick that I got from a book of Duncan Williamson’s which features the world tree withered and bearing no more of its life giving fruits.

We spoke of how strange it is to the modern mind that the center of the kingdom is not even human and how it might be fed and how what feeds that one might also be fed (or harmed) by our conduct.

It was a marvel to sit next to Kakisimo Iskwew, for whom my admiration is almost bottomless, and do our best to feed the people, offering them the smallest portion of sourdough starter that we had as a blessing for their time together over the weekend.

This is a woman who has committed herself to living off the land, studying as deeply as she can with her elders and going back to school to learn her ancestral language of Cree. She has sacrificed over and over in order to learn what she has learned that she might share it with others in a life of cultural activism.

If I’m a lucky man, it won’t be the last time that she and I sit together and share story with others, hungry in a way they don’t recognize for a thing they don’t know - hungry for culture - the very thing that would allow them to gain nourishment for what they ingest.

Stephen Jenkinson once said, “Food makes hunger.” It’s not the lack of food that makes us hungry alone. It’s the lack of food and then the appearance of food that brings the hunger. You can be hungry and forget you are - until that aroma wafts from the kitchen and hits your nose.

We sat before a people thirsty for… what? They didn’t know.

If we are lucky, we brought them some libation to quench some of their thirst.

If they are lucky, we brought them thirst that won't be so easily quenched.

Maybe by the end of their weekend, they had some sense of not only what they were thirsty for, but what the thirst itself, was for.

*

Photos by the good Ron McHugh.

You can learn more about Kakisimo Iskwew’s work here.

To read my substack essay Culture Makes Food.

To read the story The Beatin’ Stick by Duncan Williamson go here.

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Years ago, maybe in 2016 or 2017, a young white man who wrote to me, in response to letters I’d been writing on Facebook on the #DearWhiteMen hashtag. He wrote:

"But what about all of the innocent white men? The white men who fight relentlessly for the rights of others? My whole point is that we should not lump each other into predetermined groups. In doing so, we undermine all of our collective effort in moving forward towards a more equitable future. Blame does not help what we are all working towards. Blaming others is what put us where we are today."

The following was my reply, published as an open letter. I don’t know if I’d say it all the same way today but, I think much of it still stands.

*

First of all, I hear you.

This will be a long letter to you.

I hope you might read it.

The feeling of being lumped into a group can be painful. The feeling of being stereotyped is terrible. The feeling of being blamed for something you legitimately didn't do is awful. There are few humans alive who don't know that feeling.

Secondly, white men have played powerful and incredible roles in the movements for social justice. For as long as there were white men enslaving black people in the USA there have been white male abolitionists. In fact some, like John Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, were both – first a slave trader and then a fierce critic of it. These white men are to be admired. I wish their stories were taught in American schools rather than those of genocidal maniacs like Columbus or George Washington.

And, of course, that's just as true today.

There's much to say in response to what you have written but there is one thread that, for the moment, I'd like to follow. It's your use of the word 'we'.

Who is the 'we' you keep referring to?

Your response is likely 'everyone' or 'humans'. It's the 'all' in #alllivesmatter.

And, of course, the situation in the world is dire. Those in charge of the world's economic and political systems thrive on the divisions. Divide and conquer is a real thing. They actively work to pit us against each other. So, it would seem that the response to these attempts at fracturing our connections is to make the move from 'me' to 'we' – to refuse to let them divide us.

And I know this is what you're trying to do. It's a noble goal. And so my feedback here is not about your goal but about your strategy.

'We' is an achieved thing. 'We' is not a given. 'We' is earned from time in together. 'We' means I could speak on behalf of a group and have all of their heads nodding. 'We' is a shared understanding. And white men, it seems, often move too quickly to 'we'.

Let's unpack your use of it.

"we should not lump each other into predetermined groups."

Of course, the heart of this for you, the issue you are responding to here, is that I seem to be lumping white men into a predetermined group. So let's start with that and look at some of the implications of it by saying it differently.

"Women and people of colour should not lump white people into a predetermined group"

What is being said here is that, no matter what traumatic life experiences they have had with white men, they should see us as an individual, totally blank slate. They shouldn't bring any of that 'baggage' into their interactions with us.

Consider the words of Muhammed Ali,

"There are many white people who mean right and in their hearts wanna do right. If 10,000 snakes were coming down that aisle now, and I had a door that I could shut, and in that 10,000, 1,000 meant right, 1,000 rattlesnakes didn’t want to bite me, I knew they were good... Should I let all these rattlesnakes come down, hoping that that thousand get together and form a shield? Or should I just close the door and stay safe?"

This is what we're asking them to do – to trust that we are different.

To take the enormous risk of opening themselves to us despite generations of proof that people who look like us can't always be trusted. When we tell women and people of colour that 'they should trust us' we are doing an incredible act of violence to them.

We are removing their right to engage with us or not as they choose.

We are forcing ourselves on them.

Of course, as you read this, there is every chance that all you will see is that white people are being compared to snakes and that this simply proves your point. Underwriting that response is your notion that they are exaggerating. That it hasn't been that bad for them. That 'poisonous snakes' is an over-the-top analogy.

Stated differently, we can't trust what they say.

Stated differently, our response to their trauma is to dismiss their trauma in such a way that more trauma is created.

Stated another way still, we are owed their love and forgiveness.

Looked at from another angle, women and people of colour can't withhold their love and other white men must not corroborate these fears.

"In doing so, WE undermine all of OUR COLLECTIVE effort in moving forward towards a more equitable future."

Your thought that the 'more equitable future' you imagine is the same as the one that women and people of colour imagine is at the heart of the issue. Your assumptions that you understand the nature and causes of their oppression, that you share a core worldview of how that oppression should be dealt with and what it might mean to work together are at the heart of the issue.

The implication of what you are saying is that, 'we are all being screwed over in the same way by the same people and it looks the same everywhere and so our response should look the same everywhere' – that's what makes it a collective effort that WE are all working on. Racism and misogyny do harm white men. Yes. But it's in a very different way that it harms women and people of colour.

"Blame does not help what we are all working towards."

Part of the challenge here is that white men seem to have a very difficult time in hearing about historical and current patterns of behaviour about themselves. These are patterns of behaviour that are intimately familiar to most women and people of colour but, when a white man is confronted with these or they hear these dynamics discussed by others the response is not curiosity but a brittle and bristling sort of defensiveness that says, in essence, 'you are exaggerating'.

You can name and not blame.

You can name the issues and not have that be an indictment of who you are.

And again, "what we are all working towards".

Your assumption that you are working for the same goal, and that you have the same map and route on how to get there, without asking or checking in, is a large part of the issue.

So where is this 'we' coming from?

"Blaming others is what put us where we are today"

Again who is 'we' and where is it that you are referencing that we are? The implication of this is that we are all in the same place but many women and people of colour will assure you that they don't live in the same world as you.

This is a tale of two cities and there you are, having grown up on the privileged side of the river, running for Mayor and claiming fellowship with the very people on whose backs your side of the city was built, and claiming fraternity with them. And, when they raise their eyebrows at your pronouncements you tell them that they are the problem for not trusting you. You become angry and petulant and wave the flag of victimhood.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all white men are ‘privileged’. There are poor white men. Ones who grew up infirm and unloved. One privilege doesn’t protect one from the sufferings of life. This world is a hard go.

It’s also not to say that being ‘privileged’ is all its cracked up to be. That it’s good for us at the end of the day.

Ayiyi. There’s so much to say.

But the central thing to underscore is that, for so many reasons, most of us live at different intersections of the world these days. There’s so little shared anything amongst those of us in the dominant societies of the world.

'We' is an achievement that is worked towards not something to which we are entitled. 'We' is the result of an immense amount of work. 'We' is not a given – even if we work hard.

As the good Lillie P Allen suggests, "The only way we get a fresh moment with each other is if we create it".

But don’t we tend to want it all immediately.

And the roots of the word immediately come down to 'no medium' meaning 'nothing in between' or 'nothing separating' as if the way to intimacy was to remove the distance between us but the first casualty of this approach to intimacy is the one we claim to admire and support.

Is there distance between men and women and white people and people of colour? Indigenous and settlers? Often.

So what's your solution? To claim it shouldn't be there? To shame them for being suspicious? To force the removal of it?

To utterly disrespect boundaries as you did with me when I asked you to stop posting on my wall and message me directly with if you wanted to talk? Or when I told you I would reply when I could and offered to go for beers but you had to keep pushing it so you could get satisfaction immediately?

How about honouring the medium of space between us as a sacred thing?

'We' is an achievement. 'We' can't be imposed. 'We' doesn't exist because you think it should. 'We' is something tangible and real. 'We' is something to be courted with diligence and effort. 'We' can't be achieved if the other is not respected. 'We' can't be achieved without the space in between us being maintained and honoured. That space is the place in which our relationship happens. No space between us? No ‘we’ because there are no longer two of us here.

That space is the medium through which our love flows. Stalking and worse is what can happen when that space is not respected. This is the tragedy of it. Being starved for love, we grasp for it but the consequence of our grasping is to destroy the one we grasp. The attempt to force a ‘we’ destroys the possibility of it from ever emerging.

“We should be together,” said by a man who can’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer or read the clear discomfort signals she’s giving can be terrifying words to a woman.

Many of our attempts to build a ‘we’ as white men end up hurting the ones with whom we want to enjoy this ‘we’. And one of the major ways we cause harm in building a ‘we’ is by assuming the ‘we’ is already there.

I recall speaking with a friend who was driven to ‘unite the youth movements of the world’. I listened to him for a good long while and finally asked permission to share something I was seeing.

“You know those connect the dot games we played as a kid?”

He nodded.

