MY PHILOSOPHY

THE FOUNDATIONS

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Kahlil Gibran

Boy at a threshold, parents on edge

If you are here, you already have a sense that your role as a parent is now to support your boy’s soulful passage into early adulthood. You’re aware of the significance of a rite of passage to transform him into a full member of the community. You’d like something like that for him, but you just don’t know how to make it happen.

So I put together this page to share with you an overview of my thoughts, my philosophy. It’s my best attempt at conveying what I understand supports our boys in one day becoming healthy, resilient, responsible men.

Mending the Village for Our Boys

At the heart of my work is this understanding: as parents, we can’t do this alone, nor should we.

We, as parents, are constitutionally incapable of doing most of the parts of our son’s rite of passage. In many cultures, likely your ancestors’ and mine included, parents stood on the periphery looking in (while trying in vain not to). The initiation was carried out, on their behalf, by the rest of the village.

Ah… But we no longer have a village.

So, what do we do?

I believe we can start remaking that village around endeavours like this for a time we may not live to see.

We democratize the maturation of our boys into young men by asking people whom we trust, to help us guide them into a wider understanding of their gifts, purpose and responsibilities in serving creation.

This doesn’t aim to make your son a successful citizen of the global village. This is a communal process rooted in place, specific to these times that has your son come from somewhere, from someone and become a person. It’s mundane and ordinary and consequential.

I call it a grassroots rite of passage, a community-based maturation of your son’s heart that serves not only your son, but the family, and the wider human and natural community as well.

It’s a collective attempt to spin a thread of culture by remembering the purpose and responsibilities of being a young man.

a stitch in the fabric of belonging

You may not believe it at all times, but you are still your boy’s secure base as he glimpses what lies beyond childhood. You can accept that your role is changing, and be an active participant in the transformation that is affecting everyone in your household and beyond. You can ask others for help where your reach ends, to craft a rite of passage that makes a person out of your boy.

Crafting a neighbourhood based ritual like this is a different approach than more discipline, more rules, more intensity, greater control. It doesn’t require an app to track his whereabouts, no surveillance, digital or verbal. It does require others who know him, see him and are willing to guide him.

It takes a willingness to put time and imagination to work in supporting your boy’s transformation into a man. It is letting go of your son, with a deep loving care, and trust. It’s facing your fears, as he faces his. It’s grieving for what is coming to an end, so something can be fully born.

Such rite of passage is a stitch in the fabric of belonging. It’s weaving a thread back into the tapestry of life. It’s courageous community work that calls back what is very nearly gone. It’s barely perceptible culture-making. It’s democratizing the process of making humans. It’s parenting for a day you may never see. It’s ancestral work. It’s a grassroots rite of passage.

Most of us don’t have that depth or culture anymore. In the escalating troubles of our times, most of us may feel we are not part of a culture at all, but living through a rough, disordered initiation as social structures are in violent turmoil.

What we do have seems to work against our ancestral legacy. It creates distance and isolation, tension and misunderstandings in the home, when instead your son’s deepest, heartfelt if unarticulated longing is to become more deeply enmeshed in the fabric of culture, and welcomed as a valued member of the community.

My Lineage for these Foundations

What and who shaped my approach to grassroots Rite of Passage

A lifetime of befriending, playing and loving nature, the one constant in a childhood of several homes in a handful of countries. Boarding in an all-boys school dorm in my teens. Serving as a Sergeant in the Swedish Army. The Art of Mentoring, where I first experienced teachings on inter-generational community . The Mankind Project and the beauty of caring men in community. Twenty years co-creating community initiatives. Leading a Waldorf School. My dear relatives who wrote down the family story for us to know. And fatherhood itself, of course. There is much more, and many people, amongst whom are

Jon Young, who mentored me in organic and full-bodied nature connection as the foundation of culture
Stephen Jenkinson, who showed me how eloquence serves what troubles us most and the redemptive power of kinship etiquette and remembering the old ones
Bradford and Hillary Keeney, brilliant practitioners of resource-focused transformations and devotees of the life force
Maya Angelou, strong and kind, a true elder who in a fleeting moment long ago showed me the power of blessing the young
Annie Bloom, vision fast guide, a lifetime’s devotion to loving and serving earth
Maeve Gavin, a dearly missed friend with a profound spiritual generosity, contagious playfulness and loving heart
Mala Spotted Eagle, ceremonialist and friend
Sobonfu Some, courageous and playful, a champion of intimacy, in service to life, come what may

The Hard Choice We Face As Parents

We either hand over our boy’s transformation to friends and family, or he may walk alone and lost for longer than he has to.

