Endings As The Midwives of Culture

Given the deep need for cultured humans at this moment in an increasingly antiseptic and increasingly cultureless world, it is good to wonder when and where culture might be made. 

If culture is fed by our troubles, then it is hard to find something that troubles and stymies humans so much as limit and endings. They are both stitched deeply into the fabric of how it is, dyed in the deep indigo of grief and gratitude as it is. Endings are a particular place where culture might have a chance to appear and the place it is most notably absent. 

From time beyond the lived memories of most of us, human cultures have practiced human making in the form of rites of passage - the recognition that one part of your life was ending and another was beginning. 

The Five Farewells That Never Happened

A good man I know ran a conference for years. He took it from struggling to thriving. He brought in big name speakers. He balanced the books and then it was time for him to leave. And there was no proper farewell to him. A sort of 'so long and thanks for the fish'. A perfunctory, 'thank you for your service' when what he deserved was a regal farewell feast with outrageous toasts and eloquent speeches, overflowing cups of mead and the best local beers. He deserved gifts and tears. He deserved as many free tickets to the conference as he wanted for the rest of his days. He got none of it. 

Another friend of organized the fundraiser of a local theatre company for twenty years. One year she realized she couldn't do it anymore and so she let them know. "Thanks for letting us know," came the reply. Period. That was it. Twenty years of her benedictine touch got her a one sentence email.

Another friend of mine was leaving Edmonton to move away to another continent. I went to her farewell potluck and nothing was happening. The level of casualness there staggered me. This was our dear one who'd given so much to the community, she was the deep well spring around which so much live had bloomed and she was getting hugs, 'blessings on your journeys' and New Age affirmations of 'perfect timing' and 'I know we'll meet again.' She deserved some grief, memorized poems recited, songs written about her and people blocking the door and saying, "I know this is wrong. I know you have to go but the news of your leaving has so undone me that you'll have to fight through me to get to the airport." None of it appeared.

After twenty four years in a local theatre company, I realized that my next year would be my 25th. I told the Artistic Director and General Manager this. And then my 25th year passed without any occasion or noticing. Nothing was done. I felt, perhaps unfairly, gutted by this. The next conversation I had with the AD of the company was not to apologize for missing the anniversary but to wonder about my future with the company and whether I was in the troupe or whether I was moving into alumni status. Looking at the criteria and requirements for each, I chose the latter with relief of both sides. But there was nothing done about it. I would simply vanish if I wanted to. There would be no farewell dinner. There’d be no evening of performance dedicated to me. There’d be no watch given or bottle of wine. I would just fade into obscurity and be forgotten. 

The fifth story: a friend of mine lives in what is, ostensibly, a community house. One of the roommates moved out and they decided to host a farewell dinner for her. The day came and it was cold and raining out. The ex-roommate, already moved into her new place, texted an hour before the scheduled dinner, perhaps wanting to stay at home and perhaps unsure of how valued she was in that home asked, “Does anyone even want to do this?” The answer had come a few hours before as two of the other four roommates texted with summary cancellations since it wasn’t really in their flow for the day. The last roommate arrived half an hour after the dinner was supposed to begin and jumped straight into cooking until, after ten minutes he looked up and said, “Where is everyone?” Everyone, except my friend, bailed on the thing. And I have little doubt that they did it with no sense of consequence. And yet, the consequences were many. The housemates learned that they didn’t really matter that much to their ex-housemate and she learned how little their friendship had mattered to them. The housemates learned they couldn’t trust their own promises and everyone who lived at that house learned, whether they realized it or not, that they would not be getting a farewell dinner either.

Each of those endings could have been a culture making event instead they were testimonies each to the utter lack of culture that we all live with and in.

Endings can be food for culture. 

What The Taxi Driver Said

I am in Scotland staying in Rogart with an old college professor. I ask him if there are any places you could go in Scotland to find Gaelic spoken in the community. He shakes his head.

"Melness, where your grandfather's people came from, that was one of the last places you could have twenty or thirty years ago but it's not there anymore. Mostly the Gaelic speakers and learners have moved to Inverness, Glasgow and Edinburgh." Big cities in which you won't find any Gaelic speaking neighbourhoods. 

