Short Bio:
Miki Dedijer is a facilitator of community-based rites of passage for boys, drawing on his background as an ecologist, permaculture practitioner, storyteller, and father. After recognizing the absence of traditional rituals and communal support while raising his own sons on a farm in rural Sweden, Miki dedicated himself to restoring meaningful initiation experiences rooted in nature and local relationships.
He has guided fathers over several decades, and developed and led programs that bring together families, mentors, and young people for nature-based learning, ceremony, and collective support, emphasizing that every boy’s transition into adulthood is best nurtured by a circle of caring adults and real engagement with the land.
Miki holds a degree in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior from Princeton University, and was for 20 years an environmental journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker across four continents, focusing on how our relationship to nature affects our communal and personal health.
Longer Bio:
When my first son was born in 2008, I knew that the day would come when I would seek guidance for him (and his younger brother, who followed soon after) through the stages of childhood into adulthood. I began to wonder how I could prepare him for the world and what would have him thrive in a time bereft of rituals and rites, and in a rural area lacking community and deep-rooted, old-time culture. Like most of us, I received no such transformative guidance in my own youth, and I knew some of the consequences of that.
Former Lives: The Yet To Be Braided Threads
The foundation for my focus on rites of passage lies in my earlier work as an ecologist, forester, journalist, gardener, facilitator, father, and mentor. I’ve always been drawn to that fertile and vital threshold between the cultivated and the wild—the vibrant hedgeland between culture and nature.
After completing two years of travels across the globe for a documentary film that I co-directed for Swedish Television and cinemas (about humanity’s impact on the biosphere), I moved with my partner in 2005 across the country to an 80-acre farm, with the aim of starting a family and contributing to the local health of people and place.
My lifelong immersion in nature—and my degree in ecology and evolution from Princeton—helped guide me in tending the fields and forests, aiming to maximize biodiversity. Collaborating with Linköpings University, I replaced monocrop spruce plantations with several acres of fauna-optimized forest to support insect populations and seed feeders. I established a food forest amidst a system of streams and newly dug ponds. Over the years, I regenerated depleted soils, establishing a fertile no-dig vegetable garden to feed my family and visitors. I ran courses and workshops with permaculture teachers, friends from indigenous cultures, and visiting colleagues from wilderness schools across Europe.
A Farm In The Country: Making Soil & Extending Kinships
By 2009, my partner and I were parents of two young boys in a rural part of the country where neither of us had any close friends or colleagues. We were raising our children without social support, all while repairing and renovating five wooden farm buildings and tending the land—a hard and demanding life. Winters were long, dark, and cold, and often lonely. The strain on our little family was considerable.
It soon became apparent to me that my role as a partner and father to a young family was not just to tend to the health of the farm and forests, but also to contribute to the diversity and carrying capacity of the local community.
Just as a newly established garden’s health depends on being part of a healthy and diverse ecosystem, I realized that the health of a nuclear family depends on it being part of a healthy and diverse social ecology. In urban areas, that’s not a given. In rural areas, it turns out, it’s not a given either.
Supporting Our Family and Building Community
One of my central motivations for ‘extending’ my family was to support us as parents, so that our boys could develop thriving relationships not only with the natural world but also with caring adults in the community, learning from connections beyond the nuclear family.
I gathered neighboring families and started a farming group so we could grow vegetables together during summer months, and share meals together in the darker months. Together with friends, I ran a summer course at the farm for underprivileged children from urban centers. I taught nature awareness to teachers at outdoor kindergartens.
Over the years, a steady stream of young volunteers from across Europe helped out and brought a diversity of cultural perspectives. I started a mentorship program for young men, who stayed at the farm over the growing season to learn gardening and receive guidance.
Gradually, our farm became a meeting place for friends, volunteers, and neighbors throughout the seasons. Some visitors returned for many seasons, several became family friends, and a few decided to settle in the area.
Supporting Parents: The First Coaching Business
Starting in 2005, I contributed as a facilitator and leader of the Art of Mentoring—a week-long residential intergenerational program woven around nature connection and cultural renewal.