The old timers knew this, they paid attention to the signs, and they had ways of taking the boy away from his parents to initiate him, and plant him in community so that he knew, for sure, that his childhood was over, that he had adults who cared enough about him to try to bring him to fruition (a gift he won’t truly understand for many years to come).

If enough of us do this it could change many things. Imagine a generation of boys going through it together, bonded for life, and the community united through creating the container.

We’re far from that, but the seeds can be planted now. What you do with your son might inspire others to do the same next year and beyond.

Most of us don’t have that depth or culture anymore. In the escalating troubles of our times, mAnd this all feels increasingly urgent because you can already see that..ost of us may feel we are not part of a culture at all, but living through a rough, disordered initiation as social structures are in violent turmoil.

And this all feels increasingly urgent, because you can already see that…

…Your Son Is Pulling Away

Right now, you’re finding yourself on edge as your boy approaches the threshold that separates boyhood from the onset of personhood.

Why?

Because you have a sense of imminence and urgency in your parenting. Time keeps on passing without easing the ache you feel at a growing estrangement between the two of you.

We’re far from that, but the seeds can be planted now. What you do with your son might inspire others to do the same next year and beyond.

I’ve heard parents of boys close to adolescence say things like, “I feel I’ve become a janitor. I just put food on the table, get his clothes cleaned, put a roof over his head.”

In seeking his independence and finding his way, he rejects what you tried to share with him for most of his life, the values, ethics and traditions that you hold dear. It seems he just wants to be mainstream.

Of course, you want to support him in finding his own way, but you also long for the closeness you once shared. You want him to listen to you and trust you with his inner life, his dreams, and his challenges, so you can keep caring for him.

But no matter what you want, he’s pulling away. He’s become private, reserved. He no longer falls into your arms when he’s in pain. He doesn’t listen to you as he used to. You don’t know anymore what his inner life is like. Instead he goes silent, sulks, heads to his room, texts his friends.

It’s a mystery.

There are closed doors that you can’t seem to open. Power struggles. You wonder if he’s ok, if he has anyone now that he speaks to, and that he feels truly supported by.

So you ask to sit down for a talk, but he’s mostly silent. You’ve tried a thousand ways to reach him, asked how he is, what he’s up to, but the answers are few. He walls himself off. When you try to get close, he withdraws, hiding in plain sight.

You suggest things to do together, but his response is lukewarm. Your fledgling boy no longer seems to find what he seeks under your protective wings. He wants to please you but no longer has real enthusiasm for your company.

More and more often, he’s with people you don’t know, friends or girlfriends, or in online contexts with values vastly different from yours. He carries his phone wherever he goes (Oh that phone. You worry about his reliance on it and how it never seems to leave his hand).

Yet he seldom responds to your texts or calls. There are days when you don’t quite trust him. You try to make agreements, but he doesn’t follow through, always with a new excuse. You grow nervous, asking yourself what is wrong with him or what are you doing wrong.

You’re frustrated, worried, resorting to discipline and rules to gain control, but every time it works, it saddens you. It’s not what you want for either of you. Gosh you miss the sweetness of parenting a boy, to hold him close and safe. What parent doesn’t? And now, you have no idea how to let go of him (and you know you need to) without losing connection.

A Time for Soul Maturation

The tension that comes into our lives when our son approaches adolescence is an early sign that he is passing on to a new life stage.

You have already noticed some signs of physical transformation. These obvious changes to his body will run their course regardless of what you do or don’t do.

What is less obvious to you is what is happening within him–the wild and laborious parturition of his soul. This part of his maturation needs cultural guidance.

Your son is sensitive, beautiful, wild and passionate, yet these are troubled and troubling times of great uncertainties and the unravelling of much of what we have taken for granted.

You simply don’t have the time or resources to figure it all out on your own. You’re too close to see how to proceed. You need help.

What Might Happen Next For Your Son

Here’s what might happen next:

Given how close you are to your son’s adolescence, you find out what’s possible and create a realistic plan for a home-based initiation that does more good than harm. You stand next to your son as he matures, knowing you helped him leave boyhood through a rite of passage held by community, nature, and ancestors.

You look back knowing you offered him a trustworthy welcome into early adulthood with others in your limited, human way. You were all able to transform as he stepped towards young manhood with a deepened sense of belonging as a participant in the web of life, not just a mainstream, passive and individual consumer.

It’s imperfect, but it happened.