A few days later, I find myself in Edinburgh where another University Professor and I sit and speak together in Gaelic over some affordable Greek food on Teviot Row. I'm grateful for the low prices and heaping portions because the UK is killing me with its conversion rates. 

"There was one island where Gaelic still had many native speakers but when they did a survey to see how many of them spoke it in the home it was only about a quarter of them. When they were asked how many of them spoke it daily it was only ten percent."

There are many languages in rough shape but Gaelic in Scotland is in a very dangerous moment right now.

A month before this I was on the Isle of Skye with George MacPherson an old storyteller. He tells me that there are about thirty houses in Glendale where he lives but that only three of them are from the area. Everyone else has moved in and none of them, old or new, are particularly or at all interested in the old stories and history of the place. As I drive through Skye I see signs for Bed and Breakfasts everywhere. I'm aware that a good chunk of the other homes I see are AirBnb's. 

A taxi driver tells me, "If you were to buy a house here and rent it out as an AirBnb I could guarantee you that it would be full for eight months of the year."

The Broken Wedding Gift

“What do I do with this?” 

I was holding a wooden, cribbage card box in my hands. I’d been at a wedding in which we were all told to bring a gift for the other guests. A ritualized gift exchange. This is what I’d picked up. Upon getting back to our accommodations I saw two things. The first was the $5 price tag on the bottom and the second was that it was broken.

“Who brings a broken gift to a wedding?” I shook my head and called over my friend Day Schildkret, author of the fine book Morning Altars. I showed him the box and asked him what might be done with this. It wasn’t of much use broken but I couldn’t imagine throwing it away.

“What do I do with this?” I asked him.

“Fix it or burn it,” he said after a moment. “But don’t let it carry on like this.”

And I was reminded of my time working with a non-profit in Santa Cruz, California. I showed up to their office on 706 Frederick Street. I was eighteen years old and excited to be there. But there was no life in it anymore. Funding had slowed down. The founder had stepped aside. The existing projects seemed to be all operating independently, with their own dwindling streams of program specific funding from their own sources and the people running those projects didn’t seem to care much about the organization as a whole. Everyone was doing their own thing and the organization was clearly dying. Or it was already dead and no one wanted to admit it.

A new Executive Director was hired and brought in to deal with the quiet crisis of its demise. We met in the back yard in the Sun. 

“Here it comes,” I thought. “The rousing speech. The inspirational, tough love conversation from our new coach telling us to get back on the field and play as a team.”

But, and I’ll never forget it, the words that came out of her mouth were, “I’m curious to see what will happen.” 

“We’re dead,” I thought silently.

Here was the organization, broken like that card box and she just wanted to observe, as if there were any mystery to it and where it might go, as if the likely future of it wasn’t written legibly on the wall for all to see. 

I looked at the wooden box in my hand and it occurred to me. My brother could fix this. It would be a small way that I could let him know he is needed in this world and by me. That’s how village is made - by our willingness to need each other. 

And when things can’t be fixed, when they are dead, this culture is mended by our willingness to gather around and set fire to that one who has died rather than ignoring their slowly rotting corpse in their room while pretending they didn’t just die. People deserve a good death. They deserve to be buried or burned up. They deserve a good send off. And we all deserve to be a part of such a thing. This is one of the ones that culture is made - the coming together to say ‘goodbye’. 

An Entire Community Is Dying

It is 2016 and I am in Iceland for the first time in the small, North Western village of Árneshreppur. I am there for a workshop on hide tanning. For a thousand years, in this particular place, sheep have been a part of the people's lives. Certain lines of sheep belonging to certain hills. This mother line always goes to that hill. Coming from a country that is barely over 150 years old, this staggers my mind. 

And yet, though the sheep are a part of the people's lives still, the farms are quitting. The year before I came there were nine farms. Within that year, five of them had quit, choosing the easier life in Reykjavík or Akureyri. And, though the sheep roamed the hills still, it had been a long time since anything had been done with the sheep's hides locally. I don't know if anyone there had ever brain tanned a sheep.