“The whole picture was there already. You just had to find the right connections between the dots and draw them in. You weren’t really making up a picture you were discovering what it was. Each dot was in its proper place. You just had to connect them. What you’re trying to do is to push all of those dots together into one big super dot.”

He sat there stunned for a bit. His eyes widened. He took a deep breath. He understood.

How many times, over the years, have I heard of people wanting to create an umbrella organization that would bring all the organizations in a certain field together. Unspoken in all of this was that they would be the one to hold the umbrella.

So, creating a ‘we’ in a complicated thing that is something more akin to an honouring of the diversity of experiences than the attempt to amalgamate them. It’s more of a mosaic than a melting pot. It’s an understanding the big picture and our roles within it.

There’s a difference between divisiveness and honouring differences.

There’s a difference between inclusiveness and not acknowledging people’s autonomy. If someone values connection over separation as a rule, what happens to the respect for the independence of others?

We can have empathy for others and still be discerning about when, where and how to connect with them. And that choice must be left up to them.

I’m noticing that whenever someone, especially someone in a position of power, says, “We should _______” about our culture at large it is a conjuring that seems to vanish the diversity of who is being discussed and the imposition of a monolithic sense of strategy when it may be much more nuanced. It might be that white men should do one thing and white women another and that black men might do another thing and black women might be drawn to something else. And diversity within all of that too. There may be so many different roles for different people. Some people may need to work inside the system and some out. And some might have different understandings about how to encourage and engage people.

All of that is, it seems to me, made invisible with, ‘we should ______’.

The creation of a fresh moment with each other is more work than we can imagine.

And so there you go.

The hour is late. It is growing dark. And we have a long way to walk before we get home to a place where good relations might be established again. You look up at the sky and there it is. The stars beginning to come out held, as they are, in the cool medium of space in between them, the universe’s way of loving them as they are and giving them a chance to shine for a while and, from where we stand, full of constellations - lines drawn between them.

Do you want a 'we'?

Start by noticing why there isn't one. Learn that well.

Learn the resistance to the 'we' you yearn for instead of making it wrong.

Learn why we, as white men, are spoken of in the ways that we are without defending or seeking to change it.

Ask others about the present they live in, what it's like to be them and what they think causes the struggles they face. Ask other about the future they want and what they imagine it might take to create it.

‘We’ is our only hope but it will take more than hope to get there.

"We are the products of the children of a dominant North American culture. Now, ask yourself, when was the last time you were able to use the word 'we' and you know who you meant. Is 'we' you and your family? Is we you and a couple of close buddies? Who is we? Because in cultures that are alive, we is an enormous proposition. Deeply inclusive. A ramshackling event and many other things. It's not a monolith but it's certainly recognizable. And you recognize yourself as someone who was claimed and conjured and delivered unto this world by that 'we'. I use 'we' very, very rarely and the reason for that is that I don't know what that refers to. So that's what we have instead of a culture in the dominant culture of North America. We have a kind of religion of individualism that's a default consequence of the mass migration that spawned the white America that we know about and we're still living the consequences,  unwilling to learn them, we still live them as if history is over. As Nick Cave put it, 'The past is the past and it's here to stay.' 'We' is not a racial identity. It's something much akin to a shared understanding of what life is, what's asked of us, about what we're willing to live and die for and three or four other high end items... a shared ancestry that's not all DNA ancestry. It's an ancestry that's somehow soulful and recognizable across the barriers of DNA." - Stephen Jenkinson

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I think reputation may be one of the least understood realities of the modern world.

Not that reputation is unique to the modern world.

Reputation, this way we constantly reconsider the meaning of other people's lives and our understanding of who they are, may be one of the most important functions of human culture. In fact, without it, culture, in any achieved sense, might not be possible.

In the modern world, there are two approaches to reputation.

The first seems to be a mad lunge towards a narcissistic sort of fame and notoriety.

The second is an aversion of 'being known' that plays as a kind of modesty, "I don't care about that stuff. I don't need to be well known. Whatever. I do what I want. People can think of me what they will."

Perhaps both of these responses to this old, and deeply human culture-maker are not opposites, but opposames. Seemingly opposing answers that both, in the end, testify to the same thing: our modern obsession with and deep poverty of individualism and the sense that the only purpose reputation might have is to aggrandize ourselves; to fill some deep empty hole inside of ourselves.

But, what might reputation look like in a culture more rooted in some collectively held understanding of the world and their place in it?

I believe that, in a more tribal or clan based culture, it would be understood that, wherever you travelled, like it or not, aware of it or not, you were representing your people. If you behaved well, it reflected well on your people. If you behaved poorly, it did not.

And so, reputation might be better understood not as a way we feed ourselves but as a way we feed our people.

Perhaps a good reputation is a way we feed the past, the present and the future.

Perhaps a good reputation is a way that we feed our ancestors; that they look up and swell with pride and say, "They're one of mine!"

Perhaps a good reputation is a way that we feed our people in the present. It's a way that we make their lives easier, inspire the generosity and kinship of neighbouring peoples and warm up the hearth fires of good reception they might get the next time they follow your footsteps to the neighbouring county.

Perhaps a good reputation is a way we feed those to come by giving them ancestors worthy of claiming; worthy of being from. That they could swell with pride and say, "I come from those ones."

I recall a storyteller from England speaking of the legendary Irish hero Fionn MacCumhaill as, "My man Fionn." An ancestor he was proud to claim and be from.

In a world rife with self-loathing and all of the consequences to our physical, emotional and social health, developing a good and honourable reputation and allowing ourselves to be claimed by others, may be one of the most potent medicines we can give.

A good name is a currency, but it's not there to be spent on yourself.

Reputation can also animate or de-animate our entire community; it can feed or starve those connected to us.

If you look at the word 'indigenous', you will see that root word gen that also appears in genitals, genealogy, generic, genetics, genre, genus and more. Gen seems to relate to a certain kind of belonging to a group, to a people. It seems to speak of lineage but also of shared understanding and deeply fashioned kinship. 

Gen also appears in the word 'generous'. And, perhaps this whispers that our capacity to be generous is not self-generated, but comes from our belonging to a people who have our back; and from the depth of the cultural patrimony entrusted to us.

Traditionally, the foundation of your personal self-esteem was not a self-generated enterprise at all but something of which you were on the receiving end.

So, from whence did it come?

From your pride about the people from whom you come and your noble heredity.

An elder I study with spoke of how the tall-walking, swagger one develops when one belongs to a people of good repute might come across as a bit arrogant. He shared how someone who was proud of where they came from might say, "Well, you know... I'd prefer to be a nobody. I mean, if it were up to me, I'd play it small, but look at who I come from and who I am representing here. Look who's behind me!"

Most traditional people's I know have an immense pride in the lineages from which they come.

Consider these words about the Irish during the times of the Potato Famine, as described by John Kelly in The Graves Are Walking:

"Irish peasant culture, though medieval in character, was good at a few things; one was affording a deeply impoverished people with a sense of dignity and worth. Every Irish townland had its wise man, its storyteller, its keeners; every district its schoolmaster, its traveling poets, and its songsters. Under the sheltering umbrella of peasant culture, even the most humble could be esteemed. Of course the peasant knew he was very poor, but that was the result of being outmatched by life, and where was the shame in that? Many a man - many a fine man - had been outmatched by life. Besides, the peasant's language, Irish, was such a glory, the saints in heaven spoke it."

Or consider the Scottish Highlander as Michael Newton writes about in Warriors of the Word:

"John Mair wrote in 1521 about the pride taken by his countrymen in their pretensions to noble birth, '...they take inordinate pleasure in noble birth and (though of ignoble origin themselves) delight in hearing themselves spoken of as come of noble blood'. Visitors from other nations often remarked at the self-regard of common Highlanders, in contrast to the cringing peasants of their own societies, as when as anonymous eighteenth-century English visitor noted, "The poorest and most despicable Creature of the name of MacDonald looks upon himself as a Gentleman of far Superior Quality than a man of England of £1000 a year.' Regardless of their economic dearth or the swings of fortune, their cultural self-confidence gave them buoyancy as Edmund Burt noted in the 1720's: 'The Highlanders walk nimbly and upright, so that you will never see, among the meanest of them, in the most remote parts, the clumsy, stopping gait of the French paisans, or own own country fellows but, on the contrary, a kind of stateliness in the midst of their poverty.' The Rev. Donald MacQueen, minister in eighteenth-century Skye, stated that even the lowest classes aspired to the highest ideals of noble behaviour, as elucidated and celebrated in Gaelic song and story: '...Every one of the superior clans thought himself a gentleman, as deriving from his pedigree from an honourable stock, and proposed to do nothing unworthy of his descent or connections."

The whole thing is there in that last sentence: "...and proposed to do nothing unworthy of his descent or connections."

Our reputation has immense consequences for our people.

Our reputation is not primarily about us.

Our reputation has immense consequences for our people. As does their reputation for us. This is the reciprocal nature of it.

If we behave badly, it reflects poorly on all of them. If they behave badly, it reflects poorly on us. If this shared culture is the source, the well-spring of one's self-esteem, then if we act in such a way that poisons this well, everyone is affected. There is less to be proud of. And, of course, this isn't just for those alive now. Our reputation will also have an effect on those who follow us. Ask any MacDonald in Scotland who knows their history if they don't still hold some grudge against the Campbells for the Massacre at Glencoe that happened in 1692, over three hundred years ago.

In traditional communities, if you were the child of one with a bad reputation, you might carry that too and be starved by it but, if your parents were renowned for their kindness and generosity, that reputation would feed you.

If you are a salesperson and you behave badly towards a potential client, it reflects on all salespeople.

If you are an holistic practitioner and you behave badly towards a client, it reflects on all holistic practitioners.

If you are a life-coach and you behave badly towards a client, it reflects on all life-coaches.