Crafting A Grassroots Rite Of Passage For Your Son

“Seek not the way of the ancients, seek what they sought”

Buddhist monk Kūkai (774–835 CE)

You already see rites of passage as something that can deepen your son’s sense of belonging and purpose, rather than leave him to navigate adolescence alone in a digital wilderness.

Your boy needs help in becoming a man, and understanding his role and function outside of the family. You need help in letting go of your role as the parent of a boy, so you can learn what it’s like to be the parent of a young man. Both of you need others to make this transformation happen and to integrate how it changes you both.

But where do you find these people, and how do you ask for their help?

Most of us have an idyllic idea of community or village, and a longing for it, but few of us have a lived experience of it. It’s a hard thing to cultivate these days. And it’s painful to bear witness to the difference between what we long for and what is actually there. And so we might miss what we actually have in plain sight.

You’ll have some good friends. Make a heartfelt plea for help from them to craft a rite of passage for your boy, that transforms him into a man with the participation of others, in the presence of friends and family.

You know this is not a one‑off cathartic event, or fist-pumping theatrics. It will certainly be confounding and hard going at times. It will involve grief, longing, limits, frailty and possibility.

But it’s a tremendous achievement that changes everyone engaged in the work to end boyhood, so the young man can be born.

The Nine steps

To craft such a home-based transformation from boyhood to personhood might loosely divided into the following steps:

Changes in your son. Changes in your parenting. Changes in the family.
Not a problem to be solved. An ending to be noticed and affirmed with awareness.
So you pay attention to the household dynamics, to your son, and you don’t take it personal. You step closer.
You’re looking for the signs that the time has arrived to set things in motion, to say goodbye to your boy, so you can welcome the young man.
You either have an ending, or you have a furthering, says Stephen Jenkinson. You either come present to the impending end of childhood, and the end of parenting a child, and engage willingly, if with a broken heart, with all that is coming to a close so something yet unborn is made possible.
Or you hold on to what you know, fearing what you don’t know, and arrest the development not only of your boy, but also of yourself, and of the community. This is how consumers are made, men who spend much of their formative years, well into adulthood, with an insatiable hunger, wanting more, demanding that they be favoured by life, that their individuality continue to be enthroned, that their worth be measured in wealth.

Whether it’s myself or a local rites of passage guide whom you know personally, you’ll want someone who has done this with his own sons and who has had a hand at helping other boys to become men. You’ll want to find someone who is well read, deeply studied and long in the tooth of considering these matters.

When your son’s soul and sanity is on the line is not a time for a group of well-intentioned re-villagers to freestyle. You want people you trust, men and women of integrity, who have wrestled with endings enough times in their lives to have softened in their certitudes and hardened in their commitment to aliveness and to creation itself.

Your role now is to find good people you can ask for help.

What you have now may feel threadbare compared to what you had imagined when your boy was a toddler. A dozen good people, perhaps, likely fewer. It’s not enough to make a village. But it’s certainly enough for you to ask for help and guidance, now that your son’s soul is inarticulately grappling with the big questions with very little help from those who have been there before him. Who am I? What am I doing here? Where do I belong? What is my role?

To discover the answers for himself he will need the presence, the listening ear, the mentoring and gentle guidance of trusted uncles and aunts, people who are willing and able to sit with him free from the constraints of parental bonds.

Choosing the right people is so vital. Choosing the wrong ones, the ones who are reactive, overly self-involved, unscarred by suffering, argumentative or averse to mystery and imagination can snuff out your best ambitions and finest inspirations before it begins.

You may not have the wizened elders within reach, but you have friends. They are neither specialists nor experts. They are people in your extended family and neighborhood who have earned your trust over the years. They are men and women who share your longing for community, reverence for earth, and a culture of care.
They are the grassroots who may yet form the gauze of a flourishing community with real dirt-time as its substrate.

And it may shock you to find how many of them are willing to accept your request for help, and take over where your reach ends. Not only willing but galvanized and energized by it–that your asking might do something similar to them as what you’re hoping this rite of passage might do for you son–to help stir the bone memory of what it is to be a human being enmeshed in kinship, caring for the good of the whole.

The way you approach those whose support you seek will set the direction, tone and possibility of the entire thing.

If you ask too casually, you may risk causing offense or getting ‘yeses’ that came just a little too easily to the eventual regret of everyone involved. This must be thought through with care.

What are you asking of them? Are you sincere in your request? Are you truly ready to engage in a process that has you say goodbye to your boy, so someone else might emerge? Can you see this as a natural progression, rather than as an injustice? And can you convey this sorrowed realization in a way that makes it clear to yourself, and to those you request help from, that you’re not asking cosmetically or superficially, but from a deep realization that you’ve come this far, and can go no further without their willingness to step in and take on the role of alloparents, of uncles and aunts, grandparents?