But Árneshreppur was dying. The number of children in the school kept dropping. There were about forty people in that particular fjord but they were all getting older. But it didn't look like a dying place. There was a restaurant. There was a little store. There was a fish harbour. There were two churches and a community hall. 

And yet, dying it was. 

Over the years between now and then, that pronouncement seems to be bearing out. An entire community dying.

*

It is 2018, I am on the Isle of Skye in Glendale to visit an old storyteller George MacPherson with my friend Tyla. He tells us that there are 33 houses in the glen but only three of them are inhabited by people from the area.

"In the next glen over there's only one."

That place is dying too.

"No no. You die. And something else lives," 

Running through the center of Norse mythology is Yggdrasil - the world tree. Yggdrasil lives above, or on, Hel - the land of the dead and containing the Niddhoggur - the devourer of corpses. And there you have it... the tree of life rooted in death. Death - the maker of food for life. Soil is everything that failed to live forever. Every animal, plant, insect and bird that died and had the chance, became the ever accruing top soil that feeds us now. 

Life doesn't feed life. Death feeds life.

Years ago, I heard an interview with Stephen Jenkinson. The interviewer was trying to press him that death was simply a new beginning. 

"No no. You die. And something else lives," Stephen said.

You See It Down

These moments, the deaths of languages, places, communities, people and eras can and should, properly, be tended to and come to as occasions for culture to appear again.

As we weave the tapestry of culture in the places and times we find ourselves, I advocate that the endings of the very ancestral cultures we are weaving in must be included in the weaving too. Not just the ancestral culture but its ending. A different thread.

There is immense heartbreak in this. Something has ended and others are ending now. That means they are not coming back. And we all could have done more.  Knowing that is part of what gets woven in too. "I could have done more and I should have." The grief of our own failure, our laziness and apathy in the face of it all, the regret we feel afterwards and the implacable grief - that gets woven in too. The loss of the diversity is one of the diverse threads we weave in. 

When something or someone is dying, you see it down. You gather people together - those who were kin and the new strangers too. You gather them in and together. You harness your culture-making to that wagon that's heading out of town and that, try as you might, you can't stop. "This is dying," you say but you do your best to say it in such a way that what is present now can be fed by what will follow the dying. 

To say this all another way, culture is a shared understanding of a people bound by the limits of a place. In deeply wrought cultures, this understanding is deeply informed and underwritten by grief - the lived understanding of the proper limits of all things even though you often wish those limits were otherwise. It is the willingness to contend with endings that is the birthplace of culture. Traditional cultures might use tools which extend the function and range of the human hand, but they demure from machines in which the hand no longer recognizes itself but the human will is extended (and there seems to have been no limit found for that). In oral cultures, you operate knowing that even the limits of memory are entrusted to you - you can't remember it all and so you must choose carefully what will be passed on. Those choices become the culture your children and grandchildren will live in. 

To say this all another way: no limits, no culture.

Though perhaps that not it because our lack of recognition of the limits of the world doesn't make them go away. So, maybe it's closer to this: our willingness to recognize and be bound by the limits entrusted to us is where culture is born and can be borne. The unwillingness to do so kills culture and replaces it with freedom, choice, an obsession with rights and the urge to keep moving.

So, what might be done? When you see something ending, pause, see who you can gather around to mark that ending (you might be surprised as to how small those numbers may at first be). Say some words though they might not be worth much. Invite others to do the same. 

And then be willing to be troubled afterwards at how unworthy your words and efforts were of the moment. Do better next time and ask it of others too. Perhaps the next time, someone will cook a fragrant meal and leave some on the grave of the one who died. Someone else might memorize a song or a poem. Another might weave a beautiful scarf by hand and offer it to the family of the one who died. 

If it is someone leaving a community, you might all gather around them and plead for them to stay saying, "It's too soon. Don't go. We must let you know what you mean to us. There's so much we don't know about you yet."

And , with all of this, there will be witnesses. Those who've never seen an ending properly honoured. Those who've never been willing to admit that limits or endings were anything but another thing to overcome.