If you are a man and you behave badly towards women, it reflects on all men.

If you are a white person and you behave badly towards people of colour, it reflects on all white people. And thus, the growing self-hatred amongst white people and the increase in cultural appropriation that flows from it. Of course, the challenge here is that white people tend not to see themselves as a group and so, can’t imagine why their conduct would have any consequence for other white people.

How we behave, and the honourable reputation we cultivate becomes food for all those around us and those to come and ennobles them as well.

A good reputation is food. But that food is not primarily for us. Cultivating a good reputation is our way of feeding the deep, cultural well-being of our community, it is the hard-wood we bring to the collective hearth fire that keeps us all warm, it is water flowing to the common cistern; the deep, spring-watered well of our collective self-esteem which feeds the fruiting trees of beauty-making, affection and pride that grow around it.

Our conduct can bring a good name to our people and give our community something beautiful to testify to that ennobles them in the testifying.

And so what does this mean for all of us? What does knowing this ask of us?

Perhaps it asks us to consider that our insistence on being an inconsequential nobody is starving people.

Perhaps it asks us to see that an honourable reputation is one of the ways that village-mindedness finds its way back into our world as people say, “Yes. I will claim this one as one of mine.”

Perhaps it might ask of us, that we proceed in such a way that we become an ancestor worth claiming; the we carry ourselves in the world with such beauty and style as we feed the world that has been feeding us all along that those who come after us might say, "I come from the same community as that one there. I'm one of their people. I'm proud to be in the same group as them."

Perhaps it asks of us to see reputation as being a scent we can leave on the wind, a rumour that could be spread that, in these dangerous and endangered times, there were those who strove to live differently, who tried for something finer, who worked to learn the poverty of their times and make beauty from it, who woke up to the crater into which they were borne, and, instead of trying to escape it, made something marvellous, ornate and staggeringly wonderful of it from the poverty that was entrusted to them.

No doubt, life will get the best of us, but we can leave something that lingers behind us, a rumour, a small testimony, some carefully preserved sack of seeds, the remnants of the fruiting of all our best intentions, a reason to keep breathing and going on, a life-giving wind carrying a story of those who came before them.

Reputation is not a trophy to win. It’s an obligation. It’s a responsibility.

Reputation is not our greatest way of becoming a unique individual. It’s a deep manner of tethering one’s self to those you come from and allowing others to tether themselves to you.

Reputation is not a reward. It’s a manner of feeding. It is not about self-sufficiency but about bringing your contribution to that old clay pot at the centre of the village so that others might eat.

When there is no village, humans are consistently overwhelmed and lonely and, from this place, behave badly. This has consequences for other humans, the non-human world and the unseen world.

When there are no people worthy of claiming as your kin, there is no possibility of village.

And so, perhaps, more than anything, it asks us to consider how our insistence on being an inconsequential, invisible, individual nobody might be starving something invaluable.

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In Memory of Kyla Hidsen Lewis

Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.

Weave a shawl that keeps in mind all of your old timers who were broken by the world, who never had a chance, who were on the bad end of the enforced trading of homeland for homelessness, the ones who were hardened by Empire, who came to see this world in rigid ways, the ones who lived in fear daily of what others might do to them or what they might do to others, who lived in shame daily of what they let others do to them and what they did to others.

Weave a shawl out of the poverty that lies in between you and them. Weave a shawl out of time itself. Fashion beauty out of the ugliness so that those troubled and hungry ones might be fed by someone's willingness to remember them.

Weave a shawl for those forgotten and scorned ones; those banished and shunned ones. Those ones we never talk about. Those ones left out in the cold of our collective dismissal.

Weave a shawl that might keep them warm and you warm and those to come after you warmer still.

Weave a shawl that tells the story of your people and that leaves no one out.

Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors. Somehow, both of you edges of the loom. Them, one side of the loom and yourself the other.

Reach back and back and back until you find them, trying to find you. You, their redemption and they yours. Both of you doorways back towards life swung open and letting the Spring breeze sweep into the old dusty home of everyone and everything forgotten, this boarded up cabin of rugged individualism and not needing anyone, this remote shack of self-sufficiency.

You, the fruit, reaching back down along the twisting branches, tracing your way back to the roots from which you come and finally understanding this tree of life. Don't skip over the knotted trunk and gnarled or broken off branches. If you could step back from it you would see the beauty of it all and that the sap of life doesn't choose favourites amongst the branches. You are the fruit, hungry to be fed, coming to know the source of what feeds you and has kept you alive all this time.

You contain the seeds of more trees that may sprout roots one day. You may become the forgotten old timers of those to come. And so show us how it is done. Live, not trying to be remembered, but remembering instead.

Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.

Weave in the ugly threads. Weave in the hard parts. Weave in everything you don't want to remember. Let the knotted parts of your history appear and wrap it around your shoulders.

Be willing to let those old ones remember you and stand tall under the weight of their remembering.

Be fed by the barely remembered times, and the times you remember but never lived. Be baffled by your own unlikely appearance, this fruiting face, at the end of this long branch and see how your growing weight makes this supple arm of your old timers stronger because of it.

Let yourself be held for a while by that from which you came until one part of you falls and another part of you keeps growing, both of you the chance for life to appear once again, both of you food for something. Let yourself be baffled by how all of this could have ever come to be and where that first seed could have come from. What a mystery.

Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.

See how it works now: your willingness to open to your life up here is what feeds them down there. Your gathering up the sunlight of your days reminds them of the time when they were you, sitting there, growing heavy on the branch themselves. They remember and would give anything to be where you are now but your fullness and sweetness is a food to them. Your growing beauty is a salve for what they had to give up then so that you might have a chance now. You feed them the sunshine and the breezes and they feed you the deep waters and then Earth. Watch as the food you send to them and the food they send to you passes through the trunk and branches that connect you, all of you a part of this same tree; alive, on this hill, its rich loam made from the bodies of all the other ones who came before you, their deaths feeding your life, your roots in touch with stories and memories older than the tree itself. The tree of your ancestry rooted in a deeper ancestry still, this old pageant of food and feeding.

Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.

Drape it across your shoulders and wear it for the rest of your days that we might see how beautiful is the one willing to remember and be remembered.

Or drape it across the shoulders of all those forgotten.

Or maybe those two sets of shoulders aren’t different at all. Maybe you are their shoulders now.

Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.

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In the end, it all comes back to food.

Food might be one of the only religions worth having. 

We were sitting out at a bar together. The music was loud. It was a weekend evening. I'd just gotten home from some time on the road and was happy to see her. 

I'd met her years ago when she was dating a friend of mine and, though their relationship ended, she and I became very close in a way I don't think either of us anticipated when she first appeared in my living room years ago with my friend.

My friend, we'll call her Jane, was melting down. 

"I haven't eaten in 24 hours," she said. 

After a long dry spell of being convinced she'd never find another woman to date, she'd met someone. They'd gone on nine dates and things had gone incredibly well. But then the other woman had told her that she could feel where things were going but that she'd just gotten out of a long term relationship and wasn't feeling ready for anything exclusive and wanted to continue to date others. 

It had sent my friend reeling into a pit of insecurity and depression. And, as is often the case, matters were made worse by her feeling like her reactions were disproportionately large. She'd tried to communicate what was going on for her but it had only made things much worse and the woman she was seeing had backed away. Communication had gone from easy and fun to awkward.

"What do you think it's about?" I asked.

"Maybe it's a self worth issue?" she said and shared some of her feelings and thoughts surrounding that. 

"Maybe it is. But it might not have anything to do with self worth."

She sat up. "Oh?"

I understood. I remember years ago meeting a woman by whom I was so viscerally struck that it sent me reeling. I'd popped by the Black Dog Freehouse to see if anyone I knew was there and saw a friend of mine sitting there with her friend. As soon as I sat down and looked at her, I had the rare experience of feeling impacted and utterly undone. We spoke a bit and I asked her out on a date which had gone incredibly well. And then, over the next few days, I heard nothing from her. I completely melted down inside.

"What is going on?" I had wondered. "I barely know this woman and I can't stop checking my phone."

Over the next few days, I began to track my thoughts to see where the source of my unsettledness and neediness was coming from and, in so doing, was introduced to a nest of thoughts woven together by that strange bird of loneliness we all carry in our hearts in these modern times and feed our attention until it crowds our heart so much that the blood can barely flow and we can barely hear our own heart or thoughts over the ruckus it makes with its cawing and beating of wings. Or maybe the bird isn't in us at all but has done its best to make a home for us out of the few thorny branches that remain and brings us scraps from the table of this increasingly mad, over-processed world with her rapidly eroding topsoil of community and village-mindedness. Or maybe it's a nest in a tree we visit because someone told us that this was a throne worthy of worshipping at. I don't know. 

"First of all," I said. "This is all deeply cultural. What is it that makes it seem like a good idea to find 'home' in another person? Why do we put all of our eggs in these romantic baskets? Because there are no other baskets. This is all happening in the wake of the loss of village. Where are the women's circles, the growing of food, the making things by hand, the elders who feed us... It leaves us emotionally and spiritually starving and so we try to turn the other person into our village and it's too much for them to bear."

"But, on the personal level, in my experience," I told my friend sitting there at the bar. "It's never the experience that upsets us. It's so confusing. Something seemingly small happens and, inside, we have a volcanic reaction to it. It makes no sense. Small stimulus and huge response. They don't call. Or they tell you that they want to date others and, it's only been two weeks but... it ruins you. How could it be? This is what makes it worse. Not only do you have the initial impact but now there's also the shame of feeling like you're over-reacting; that you shouldn't be so upset by what happened. But, in my experience, it's never what happens that upsets us. It's what it means to us. It's our thoughts about the thing. When you look at the incident, there's no logic but, if you were to look at the list of everything you're telling yourself this means? Your reaction makes total sense. Because it happens and then all the thoughts appear... 'But we need to be together,' 'This is supposed to work out!' 'If she leaves me it will be months or years until I meet someone where there's such a fit!' or 'I'll never meet anyone again and I will die old and alone.' All those thoughts appear but they appear so quickly and under the radar that we don't even realize they're there... Or we don't realize they're thoughts. We think they're reality."