Your carefully chosen words here–your willingness and care in giving voice to your deepest longings for your son and for life–are the soil from which what is yet to come will find the sustenance to grow into something life-affirming and beautiful in all its glorious imperfections and wondrous surprises.

Now that you have all of your people assembled, and you’ve come present to what is asked of you and them, it’s time to make a plan, or at least a plan-like-thing.

It’s time to begin to decide the whens and wheres, the whats and hows, the whys and wherefores, the shape and structure, the art and architecture of the thing.

Generally, that plan will fit into Three Trimesters.

First trimester: Separation and Preparation

Second Trimester: Rupture and Rapture

Third Trimester: Birth of the Young Man

Having the right people and the right intentions won’t get you there.

There will be a lot to learn. Some of it you will learn from books, videos, podcasts and most of it from each other as you begin, collectively, to wrap your heads and hearts around what it is you are doing and how you might translate what was done centuries or millennia ago amongst your old timers with what might be done today, here.

You’ll come to understand your son’s place in the cycle of life. You’ll reach deep to draw on your own losses, failures, and understandings of what is worth passing on to the next generation. You’ll remember who you come from and what they lived through.

You will have to stick with this extended ending of childhood long after your inspiration is spent, and well before any imagined rewards have accrued in amounts anywhere near large enough to warrant your time or heartbreak.

This part is unknown to your son, and to you. This is the rupture and the rapture. It’s what you have prepared for, and now that it is here, you are no longer in control or in the know. It’s in the hands of the friends and family you’ve entrusted your boy to.

“The first birth is into the family. The second birth is out of the family into the realm of nature, culture and cosmos. The second birth is a psychological birth and also a spiritual birth that comes when it’s time to leave the family. Eventually, we all must leave home to fully discover and live out the core purpose and calling in our lives” – Michael Meade

When your son returns from his time with the older men, he is no longer a boy.

And you are no longer the parent of a boy.

He has spiritually moved out of the family, into community.

He knows he is not isolated, that there are men he trusts who are not his fathers, men who know about death, love, grief, suffering and discipline. The souls of our sons require the help of older men like these to leave boyhood behind, and mature. To have their gifts affirmed and well-rooted in the responsibilities of communal interdependence.

And now that he has been helped across the threshold from boy to young man, he has been situated in the time and place of his life. He is confirmed as a young man, and his strut and shine has a place among us, a welcome vibrancy and joyful servility that revitalizes the community with its exuberance and virility.

You and the community must be ready for the return of such a young man.

During the months of crafting this transformation, miracles will likely have occurred and misfortunes will have gathered around too. What now follows is a time to sort out the wheat from the chaff of what went well and what didn’t. To live with the realization that childhood is no more, and what has come in its stead needs the care and nourishment and attention of a newborn.

It was something akin to an initiation, you see, a beginning, not the completion of the thing. What happens next determines if the carefully spun thread of your maturing son is woven meticulously back into the fabric of the community like a vibrant fiber that brings a stunning beauty to a vast and ancient tapestry.

Or if the fibre you have carefully and laboriously twined is now spooled and discarded in a drawer as a memento that is occasionally taken out to remind you of a brief moment in your lives, a trinket of little consequence.

It’s widely understood amongst those who hold wilderness vigils, rites of passages and initiations that the greatest challenge facing participants may not be the quest itself, but the return from the quest back to friends and family who have no understanding of what they have lived through.

Whatever challenges a quester faces on the land, whatever ways he is stripped of certainties and magnanimity, the day comes when he must return to cups and closets, to paying bills, making breakfast, looking for work. Without people around who know him from before, and welcome who he’s since become, his time on the land is like mist on a spring morning: stunning, mysterious, transient and gone with the rising sun.

How you are with your son after his return decides whether or not what he touched with his heart over the past days and months has a place in the day to day, or if it was just another experience, a theater, a betrayal. And how you are with your son from now on, decides what you come to think of your own role in the family in years to come.

Roll the dice, make a stand, stay the course, and you will have brought something to your son, your family and neighborhood that might be of considered consequence, a sweet scent wafting across the generations, emanating from men and women who generously gave a moment of their lives for boys, for people, for a place and a time they may never live to see.

Parents to be blessed by. A community in service to life. Ancestors to be proud of. Love for those who are following behind, and for those who are yet to come.

A feast for life itself.