And you will show them how endings can be met, that grief is not the enemy, the death is the great chef that feeds life and that limits aren't the ending of our freedom but its incarnation. 

The Cost of Not Tending To Endings

If we meet death with no collective recognition of the death, in an uncultured way, it continues the unravelling of culture. The doing nothing has a tremendous consequence - there is a very strong presence to the absence of these things. 

We Embrace Nihilism & Cynicism: One of the first consequences is that you learn quickly that nothing means anything. Nihilism begins to creep in. “I could give all of that to this community and they can’t even muster a decent farewell? What’s the point of trying or caring?” All your efforts will be forgotten. You see that clearly. God is dead and nothing matters and so we party like that. 

We Feel Terrified: Deep in this culture is a phobia of death. To render it more accurately, it is the fear that, when you die, you vanish. Nothing. Oblivion. The utter end of you. This is driven by living in a culture where, when people die, nothing changes. Everyone just moves on as if nothing happens. People grieve briefly and then are encouraged at a certain point to ‘get over it’. We know, at some level, that when we die everyone will just move on too. When we witness the death’s of others (if we ever do) we rarely see the body and, if we do, that body is taken away immediately. We rarely get to bury that body, wrapped in a shroud and interned in the Earth to become the flowers and grasses of the next Spring. And, living in cities as many of us do, we don’t get to see the cycles of dying and birth of the world. We never see the old, fallen tree slowly turning into a home and food for the forest. We never see the bones and carcass of that dead old sheep lying there by the fence line from that one day it never made it home being food for the birds and slowly returning to the Earth. This lack of time in with the gods of death, decay and decomposition leave us culturally poorer and, perhaps, incapable of crafting genuine culture.

We Feel Insubstantial: When an important ending if your life is not met, seen, mourned and celebrated you begin to feel like a ghost. Insubstantial. You look for evidence that your life and all of your efforts mattered and you find too few. At the end of the farewell party of my friend moving to Australia, I asked her how she was doing. She looked at me with such sadness and said, “This is my crew. This is my tribe.” What she meant was, after years of pouring her heart and soul into the community, they couldn’t even manage a decent farewell. No one memorized a song. No one wrote her a poem. No one made her a gift to take with her. No one wept unprompted and pleaded with her to stay.

You Don’t Feel Needed: Endings are immense moments that should, properly, require all hands on deck. If ever there was a time to know you were needed, this would be one of them. Imagine growing up in a culture where, when someone was dying, everyone mobilized to support the family, to bring them food, to come to their home to share stories and songs. And when they died that grief was asked of you - that your tears mattered not only to the community but the one who just died that your grief helped them make the journey across those dark waters. Someone must tend to the body. Someone must dig the hole. Someone must bring gifts and sit and listen to the family and loved ones. Imagine growing up in a community where you knew that your participation mattered. We so utterly lack this and so most of us walk around feeling needy instead of needed. 

Endings Become Unceremonious: It’s worth noticing the word ‘unceremoniously’ and how it is often used to describe a manner of endings because woven into all of this is how, when endings are not tended to well, life becomes so utterly casual. Maybe this is part of why shunning is so painful. Your life in a community is being ended unceremoniously. The clear message is ‘you didn’t matter enough’. 

We Become Entitled: Facing limit and endings in a cultured way is good for humans. With no sense of limit or boundary we become entitled and monstrous. We take. We grab. We constantly seek ‘more’. More money, more land, more power, more time and more life. We meet every limit with grievance (the executioner of our humanity) instead of with grief (it’s midwife). To end thing in a ceremonial way asks something of you. It asks something of everyone in the community. It requires labour. Currently, we live in a world where most people would choose watching that latest series on Netflix over the work required to tend properly to the endings of things.