She nodded, reflecting on what I'd said.

"So, my question is: what's most upsetting about this for you? So she said what she said but... so what? What does it mean to you? What are you telling yourself."

"Well... that she might not choose me."

I nodded. "Right. But so what? What might it mean if she doesn't choose you?"

"That I'm not good enough."

"So, 'If she doesn't choose me, then that means that I'm not good enough.' That's the general idea. That thought appears and we never question it. But... is it true?" I asked her.

She sat with it for a few seconds, "No."

"Right. You can't know if that's true. It could be but you don't know that. But what we can know is that impact that this thought has on us. So, what happens inside of you when you think this thought?"

The answer to this question is no mystery. You could answer it yourself if you were to reflect on what it does to you too. We leave the present moment and get trapped in the past or some imagined future. We become obsessed with doing whatever we can to make sure the other person chooses us. We manipulate. We feel insecure. We are filled with fear. We shut down.

"And who would you be without this thought?" I asked. 

She immediately relaxed. Her shoulders dropped. "I'd be so much more relaxed and fun to be around again."

"You know, as far as I have figured out, the mind is not a seeking mechanism, it's finding mechanism. It always finds proof for what it believes. The idea is like this table top and the proof is like the legs underneath it than make it study. When we have a thought that we don't question, the mind immediately begins looking for proof for it. And it finds it. It always finds something to back it up. But you can use this to your advantage by twisting that original stressful thought in other ways and asking your mind to find proof for it. It's so strange how quickly a thought can become a monotheistic religion where it, and only it, can be true. A thought is a like a moon with a gravitational pull to it and it draws in asteroids."

I am remembering being in Victoria at a friend's house for a house concert. In the kitchen was a table that, upon closer examination was basically a solid block of wood. 

"Is this hollow?" I asked him.

He shook his head. This is solid maple, joyced and glued together. It weighs about 250 lbs." He slapped the top of it and you could hear it. I leaned in closer, amazed at the work and how perfectly fit together, like puzzle pieces it was. I pushed at it and was amazed by the weight.

Some table tops are heavier than others. Some thoughts, like, "I'm not good enough," are a big deal. Others are thin particle board. 

What my friend was dealing with was closer to the former. I've heard some people say that the core wounds most people, at least in this dominant culture, deal with are: "I'm not good enough," and "I'm not good enough to be love."

Our food arrived and we dug in. Fuck I was hungry. I don't know what it is about travel but I can eat a large meal, get on a plane for a couple of hours, land and be ready for another large meal.

"So," I say, bulgogi beef taco in hand. "Could it be just as true, if not more true, that "Her not choosing you does not mean that you're not good enough"? Could it be that it just doesn't mean that?"

She agreed.

These days, our world have shrunk to the size of our yoga matts and meditation cushions as we try to 'self-sufficient' our way through life. We try to figure it all out on our own. And it's madness. The Irish have a fine saying, "Is maith an scáthán súil charad". It means, "A friend's eye is a good mirror."

Today, I am clear and she's struggling but tomorrow it might be her who's feeling more clear and I might go off the deep end of whatever my current self-absorption is. That's what was happening here. Her being willing to have her situation and troubles seen through another's eyes rather than being lost forever in her own reflection. We get lost in ourselves sometimes and we need the companionship (a word that means 'with bread') of shared food and conversation to make it through our days. 

But maybe our thoughts need our companionship too. Maybe they need the food of our attention too.  

"And could it be that her not choosing you might actually be a sign that you are good enough?”

She sat back in her chair in the way we all do when someone offers us a though that we'd never considered before that we can sense has truth in it somewhere that we can't discern. She looked to the table and furrowed her brow trying to find how this might be true. A table top in search of legs and not being able to find any solid enough to rest it on.

"What if her leaving you was a divine sign, the best benediction you're likely to receive, that you are absolutely good enough?"

"But how?... I don't see it."

"Well," I offered and normally I'd encourage the other person to sit with it themselves longer but, being in a noisy bar and late for a show we were headed to, I offered some possibilities. "Maybe it could be that this is a sign of how much she respects you and sees your goodness that she'd even be willing to be so honest with you. Maybe this is her saying, 'You're so good that I won't fuck with you. I'll be straight with you about where I'm at rather than cheating on you or disappearing or simply not talking about it." I could tell that this had never occurred to her in this way. "It could also be that this is the Universe taking care of you and saying, 'She's too good for this woman. She deserves better. Let's contrive to end this pronto so that she can find someone more worthy of her goodness.' I'm not saying that's true. But what I am wondering is why is the original thought more true? Why does the thought, 'If she doesn't choose me, then I'm no good' get to be the religion?"

"Could it also be that her not choosing you means that she's not good enough?"

My friend smiled.

"You know, just on a friend level I might say to you, "What the fuck Jane. You deserve better than someone whose not totally into you. You've gone on a bunch of dates now. She gets how amazing you are and she's still not convinced? Fuck that noise. If she doesn't choose you then something's wrong with her taste. If she can't see that you're a Queen, then I say 'no'."

She laughed at this. 

"Again, I'm not saying this is true. But why is the first thought so much more true?"

"And could it be that if she does choose you that this might be evidence of some other things beyond that you're good enough? Does her choosing you inevitably mean you're good enough? Is this really the most trustworthy sign you could imagine?"

"No! She might just be staying because she feels sorry for me."

"Yes!" I told her the story of how author Tony Robbins had known, at the altar with his first wife Becky, that it was wrong but that he went ahead with it because he didn't want to disappoint her. "It could be a sign that she's settling. That she's scared she won't find someone she really wants and so she chooses you. Could be a sign of a rebound. Could be a sign of her being rejected by who she really wants and you're easy and available. Why is it automatically, and unquestionably, a sign that you're not good enough? Why is that meaning enthroned?”

I could see she was feeling better and we asked for the bill.

"But, couldn't it also be that this has literally nothing to do with your value at all and whether or not you're good enough? Couldn't it be that this is simply a matter of whether or not it's a fit between you both - self worth and your deep, intrinsic value not included?  It might be that simple. You're wanting different things. But, if you believe that your value hinges on her choosing you... you'll manipulate to get a situation that, in reality, isn't what you want. Do you want a partner who wants to date other women still and who isn't ready for a relationship?”

She shook her head.

"But that's what you've got here. That's the reality. She's not ready to settle down, or not with you. So there's the 'her' in your mind who you imagine a future with and then there's her in reality. And the real one just might not be a fit."

We paid our bill and began walking through the Edmonton Summer night to the venue. 

"I feel better. Thank you for that."

I smiled at that.

I know the feeling.

I've wrestled enough of these bears that I know something of what she's feeling right now. Relaxed. Present. More peaceful. Lighter. This feeling doesn't come from replacing one religion ('if she doesn't choose me I'm no good') with another ('if she doesn't choose me, she's no good!'). That's the same old game. It's still monotheism. The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen. How many revolutions end up recreating the exact same thing they sought to depose? How many revolutionaries become worse tyrants than the one they resisted because their manner of resistance was tyrannical?

It seems to me that a proper approach to these thorny nests of thoughts in which we find ourselves may not be to replace it with a new nest, but, stand by stand if that's what it takes, to walk that nest over to the compost pile at the center of what might one day become a village and to compost it. This nest isn't nothing. It's food too. 

"How do I get rid of this thought?" was a question Jane asked me early in the night. We discard too much in this culture with our collective insanity that anything that displeases us can be wrapped up in the plastic bag of our obsession with purity and thrown away. But this nest isn't nothing. This nest can feed something if we let it. This nest that is slowly killing us can turn back into the chance for life to appear again amongst us. The nest isn't the end of our life, it's the food that might yet give our life a chance. 

How does it feed anyone else if we wrap up our thoughts and throw them away rather than engaging in the hard labour or planting and tending to them to see what they might become? Perhaps life is begging us to stop throwing things away and to start admiring and learning them.

I say to my friend as we walk down the street, past the Strat (home of cheap beer, newly discovered by every generations of university student every year) and across Whyte Ave towards the Almanac where my friend is playing, "A Cree friend of mine told me that his elders told him that our minds are supposed to be fluid. Not concretized. Not rigid. But when we have one thought that we believe is the truth, when we have one idea that never goes questioned, everything ossifies. The point isn't to know what's true. It's to be baffled by it. To feel wonder. As near as I can tell it, the truth isn't any particular thought, it's what we experience when the tyrant thoughts that have ruled us too long are temporarily not in charge anymore."

Life is a very fine thing when we're willing to set aside our entrenched opinions about it and see it for what it is. 

"And this is all still deeply cultural. These thoughts of a lack of worthiness aren't so  present or strong in other cultures. There are cultures who aren't wracked by the same neuroses that we have. Most of these stressful thoughts are inherited you know? It's not personal. But, if we don't understand that, we can feel like there's something wrong with us. That we're broken. It's amazing we do as well as we do."

The next day, my friend marvelled at how one small thought could do so much damage and throw us off the existential deep end. 

A strange mystery: 

If we don't offer our thoughts our deep companionship, they eat at us and may make us unable to eat for 24 hours.

If we don't offer the troubles of our times an honoured seat at the table; just one they will take over the whole thing.

If we don't attend to those handed down to us voices of our old timers, then those voices become the 200 lb table at which we eat; the carefully joyced together, solid maple fallout of years of ancestral trauma and dislocation and we will eat all the meals of our days from its solid surface, never questioning that solidity, never imagining there was a time when it was not so or that there could be a time or place where it wasn't.

