The poverty of our culture is in full display in two places: old folks homes and mental institutions.
They both sit there, an indictment of our culture, full of people who are waiting for those who will never come.
The Sanitarium
Someone I knew years ago, through local festivals and our Intention new years events that I helped foster for the first five years, took his life on Friday. We hadn't been in touch much in over five years and he'd moved away from Edmonton but, from a distance, it was clear that his tether was coming unwound as he slipped in and out of episodes with mental illness.
When he was in a balanced place, I've never met anyone so extraordinarily intense, authentic, honest, direct and fierce with his love. It inspired me. He led the first Non-Violent Communication workshop I'd ever attended (and, since then, I've led many myself and the work has been a gift to me and, through me, many). He was so comfortable in his body as a dancer and contact improvisor. He was one of the silliest and most ridiculous men I ever knew. I envied him deeply. Though we never knew each other deeply, we had a few good moments of connection and I admired him immensely. If you never met this man, I'm fucking sorry for you.
There will never be another like him.
When an episode hit, he was hard to be around: rash, unpredictable, mercurial. Imagined happenings taking on cosmic proportions of importance. Threats of violence.
Most of the time he was the former but the latter seemed to appear more and more - unwanted houseguests, rough on his and everyone else's furniture.
And now he is dead.
He worked hard, I know, to find some peace of mind and in his heart through meditation, good nutrition and yoga but, as Jim Rohr put it, "I give these retreats, and I talk about prayer and healing and transformation, but it’s very hard to heal people in an unhealthy, unhealed culture. You send them back, and the incoherence of our system — sort of showing itself in our politics today — just undoes whatever moment of sanity, whatever moment of truth or freedom you might offer a person."
Towards the end of his life, he had some stays in a mental hospital as he was tended to by an imperfect mental health system that is, itself, doing its best to respond to a deeply impoverished culture.
When he was admitted, I spoke with a friend who had been close with him in past years and related to him how Malidoma Some, a Dagara African medicine man had been visiting a mental hospital. Stephanie Marohn wrote of this in The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia,
"What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.
One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.
I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.”
The very people who were being locked away by our culture would have been gathered in by his.
"But there's no old man coming for him," I told my friend. "There is no elder who will come into that institution late one night when visiting hours are supposed to be done and look through the windows into each room and, eyes finally landing on my friend, rap gently on the door with his knuckle as he says to the nurse on duty, 'This one. I'll take this one. He is the one we need.'
"No one is coming for him. No shaman. No medicine man. No one. No one is willing. No one is able. No one will take him out of that hellish place and help him get off those hellish meds and help him learn how to work with the overwhelming intensity that has become his life. And that building is full of people like him. And there are thousands of buildings like this all around the world. And no one is coming for any of them. And they all deserve it. He deserves it as much as any young man in this world ever did and he's not going to get it and that is fucking heartbreaking."
They are waiting and no one is coming for them. The poverty of this must be testified to.
And now he is dead.
May we, one day, be capable of being that old timer, still living, who sees someone struggling in a hell this culture is incapable of comprehending and seeing, inside the flames, good news from the other world.
His last post on Facebook was a small piece I wrote called 'On Compassion'. I think it spoke to how he was feeling in his last days.
The Seniors
An old folks’ home can be a sad thing.
It’s a terrible apartheid being rendered. The carting off of the old to be cared for by families who can’t or won’t care for them themselves. It’s a loss for our modern world but it’s also a loss for those old-timers. As Michael Meade put it, “Instead of a culture full of elders giving out medicine, we’ve got olders taking drugs.”
And most of the old folks in those buildings are not elders.
And yet this culture desperately needs elders.
So what do we do?
The first things to realize is that elders are not self-made. They don’t just wake up one day and decide to be an elder. Elder isn’t an age thing; it’s a function. It’s a role. It’s something that is done.
Elders are also not made by other elders. It’s not a badge they get to bestow.
No, an elder is made by young people.
An elder is made by a young person willing to ask them for help, imagining that they, in their years, might have something to say worth hearing.
This is the heart of one of the oldest and most mysterious stories in Western Culture: the story of The Fisher King and the Holy Grail. The Fisher King is an old king who has suffered his whole life, unable to die and yet barely living, waiting for some young fool to show up and to ask him a question.
When Parzifal, his name meaning ‘young fool’, appears and asks him the question, his health is restored. Part of it is that he asked the right question but I would suggest that most of it is because a question was asked at all. The Grail Question might be better understood not as a particularly worded question but the willingness of someone lean in years being vulnerable and open enough to ask one of the big questions of someone older than them who has been through the wars.
Going through trauma, as the Fisher King did as a young man, is no guarantor or wisdom. Trauma is not, inherently, medicine. But it has a chance to become medicine when something is asked of it by the next generation.
But there they sit, our old ones, alone in these sterile retirement homes surrounded by strangers and being tended to by strangers. Strangers in a strange land on the cusp of their journey to the strangest land of all. And no one is coming for them.
There is no young fool who will come into that institution late one night when visiting hours are supposed to be done and look through the windows into each room and, eyes finally landing on one of them, wrap gently on the door with his knuckle as he says to the nurse on duty, 'This one. I'll take this one. He is the one we need.'
May we, one day, be capable of being that young fool, new to living, who sees someone struggling in a hell this culture is incapable of comprehending and seeing, inside the barely burning coals, good news, for at least a little while longer, for this other world.
The Shrunken Axis of the World
In his book The Sibling Society, Robert Bly point out that culture has both a horizontal and a vertical axis. The horizontal axis is all the people like us. They are our peers, in our age group and who are similar to us. These are the siblings of the sibling society. On the vertical axis, there is a recognition that there are those younger than us and those older than us, there are those who came before us and those who will come after us, there are the roots and there are the branches with us, the trunk in the middle.
This modern culture, for all of its vaunted growth and freedom has actually shrunk both of the axes down considerably. We only hang out with people our ages. Kids are hidden away at school. Old people are put into homes. And people who experience the world differently are put into sanitariums. On TV we only see the young, good looking and attractive. We only see the ones who are ‘mentally healthy’. Facebook only shows us posts from those with whom we are likely to agree.
Our sense of what’s normal has become deeply distorted from the reality of the life. We are promised ‘more channels’ on television and the internet and travel promises us more access to every culture in the world and yet our lives are increasingly mono-cultured.
My heart is newly re-broken reading this today...
After so many friends dying deaths relegated to institutions, mean street and mind numbing meds, I long to be the old man who comes to take them away...
But where is away?...
...and I am wholly inadequate to be such a fullsome solace, whole provider and rescuer...
I’ve provided scraps as a therapist, momentary meals as a friend, but so much more is needed for every one of us to be “saved” or rather adequately and ongoingly buffered from the society eating itself whole.
I have been steadily tending gardens and building villages I hope will still be standing after I am soil again...
And my hope comes from seeing elders glowing... even as their bodies wither, they are radiating soulful presence and tender humanity... and a few young healers not drowning but learning to swim in treacherous waters and eventually building rafts themselves to help others grab on and tether...
I am fortunate to remember my own times being lost, wanting to die and seeing the society that could not help me encourage to dig my own early grave sooner AND having many different mentors, allies and friends save me -- taking turns over time... a patchwork village or rather a relay race held together but us... taking turns and paying it forward...
Now, as I tend longer term communities, I see how much more is possible, how resilient and potent we are together as well as how vulnerable we each are alone...
He sounds wonderful, may he rest in peace and power.