We Become Monstrous: When we cause harm, we end something. That something might be trust, a friendship, a community, a possible future. And that’s a hard thing to know. When we cause harm it changes things and they never really go back to where they were. If that ending is tended to well, it might become fertile soil for new beauty and strength but, if it’s not, if the community leans, once again, on that overused staff of punitive justice and shunning then no learning happens. A scapegoat is found and sacrificed at the altar of collective catharsis and life moves on with none being the wiser for it. The shadows will be pushed further down as people walk around fearful and eventually erupt a month later, the same thing will happen and garner the same response as everyone rings their hands and shakes their heads with murmurings of, “How could this keep happening. Well, there’s nothing to be done about it but stay vigilant for the next time.” 

We Feel Crazy: If something or someone is dying and no one else seems to recognize the fact, you feel insane. We live in a culture that gaslights itself constantly with its refusal to acknowledge endings. We all see them. We all know they’re happening but, when we look around us, everyone is insisting that the naked king of endings is wearing the clothes of ‘it’ll be fine’. We begin to wonder, ‘Am I the only one seeing this? And, if I am, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe it’s not that bad.’

We Feel Lonely: With each ending that passes without any gathering to mark it, we feel lonelier and lonelier. 

How It Might Be Otherwise

Imagine a world where, when communities were dying, they held a proper wake for it, when marriages were failing the community who saw them wed, gathered together again to see them be divorced, where, when someone said they were thinking of leaving the community, they were met with pleading and gifts to say and they got to see the size and shape of the hole they would be leaving if they were to go. Imagine that when it was time to retire a position or a project that you sat down at the banquet table of all those you’d helped and were properly feasted, praised and laden with gifts befitting of your labours. 

When we begin to tend properly and ceremonially to endings we begin to feel ourselves to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, woven into the fabric of the community by our collective tending to the passing of things. We begin to feel sane once more as we see that others can see what we see. We become more just and kind because we have come to understand the consequence of certain behaviours. We learn that there is a place where we end and others begin. This coming to grips with limit is the beginning of our capacity to understand our consequence in the world.

Restorative justice is a proper, deep, ceremonially informed approach to the ending of something that seeks not to punish but to educate. As we tend to endings we become awash in a depth of grief and gratitude we’ve never known and come to know every ending as our old timers kissing us on the forehead and saying, “Enjoy what you have left of your days in this beautiful world.” We feel needed and substantial, perhaps for the first time in our life. The brutal, existential anxiety of our modern times is soothed. We still party of course but we don’t party like nothing matters. We party as if so much matters. 

What can we do in a time of so many endings? Learn the endings. 

What can we do in a time where so much is dying? Learn the dying.

Much is being killed too, let’s be clear. If we can stop the wholesale murder of people’s and places then we must. But... there comes a point where it’s too late. It’s dying now and nothing you can do will stop that from happening. And, when a person learns that there is such a thing as too late, a part of their adult life begins that until that moment had laid dormant. They become a trust-worthy human. And, perhaps, when enough humans come to this understanding together, the little sprout of culture pops its head out of the soil and begins to grow again.

So, when you look up one day and see the absence of village life, community or anything that could fairly become culture and you wonder what might be done, look for the endings. And gather some people together to witness it. Say a few good words. See if you can’t do it better the next time. 

Perhaps it comes to this: we live in a world in which more and more humans are unbridled by  any sense of limit, we have an economy predicated on growth, a modern world whose mantra seems to be ‘if we can, we should’. There is so little restraint and so much excess. We take so much more than we need. The hunger for ‘more’ seems to be bottomless and there is almost no consideration of the impact on the world of all of this. We sit down at the all-you-can-eat buffet table of the 21st Century and pile it high on our plate only to leave half of it untouched and ready to be thrown out. This modern, culture killing way of life sees all limits - economic, cultural, sexual and social - as enemies to be overcome. We live in a time founded on the grievance driven normalization of constant and often overwhelming transgression.

I am suggesting that cultured people do not do this. Cultured people have agreed to be bound my certain limits. They have agreed to live within certain constraints. I am suggesting that it is that willingness which makes them cultured. Instead of being driven by grievance they are tutored by the grief of endings.

Endings are the great, unsought and unwanted, midwives of culture.  Might we grant her a seat at every table we sit at and offer her a portion of our food and drink grateful beyond our capacity to carry it for the abundance she has granted us.