The thoughts and suffering we avoid most, that cause us the most pain (a word that looks much like the French word for ‘bread’) are the bread we might eat together, this feast of co-misery, and shared humanity.

The sound of companionship might be something like, ‘You too?’

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How to you create community?

I don’t know.

A hundred ways.

A thousand ways.

But,

how do you kill community?

I can tell you one thing

sure to do the job.

Be self-sufficient.

Always have enough.

Always have it together.

Always be a giver.

Always have all the tools you need.

Never need to borrow a sewing needle.

Never need a cup of sugar.

Never tell anyone you're breaking down.

Never need anyone.

Your pride,

your insistence on competency,

your unwillingness to be a burden,

on us

when it is the proper time for you to collapse

may be the end of us all.

Knowing what time it truly is,

or knowing how to know the time at all,

you,

needing our help,

being unable to continue without it,

you,

not knowing

how to do everything,

creates the occasion

for the village to reconstitute itself

and know itself again.

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The absence of village makes it incalculably more likely that you will cause harm to others in your life.

That harm might be from something you do. It might be from something you refuse to do; something you find yourself, to your horror, capable of doing or something, perhaps with more horror, incapable of doing.

It is almost impossible to overstate the vastness of this thing we all intuitively understand: it doesn't only take a village to raise a child, it takes a village to end the childhood of those little ones who would prefer to go on being children forever and craft humanity and village-mindedness from where there was the appropriate selfishness of childhood.

Because we live in a culture where this crafted ending of childhood and initiation of adulthood never occurs, we have less humanity amongst us. We have uninitiated children, in adult bodies, living together in condos or in the Whitehouse.

That's what we have now.

No village, just scenes. No real community, just networks.

We are so utterly and completely free and untethered to anything (elders, the non-human world, and the unseen) that would grant us our humanity. And, surely you would grant that this would all be bad enough but it is orders of magnitude worse because the unravelling of village life also unravelled the means by which to ravel it together.

It was the village that would, when trespass had occurred, intervene to ensure the one hurt was safe and tended to, that the one who did the hurting was held to account and that the village, as a whole, designed the means by which the wholeness of the village might be restored.

Each infraction - every lie, every piece of abuse, every neglect, was a tear in the fabric of mutual life and I think our old timers must have known that things can get too torn; they can reach a point at which restoration becomes unlikely or, even, impossible.

The lack of belonging we live with has us craft a world to which no one would want to belong. 

The urge to run from that world crafts a world from which everyone wants to run. The urge to 'fix' it, is, in fact, ‘the fix’ that was in a long time ago. Our solutions become further vectors for the problems are keep trying to solve.

And I would suggest that this is precisely, in the dominant civilizations of the world, where we are.

The very thing that causes our inhumanity also prevents the humanity from re-appearing. The very thing that tore a rip in that ornate tapestry of kinship prevents the sewing it back together. The civilization in which we live does not craft humans anymore, it lets children grow up and run the show.

This is the vicious cycle in which we find ourselves. Inhumanity begetting more inhumanity. Damage damaging and then damaging the capacity to repair the damage.

But I'll tell you what it looks like from the inside, from the vantage point of those who benefit from it the most, because its PR team is superb: it looks like progress.

It looks like freedom.

It looks like the internet and Facebook, like Netflix and the best TV shows you've ever seen.

It looks like a steady supply of any drug you want. It looks like affordable travel around the world.

It looks like tourist friendly destinations.

It looks like smart phones and well-paved, straight, long roads (to the extent that we can differentiate those two).

And, when we see all of that, and how very good it is, then all of the dysfunction in modern society must, we tell ourselves, come from us.

And the complete solution, we are assured, is to work on ourselves some more and that our salvation will be found on the yoga mat or, if we are particularly insightful, evolved and advanced, the even smaller, introspection demanding, leave-the-body-behind-and-go-within-to-the-real-you, meditation cushion.

Or ‘take this pill’.

Or ‘do this process’.

By yourself.

But this doing everything by ourselves is not the solution, it's the fullest expression of the deep, deep ancestral trauma of the unravelling of the village.

It’s us coping.

It is the problem attempting to solve itself by creating more of itself.

And yet, every day, so many of us are encouraged to worship at the altar of the Self, who is sitting on the throne where God used to be with the DSM where the Bible used to be.

And when we cause harm, and of course we do, the response is the response of the very individualistic, puritan culture we've been told is the product of four billion years of evolution: It is to punish.

It is to excise the offending part and get rid of them. Which shatters our scenes even further.

There is no community to do the healing and so we end up with less community. And that 'less community' is less able to do the needed healing and so it crumbles further.

And I don't know where it begins to turn around but I know it has something to do with village-mindedness. I know it has something to do with the impulse to restore wholeness rather than to enforce purity.

And I know that the individual is not the enemy of the village nor vice-versa. I know there’s such a thing as toxic individuality but there’s also toxic community (e.g. the madness of crowds, the mob mentality, cults and the like). And there are healthy versions of both which need each other.

I know it has to do with reframing safety as coming from not the absence of those things that would harm us (as we wash our hands with the anti-bacterial soaps of salvation), but a way of coming into some better relationship with their presence amongst us.

I know it has to do with a willingness to be undone and broken hearted for all the things done to us and that we did, all of the things that were never done to us and that we never did for others. 

There is so immense remorse and grief as we come to our senses just in time to see the wake of the speeding boat of our personal and collective lives tearing away at the shoreline of the people whose property we claimed to admire.

I know it has to do with being willing to get up and walk away from that altar of loneliness without knowing where else we might worship or what worshipping even means anymore.

I know it has something to do with our stopping running.

It has something to do with ceasing to make the ones who have caused harm run away on that road out of town to the next town where they do the same thing to more people because they never healed from what drove them to cause the harm in the first place.

Maybe instead, it's got to do with all of us looking at the long road that's made getting what we want so easy and getting what we need so difficult, and tearing it up to plant fruit trees in hopes of a life that is harder but more human, where we trade our growth for depth and our freedom for friendship. And maybe that's what true freedom is anyway.

I don't know if you're with me in this or against me on this but I'm glad to be alive today to have a chance to do something about the damage that I've done and that you have done and that was done a long time before we arrived on the scene, and to make as much beauty as I can while I am still granted days.

May you be granted the strength and support you need to turn your deepest shames into food to feed the ones to come so that they don't devour the world like you did.

May you see, from a great distance if needed, the ones who hurt you become utterly heartbroken by what they've done and become the greatest defenders of people like you.

May we all be granted some small portion of redemption and might we spend it like mad

Might we build a little fire that draws people together for some fine conversation about how we might proceed more beautifully.

Might we all be granted the days long enough to stand there together, not heroic, but utterly defeated by the freedom, progress and vast unending potential that we thought we always wanted.

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The other day, I wrote a piece called If You Come To The Fire To Get Warm, Bring Wood.

Here are a few more reasons why this matters.

No doubt more will occur to you. If they do, please feel to share them in the comments below.

The first reason is that, the process of going outside, finding the wood, dragging it to you and cutting it will warm you from the sheet work of it.

The second is that the work of stacking and making the wood pile is work too and that will warm you as well.

The third reason is that the fire you attend will last a bit longer with your log on it or, if it’s not used that night, it will give someone else the chance for warmth.

I’m not the first to notice those things above.

But there’s another reason to bring some wood to the fires you visit: others will see you bringing the wood. The young people sitting there will learn more from how you approach the fire, wood in hand, than by anything you could say to them at the fire.

When you bring gifts to the host of whatever events you attend, let yourself be seen. Especially by the young. We could show them how it’s done.

We could remind them that nothing is free.

That everything costs something or someone.

That other things suffered for us to be here.

That it cost our hosts something to host us around their fire that night whether they bought the wood or cut it by hand with an axe or with a chainsaw (made from the Earth) they have to fuel (with gas and oil that cost some patch of land somewhere (extracted by machines that cost another patch of land somewhere)).

Us bringing a gift is our way of saying, “Thank you for all your work, seen and unseen, to bring us together tonight around the fire.”

Most people don’t bring wood. They assume that the fire will be there when they need it, regardless of whether or not they contribute to its existence. They think this because they don’t see the cost involved.

Given the cold days we are facing and that are galloping towards us now, our young deserve the warmth but, even more, they deserve the example of us tending to our shared obligation of feeding what’s been feeding us all along.

That example might warm them, for a long time, too.

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There are times in our life when we need warmth and have no wood to bring to the fire. Those times are very real and, in those times, the warmth of that fire may be the only thing that sustains us through the night. We all may need such a thing many times in our life. There’s a time when people must be welcome to sit, no fire in hand, and nothing to contribute and just get warm.

But, if we’re lucky, that’s not most days.

Most days, something else is called for.

*

I visited a friend today who has spent twenty-five years practicing village-making in the trenches on a real property with real people. The land has been visited by people from around the world.

A lot of people came to the land to get warm. But very few brought wood.

This is tourism in a nutshell. We come to get our ‘exotic experience’ and then we leave, leaving nothing behind but our money and an economy a bit more dependent on tourists like us.

Shortly after arriving in Duncan, I went to a small workshop at the local art gallery focused on indigenous and settler relations.

I’d brought gifts for the elder who I knew would be there.

Afterwards, I went up to shake his hand and thank him for his good words and to offer him some gifts. I told him that I didn’t know how long I’d be here but that I’d try to be useful while I was here. Useful to the place. Useful to his people. We’ll see how I do.

For my ancestors, and likely yours too, it was almost unthinkable to go visit someone without bringing a gift, however small. Now that could be something you made, a bottle of wine, a candle or a good story to share. But you brought something.

Even in my grandparents generation, when you went to a party you’d have a ‘party piece’. That might be a song you could sing, play on piano or a good joke or story to tell or a strange body trick. Anything. Just so that you’d have something to offer.

“The important thing is not that you sing well,” says my friend Shannon MacMullin often, quoting an elder in the Gaelic community of Nova Scotia. “But that you have a song and that you sing it.”

The party piece is a shard of a much larger clay vessel of the ceilidh (a Gaelic word meaning something like ‘visit’ or ‘party’ or ‘gathering’). On the cold, Winter nights, you’d all gather together at someone’s home or a shared space and spent the night in the warmth of each other’s company, throwing logs on the fire as you went. As the stories were being told,

In those days, and still in many places in the Old Country, people had dozens of songs, stories and poems each that they could recite off by heart.

“No less important than the stories are the contexts in which they were told and the gifted individuals who learned them and passed down. Although the physical environments in Cape Breton differed from that of the western Highlands, the Gaelic social context for performance and transmission of the oral traditions, transferred virtually intact, proved ideal for encouraging community cohesion and and fostering verbal arts in the backwoods settlements of the new world. From field evidence amassed since the early 1960’s, Gaelic storytelling sessions, on various scales, were a staple of entertainment on the island wherever the language was spoken. The centre of the evenings social gatherings, and therefore the main intellectual institution of the rural Gaels, was the taigh céilidh (the céilidh house), a household in the community where people of all ages would gather in the evenings, particularly in the windr, to pass the time in conversation and informal entertainment… The evening would begin with casual conversation and the exchange of important local news before the main entertainment. It was usually the custom to offer visitors food or drink, depending on what was available.” - John Shaw, The Blue Mountain

“[In Cape Breton] as in the rest of Gaeldom, the main occasions for the recitation of tales were reserved for the long winter nights. The description of those present quietly engaged in their evening tasks of sewing, knitting, repairing equipment, and so on, could come from any of the céilidh settings of the nineteenth century published by collectors visiting the Outer Isles. The customary céilidh sequence given here, starting with a detailed discussion - with full commentary - of the local news and progressing to the recitation of tales, was well known elsewhere. As ikn all Gaelic communities, the taigh-faire or wake-house was a favourite venue for story-tellers, who often performed until daylight.” - John Shaw, Tales Until Dawn

And so you can see how far we’ve fallen. Our ancestors all had some version of the ceilidh. This collapsed into having a party piece. These days no one has a party piece. But they have their phone which has funny TikTok videos they can share. And, worse, we have ‘the audience’.

At a ceilidh, there was no audience. There were no spectators. Everyone had something to contribute and was expected to. The role of the fear an taighe or bean and taighe (man or woman of the house) was to play the host, inviting contributions from all who were there, starting with the younger or less skillful ones and then the evening might end with some of the finer musicians or storytellers. But there was no audience. There was, instead, a community.

And everyone brought logs to that fire. Some brought kindling. Some brought immense logs. Everyone brought something. No one was coming only to be on the receiving end of a show from a performer.

Those are modern.

And they make us so lonely.

Instead, try this, the next time you go to a gathering, bring a physical gift and bring a story, a poem, a song or a joke. One you’ve put work into memorizing and, when the time is right, share it.

Or, better yet, host a ceilidh and invite everyone to bring something they’ve memorized by heart. Maybe something from their ancestral homelands.

Even better, invite them to bring some project they can work on with their hands and, if they don’t have something, maybe you do.

But no more habitually and chronically going to the fire without wood. When we do that as a way of being, unthinkingly, when we tourist the world, we take away warmth with us and leave the cold of our selfishness behind us and leave that fire and those around it feeling used and discarded so we could have our latest cool experience.

Community is not a consumable commodity.

The fire of culture needs to be fed.

Bring some food.

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The final sentence of my essay Ten Reasons Why We Struggle With Village-Making is this, “Until we can understand why it matters that the village might fail, we will never truly be engaged in village making.”

In response, someone asked me, “In your opinion, why does it matter that the village might fail? And do you mean fail/collapse altogether or at a particular task?”

Given the reality that most of our visions of village come from the place of never have grown up in one, the chances of success are remote and yet, despite the barren pantry we can fall under the Spell of Inevitability that, “Of course this will work!”

It rarely sounds that brash. It more often appears in statements like, “When we…” and the possibility of it not working out appears nowhere in the words to follow.

“When we create our village together…”

“When we create this beautiful community for our children to grow up in…”

When we hear such things, there should be a flashing red light that appears inviting us to slow way down. When I hear people prematurely using the word ‘we’ and ‘us’ I tend to start backing away because and explosion is coming. They’re not seeing reality of the situation clearly and so there solutions are likely to fail. Possibly in dramatic fashion. When people don’t see the likelihood of failure and the reasons for it, it rarely goes well.

Back to the question: “In your opinion, why does it matter that the village might fail? And do you mean fail/collapse altogether or at a particular task?”

In short, my answer is this: if it can fail, it’s alive. If it can’t, it’s a machine.

This isn’t to say that machines don’t break or fail us. But they are design to be without any faults at all. They are designed to work in a rigidly, identical fashion every time.

The good Randy Jones makes a distinction between a ceremony and a ritual. Of course, this is semantics. Many people use the word ceremony in the way that Randy uses ritual but this is Randy pointing at something important in the best language he’s found.

In his parlance, a ceremony is scripted and a ritual is not. A ceremony is contained, proscribed, first this and then that every time and a ritual is alive and responsive to what’s happening now. A ceremony is designed to never fail and never get weird.

I remember showing up to a wedding, a couple of minutes late, and realizing, as I sat down, that I’d missed the first hour. They were already at the vows. I double checked the time on my phone. And then looked at the invitation in my hand. I asked my neighbour for the time and they confirmed my time was right. I sat there totally baffled and annoyed with no particular anyone to be annoyed at.

When the ceremony was over I was told, “Oh, it only started two minutes before you arrived.” I was stunned. That meant the whole thing was only fifteen minutes long. It was scripted and contained to make sure nothing unpredictable happened. Easy. In and out. Efficient.

But life is weird. That ceremony gave no room for the people in it to appear. It was a template. It could have been anyone at the front and anyone in those sets. We were irrelevant to the proceedings.

To say it another way, no one was needed.

To say it another way still, no one was of any particular consequence.

Imagine another scenario: there is a wedding and particular people are leaned on to prepare speeches, to prepare food, to make gifts, to make the gowns and regalia, to decorate the space, to light the fire, to dip the candles etc.

If they don’t do their job, their piece will be missing.

If enough pieces are missing, the thing will fail. It just won’t work.

Back to the question: “In your opinion, why does it matter that the village might fail? And do you mean fail/collapse altogether or at a particular task?”

It matters not just that the village might fail (of course it might) but that we know this. That this is palpably felt than any path to success is fraught with danger.

I remember two friends were leaving Edmonton and so they asked some of their friends to host a farewell ceremony. On the night, everyone gathered and those leading it stumbled with leading it. They weren’t that good at it. And so they ones leaving took over the facilitation. They ‘rescued’ the ones they had asked to hold the space.

I heard this all months after the fact, while on a stroll with one of them in Victoria.

“You made sure it didn’t fail. And that’s completely understandable. It’s your farewell. It means so much to you. But, in rescuing them, the community was also robbed of the chance to see it not working, which means they don’t fully appreciate how important the role of host and facilitator is. You can learn a lot from things going wrong. They didn’t get to see the heartbreak on your face as you watched it collapse. You asked them to do that job. And you rescued them from failing. So they were robbed of the opportunity to fail and to learn from that and see all the ways they might better have prepared for the thing. You told the ones who you asked, without saying it, that they weren’t actually needed.”

It’s something to remember, if you are ever the occassion for a ritual: a farewell, a welcome, a birth etc. You should not, properly, be in charge of the thing because, if you are, if you take the reigns on it with a flair of self-sufficiency, how will anyone else around you learn? If we are going to practice village-making, that means needing other people. But really needing them - not pretend needing them. It means leaning on people who will likely let you down. It means failure galore.

But the failure isn’t all bad.

My friend John from Calgary spent ten years preparing for the initiation of his son. When the time came, despite a decade of men’s groups, there was no readiness and no older men where he lived who were, in any way, capable of initiating his son. And so he put out a call and four men stepped up - only one of whom lived in Sweden.

He asked them all, formally and in a ritual way, to take this on. And they did.

But, part way through, he saw them stumbling and dropping the ball. He confessed he was thinking seriously of pulling the plug on the whole thing and doing something himself.

“John,” I said. “You stand down and you stand down now. If you value your relationship with these men at all, you do not take away this job you gave them. The slap in the face this would be, the affront… Your relationship would likely never recover from it. That’s a mortal blow. You have to be willing to let this thing fail. I know. It’s your son. You want, more than anything, for this to be the success you imagined, the against-the-odds triumph you’ve had since he was born and you began to plant the seeds for this day. But you’re not in charge of this. You know how it is: the parent has no ability to direct the initiation of their children. They are obligated and able to do so for every other child in the community but, when it comes to their own, they have to stand down and let the community take them. Now, you don’t have a community and surely not one capable of what you’re asking. So you plead those you know near and far to do something. And they are. And it’s not what you would have done but what you would have done is something you should not do - not with your own boy. And besides, there’s so much that can be learned from failure. Your son gets to feel the consequence of what happens when older men promise to show up and then don’t. That’s worth learning. He gets to see what worked and what didn’t, mostly in retrospect when he’s older, in initiating a boy and he can learn as much from what fails as from what works. And then men leading it get to learn too. They get to feel the burn of shame from breaking their promises. They get to see what works and doesn’t. They get to see how impossibly hard this thing is to do and, in knowing that, they might be even more gracious and full of gifts when they ask others to step in, knowing firsthand how hard it is. You’ve got to be willing to let this thing fail.”

He nodded and agreed.

In the end, though it wasn’t what he’d hoped for, it was full of beauty.

Years ago, I attended a wedding. The man leading it, speaking to the 160 of us gathered in a timber-framed meadhall in the Ottawa valley where the walls were not yet erected, said, “We have about eight hours. I want everyone to speak.” And gave us the instructions on what to do: to stand up with our gift, to put it in one of two piles and to speak some words about it.

On the drive back to our AirBnB afterwards, many of us were venting and frustrated. So many people had never had the chance to speak at all because others had spoken for thirty minutes and, to make it worse, droned on and on about themselves in a way that lost everyone.

The man leading the thing, sat there the whole time, looking deeply unimpressed, and doing nothing to stop it. He let it fail.

The next morning, with immense compassion and good humour, he helped us see what had happened. The ways that people had taken the very real wedding of two people and, seduced by the attention of such a large group, turned it into a chance to, finally, be seen and heard and made it all about us getting fed instead of feeding the thing we were all a part of.

It was humbling to see.

The next wedding of two dear ones on Salt Spring, I saw the fruits of this failure. Those who’d been at the previous wedding, stood up with their gifts and hit the mark with their speeches. Everything the previous wedding speeches had lacked appeared in spades on that floor. None of us wanted to live through that boredom and annoyance without end again. I was in awe at the learning.

Learning which never would have happened had we not been allowed to fail.

The life robbing activities of the last wedding had taught us how to feed life more beautifully in this one. The culture killing speeches of the last one had shown us how to feed culture in this one.

One last story: a dear friend was coming out of a three day fast in the woods hosted by a local indigenous elder. She asked me to be there to be a part of the gathering in afterwards. We sat in a big lodge with two fires on either side of it. There was a man who was the fire keeper and he was asleep at the switch as the lodges fill up with smoke. When I stood to go to the bathroom, my eyes burned so much I could barely see. There was a lot of coughing.

Afterwards, I commented on this afterwards to an indigenous friend.

“Yeah,” they replied. “That was the fire-keepers job. That’s not supposed to happen. They’re supposed to keep those fires going with a minimum of smoke.”

I nodded. “I’m realizing how important that role is.”

They smiled.

In seeing it fail, I got some small window into the scale and importance of that job. If you are asked to be fire-keeper in a ceremony, you need to have the wood ready before the day comes. You can’t use wet wood from the forest. You gather it. You make sure you have enough of the right kind of wood. You dry it. And then you pay close attention to the fire the entire time, feeding her regularly so she doesn’t become smokey.

I never would have realized this all had I not seen it fail. I imagine that some elder spoke to the fire keeper afterwards about this and that this person will be better on the next one.

What seemed like a small role to me, ended up mattering a great deal.

To say this another way: every role in a village making endeavour, every job in a ritual, matters. If that job isn’t done or it’s done poorly, it affects the whole. If enough balls are dropped the thing fails and people have to live with it having failed because of them and see how deeply they matter in the world.

One more angle: most people, deep down, feel like they don’t matter at all. Search for evidence of their importance as they will, they find none. If they show up or not, the events they go to will be unchanged because they are all, increasingly, scripted.

By robbing people of roles that are counted on, we rob their lives of substance and consequence. When we say to people, “We’re counting on you for this,” it’s helpful if we really mean it.

Of course, that’s a recipe for a lot of early failures as people dissemble and make excuses, “Oh! I didn’t really think it mattered… I guess I didn’t think this through, ha ha. I guess I should have given myself more time. Shoot. Ah well.”

And we could rescue them with, “hey it’s okay.” Or we could let the failure show. We could not rush to hide the consequences from them or from us. We could let the poverty appear as they realize the consequence of saying, ‘yes’ to things and we realize the consequence of not preparing people properly or choosing the right people.

I remember an old quote I saw. “Success,” it said. “Is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is the result of experience. Experience is often the result of poor judgment.”

And that quote puts to mind the old story of Tom Watson, owner of IBM who called an employee into his office who had made a mistake that cost the company a fortune.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to fire me,” the employee said.

“Fire you?!” barked Tom Watson. “I just spent a fortune educating you!”

The desire to prevent failure is understandable. But the only way to absolutely prevent failure is absolute control. And that is not culture. Culture hinges on people bringing their gifts to bear in unexpected ways at just the right moment. It hinges on reading the room, not memorizing the script. It hinges of leaving room to breath in the proceedings instead of choking the life out of it with well-intended but over-done details. The statue of David is beautiful but it’s also stone. That’s not a living, human body. It’s perfect and it’s not human.

One way to proceed is, “Ok. Here’s the schedule for the day.”

Another is, “Over to you,” and then stepping down and letting the group run it and stumble as they do. There will be failure galore and you can help people learn from that after.

Ideally, these things happen in low stakes situations and you save the roles in the high stakes ones for the pros.

It doesn’t mean we don’t prepare and do our best. But it does mean that we start where we are with what and who we have. And, right now, that’s not much.

In letting rituals and community-building endeavours fail, people’s consequence is handed back to them in a way they never expected and would never have asked for. What we are handing back in a seed, or maybe it’s good compost for the collective soil, or maybe it’s both, that will help ensure the success of the next culture-feeding event that those to come so desperately deserve.

“I know that all of my enterprises will fail. I know that already. I’m not holding out hope that somehow anythings going to change as a result of doing them. All I’m trying to do is participate in some small way in the small collection of memories that will accompany my death. That’s all I’m trying to do is having a small part to play in what those memories might be. Understanding now, that the way I’m proceeding is helping to author those things that people will remember. If they’re inclined to. And there’s not much more to me than that. But that is not a recipe for futility. One of the things I learned at the deathbed is… that’s the whole thing. That’s the magic of it. Our willingness to remember turns out to be a kind of banquet… and the remembering is the food. And I think that’s what we have to do in a rough time like this one, is that we have to give people even not yet born, we have to leave in the air a kind of an aroma… let’s call it ‘inconsolable possibility’ - a possibility that won’t be consoled into impotence.” - Stephen Jenkinson

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How do we do this?

We ask. 

It seems to me, that someone has to be willing to ask for the help on the behalf of another. If someone is struggling, someone else has to step in to convene a community response - a response that will bring healing both to the people struggling but also to the community.

It won’t just happen.

Sadly, raised as we are in the barren wasteland of mono-cropped grown in orderly rows with plenty of space in between each other, raised as we are in schools that separate us in a strict apartheid by age and ability, working as we often do alone at our jobs, learning as we tend to do alone, suckled on the tit of privatized property and nuclear families living in houses surrounded by white picket fences... the chances of a community response being organized are low indeed.

And so someone needs, not knowing how to do it, to try. 

And they need to ask more than just the usual, overburdened suspects who are already always there for everyone, sitting on every volunteer board who have no doubt in their mind that they are needed. 

What about those people who walk around in our communities doubting that they have anything to give? How else will they find out unless they are asked to appear? How will they find their strength unless they are counted on? How else will they know they are needed without being asked to contribute to a cause that needs them? How will they come to know their wealth and unless someone draws the line between it and all the good it might do that they had never yet considered? 

Someone must be willing, with no permission, authority or qualifications whatsoever, to gather people together who never would have gathered on their own and to coordinate some sort of response that redeems both those hurting and those helping. Someone has to be willing to take the first step. Someone has to be willing to fail in the attempts and to pick up the pieces and mend them together with the gold of being a clumsy, plodding, confused, selfish, impoverished and beautiful human living in this modern world. Someone needs to proceed as if they are needed in the absence of any evidence that might back that up and court others so that they know they are needed.

What if that was you?

What if we looked at all of our troubles - and the troubles of others - as yet one more chance for the village to reconstitute itself again?

Conclusion:

Of course, it must be said, that village-making must include more than just humans. It must include the non-human world and the unseen world. It is something to notice about our times. There have never been more humans in the world and humans have touched every corner of this planet and yet we have never been more lonely. What if this loneliness wasn’t just for other people, but other kin - seen and unseen? It’s something to wonder about.

But starting with the human community, though deeply insufficient, is at least something. 

What if there's nothing missing in you? What if there's a missing village for you to be in? What if there's nothing missing in you? What if there's a missing larger story for you to be in? What if what's missing is not what is being approached but a more beautiful way to approach it?

We all struggle from the absence of village and then we address these symptoms in ways that ensure the village we need never appears. We internalize our problem and feel like we’re failing for not being the whole village for ourselves and others. 

But, what if we looked at all of our troubles - and the troubles of others - as yet one more chance for the village to reconstitute itself again? What if each of our lonely struggles wasn’t in the way of redemption but the doorway towards it? What if the key was our willingness to admit that it’s all too much for us?

These words I am writing are a plea for village-making as both the needed medicine and the process by which that medicine might appear. Village-making might be both the flower that grows from the garden, and the work we do to tend the soil that allowed it to appear in the first place.

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Why do we struggle to do this?

Reason #1 - Geography: Finding like minded people is hard. For most of us, our families in no way represent the kind of community we might hope for.

There’s so little shared understanding of the world. The people we do find who make our heart sing live so far away. We see them on Facebook and wonder if we might ever share food with them. We wish that they could all live on our block so that we might see each other each day, garden, craft and make beauty together.

But it is not to be.

We are far-flung scatterlings gathering in virtual or too temporary village huts  to get some momentary protection from the elements in our too exposed lives before we have to leave each other again back into the neon-lit, strip-malled, cultureless world into which we were borne.

In her book, The Spirit of Intimacy, Sobonfu Somé speaks about village life and how, when you woke up in her Dagara village you went outside. Village life happened outside of people’s homes. If you didn’t go outside, people noticed this and were concerned that you weren’t well.  But, for too many, it’s easy to never leave one’s home and not have that be noticed until weeks or months later when their body is found, having drunk themselves to death in their apartment.

Reason #2 - Culture is Work: The root word of culture, cult is the same root as in cultivate and so culture is a made something. It’s not inevitable. It’s not the result of people living together for a long enough period of time. You can be assured that habit or prejudice might appear but not so for a life-feeding culture. 

Reason #3 - A Lack of Shared Understanding: a group of people gathered together doesn’t make a village. Even if they are gathered together with a shared purpose. Even if they’ve all decided to live together, on the same piece of land and are all dedicated to the same purpose. Village life seems to be rooted in having a shared understanding of the world. Absent this shared understanding you have a crowd.

And a village doesn’t simply appear on its own.

A village has the chance to appear through our willingness to need help, and it is destroyed by our independence. 

A village has the chance to appear when people are called into service of something greater than themselves. Someone has to do the asking. Someone has to be willing to convene. 

Deep culture is based on a shared understanding of the world. 

But, for those of us of European descent in North America, that shared understanding of anything was ended by migration which devolved to a questionable set of communities and then to the family unit and then to the individual and then to the sanctum sanctorum of our personal inner lives. 

Reason #4 - Lack of Elders: Simply put, there is a steep shortage of those who are long in the tooth who have medicine to offer the community. There are a lot of olders, but not many elders. There are plenty of snowbirds, plenty of retirees joking about spending their kids inheritance but not many actively working to be become an ancestor worth descending from.

Reason #5 - Lack of Capacity for Elders: The matter is made worse because elders are not self-made. An elder can’t self-appoint themselves. After all, to whom would they be directing their wisdom? And elders can’t appoint each other.

What’s the point of having a council of elders where all they do is sit in circles, facing inwards, away from the world?

No, elders are made, in part, by young people willing to call on those older ones and, in so doing, asking them to step into elderhood. But this modern sibling society, with its deep mistrust of those older than us and intolerance for anything that even resembles authority or hierarchy, has little capacity for elders to appear.

Reason #6 - Lack of Trusted Institutions: Even if we were to actively court the appearance of elders, where would they go? Where might we gather to receive their wisdom? What night of the week? What physical place? If you have a conflict, what’s the email address you use to book a session with the elder to help you and the other work through it? We lack these cultural structures and institutions, held by real elders, almost entirely. 

Reason #7 - Privatized Relationships: One of the central poverties of our age is the obsession with private property and this has, absolutely, extended to our relationships. We go to a wedding and agree to be there for the newly married couple as a community. But, when troubles arrive, we feel an immense awkwardness. “Who am I to intrude? This really isn’t my business. I should just give them space.” This privatization of relationships is a form of poverty few have even begun to comprehend. 

Reason #8 - An Addiction to Competence and Self-Sufficiency: Most of us in the modern world, and particularly white culture, are steeped in this. The belief that we need to be able to do everything on our own and do it perfectly.

And this unwillingness to admit that we need help and to ask for it is killing our communities. We have a deep sense of shame around having needs and a strong fear of ever being a burden that is followed with a compulsion to repay our debts to other immediately.

It looks like responsibility, has the initial feeling of freedom but the aftertaste of it all is a loneliness we can’t rinse from our mouths.

Reason #9 - “Who Am I To Convene Anything?”: Most of us aren’t sure, and perhaps rightly so, that we have the chops to convene any kind of village-making initiative. We are scared to fail and to make things worse. Which elders to ask? What approach might be taken? How do we hold the center of it when we’re not elders ourselves and have rarely, if ever, been on the receiving end of any such endeavour?

Reason #10 - “Isn’t The Whole Thing Precarious?”: The realities of village living in which people are depended on to play certain roles seems like a rickety and vulnerable proposition. Isn’t the modern world better? Why have a flimsy house when you could have a concrete one that is built, once, for you? Why have a rope bridge when you could have a steel one? We rely on a village to get the Kula ring from Island to Island when you could just FedEx it? Why take the chance? Until we can understand why it matters that the village might fail, we will never truly be engaged in village making.

Until we can understand why it matters that the village might fail, we will never truly be engaged in village making.

My man Alex King-Harris lifted up some others worth noting too:

Cost of real estate is out of reach for most people in places where it would be ideal to have a village. In addition bylaws often prevent cohabitation in ways that would help the village flourish.

Mature systems of conflict resolution + trauma healing available to people who co-habitate are often lacking, undeveloped, or not a central part of village life.

The fundamental economy of community means that most people spend their time working to survive outside of the community, leaving them unavailable for the hard work it takes to learn how to live together again.

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Why village-making as an approach to the troubles that beset us personally and collectively?

I’ll give five reasons.

Reason #1: Sharing the Load: In the absence of any village, the work to be done doesn’t vanish. Again and again, too large a burden is carried by too few people. 

I think about slaughter houses often. I am keenly aware that those massive abattoirs, those modern horrors, exist because almost all of us have abdicated from the job of killing our own animals. Our wiping our hands of it all places the entire burden on the very few willing to take it on, by the thousands per day at tremendous psychological cost to them, on our behalf. 

My friend Carmen Spagnola wrote, “I, often painfully, find myself recommending that carrying more than one's own weight is what's needed to bring balance to the whole. There's more healing needed in our world than can possibly occur; not even a fraction of what is needed is likely. Some of us, those of us who are willing, must step up and take on the task of carrying more than our fair share of the work. We must do that because we understand that the healing work I'm talking about is about more than our personal benefit. I'm talking about the kind of healing that shifts ancestral lineage, that rekindles ancient knowledge in our bones of a different way of living and being in relationship, the kind of work that leaves your muscles weary and your heart full and seems to tilt the world in a new way so there's a new level and a more solid point of contact at the centre. We aren't more capable than anybody else of stoking the healing fires, but some of us are more willing and so inclined."

Let me do the math on that statement another way.

John Mayer has a song called Waiting for the World to Change. “Great,” we think. “More work for the rest of us while you wait.”

Stated another way: if you are hanging back from throwing your shoulder to the wheel in efforts for social change you are leaving more work for the rest. You are part of the cause of their burn out. 

As an elder I’ve studied with said, “If you opt out of this village life, there will be more grief and more burden for those who will not opt out.”

In the absence of any village, the work to be done doesn’t vanish. Again and again, too large a burden is carried by too few people. 

Reason #2: Practical Skill Building: This is big. I remember showing up to a straw bale build in Arizona at a Navajo reservation. A home was being built for a local family. The building process was a masterclass in village-making.

Old timers were there, little children were there getting their hands in the clay and imagining that they were being helpful as they put the clay onto the wall to the encouragement and admiration of everyone.

Socializing was going on. Old friends were reconnecting and passing on local gossip and new friends were meeting and being introduced to one another.

And everyone involved was learning a practical skill called ‘how to build a strawbale house’. Every person there was one step closer to knowing how to do such a thing. Every person there would find the process less intimidating in the future. And so, it can be in all village-making endeavours.

There’s a practice in the world of permaculture called a permablitz.

The idea is that you have someone who wants to redo their yard so that it produces more food and beauty with less work. But they can’t afford to hire a landscaping or permaculture company to design and implement the entire thing. Such a thing might cost $15,000.

So, instead, they pay they designer $2000 and then, over one day or a weekend, they gather everyone they know together with a promise to feed them all day and thirty people install the whole thing in 48 hours rather than one person doing it over a month.

Consider the impact of this: those who help cook the food are learning how to cook and everyone installing the raised beds, the fruit trees, the mulch etc. are learning practical skills they could use in their own yards. Everyone has the chance to leave smarter in a very hands on, practical way.

If you’re helping a friend in the midst of an emotional or life crisis (e.g. suicidal, divorce, sudden death) well then, you’re learning how to listen, how to encourage, how to just sit with someone in silence.

If you’re at a deathbed, you have the opportunity to learn, though you might not realize it, how to be the one dying as well as how to sit at other deathbeds.

It must be underlined that this learning is not inevitable.

It’s possible to witness something and participate in something and to leave with a mind that is no richer or no more baffled by the mysteriousness of life.

This is some of the role of elders, mentors and conveners to structure things in such a way that the opportunities for learning are most available. 

Reason #3: So People Feel Needed: Despite the deep need in the world, too many of us remain unconvinced that we are needed. Someone must plead that case. Someone must implore those they care about, and those they do not, that their shoulder to the wheel would make a difference and that their absence makes it heavier for the rest of us.

Someone must be the visitation of this deep consequentiality of our mutual lives. When people feel unneeded, there is no chance for any self-esteem, but a gaping chasm waiting to be filled with apathy, nihilism and self-hatred. None of this is good for the person or the world they inhabit.  

Reason #4: More Help for the Person Needing Help: Being a hero and trying to handle everything alone means less help for the one we claim to love. 

Reason #5: Witnesses: Let’s imagine that you do the heroic thing and solve the problem. Congratulations. It’s certainly worth celebrating but what has changed in the community as a result of it. Is the community wiser and more resilient because of the way the issue was addressed?

Do others now have the knowledge you have? When more people are involved it means you have more witnesses to the way it went down. The good, the bad and the ugly. It means the opportunity for learning. It means building capacity in your community.

The next time a similar situation emerges, they’ll be able to remember what you all did together and, even if it’s not perfect, they’ll be able to step into the role of convening others. 

What Does Your Independence and Self Reliance Cost Us? 

Whether you’re the heroic helper or the heroic struggler trying to go it alone, have you ever considered what your addiction to being competent, doing it yourself and having it all together cost us all?

By hoarding your helping and your hurting to yourself, you give the village no chance to appear. And that means less village and more loneliness for everyone. Why do you rob of us that?

Culture is a made something. It’s not inevitable

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