From 2006 to 2008, Jon Young (founder of the 8 Shields) mentored me one-on-one in deep nature connection. Thanks to his masterful guidance, and to thousands of hours alone in the woods or in community, I eventually became an experienced tracker, storyteller, and group facilitator.
In 2010, I was asked to help bring the Art of Mentoring to the United Kingdom, where I served as one of the lead facilitators for many years, overseeing weeklong camps with nearly 200 people (including programs for children and teenagers). This powerful gathering offers a profound immersion into the intergenerational mentoring structures that make up the culture in a place.
At one of these camps, it became clear to me that even in programs aiming to revive “village ways,” parents were struggling. Couples were under tremendous strain, attempting to participate while caring for their young children. With the core team, I introduced the village hearth—a central fire where families could find support, ease, and care.
In 2011 I was initiated into the Mankind Project, and organization that provide men with a profound experiential understanding of communal healing. In 2014, I started and led a men’s group, and in the following years facilitated several other groups. Together with a few men, I brought the Mankind Project to Scandinavia.
Over nearly a decade, I volunteered and worked with men across Europe—in person and online, one-on-one and in group programs, initiating men into a broader understanding of adult masculinity. I deepened my approach through Shadow Work, which I have trained in as a basic facilitator, and as staff with Celebration of Being, to contribute to healing the wounds and rifts between men and women.
In 2013, I launched Natural Dads, a support business for fathers (of sons and daughters) who struggled with isolation and overwhelm, yet longed to offer their children a deep connection with nature and community. The heart of my work was about building relationships with place and people as a way of holding our children—nature as a third parent, planting children in community. Yet for most fathers I worked with, it was also about normalizing their struggles and contextualizing their pain in a civilized world that isolates not just individuals, but whole families.
Working With Youth: Years in Apprenticeship & Apprenticing
One October night in 2012, during a solo ceremony up on a mountain in Scotland, I was caught unprepared in a rainstorm that flooded the landscape. Relying on my nature skills, I managed to make a fire in pitch darkness and pelting rain, and kept myself alive and dry. Once I barely managed to return to safety—thanks also to my training as a sergeant in the Swedish Army and my experience as a board member of the Swedish Survivalist Guild—I decided it was time to pass this vital knowledge of deep nature connection to the next generation.
In 2016, I introduced the Night Owls, a monthly gathering at the farm where local families could come together, play games, share songs and stories, camp and sleep under the stars. I became a board member and later chairman at the local Waldorf school that my boys attended. A community of new friends marked my boys’ seventh birthdays with gentle ceremonies.
Locally, I gathered fathers and their sons to meet in nature from 2016 to 2018, sharing adventures, crafts and heartfelt conversations about being men and boys.
In 2017, I started the Foxes, a year-long course in nature skills for boys, meeting monthly at the farm to learn fire crafts, tracking, herbalism, storytelling, and more. Most boys stayed with the program from age 7 to early adolescence, when the program ended naturally.
The Sobering Reality: The Unexpected Absence of Uncles
And then came an evening in October 2020, when my oldest son, then twelve, told me he didn’t want to sleep in the house. He wanted to go away and be on his own. It was clear that his time to become a young man was approaching. His attention and curiosity were turning away from our family toward the wider world.
But despite all the years I’d worked to build community, despite the preparation, and despite having met, hosted, and befriended several hundred men over the preceding decades—through men’s circles and group work—I faced the sobering realization so many parents encounter: there were not many men I felt I could ask for help, and whom my son both knew and trusted.
It was frightening to see the gap between the large, welcoming community I’d imagined for my sons at their birth, and the reality we were facing.
Into The Woods: A Patchwork, Grassroots Initiation of Surprising Beauty
So I wrote a letter to six men. Some lived overseas, one was family, others had become friends through volunteering or co-facilitating men’s circles over the years. The letter was my heartfelt plea for them to step in where my reach ended—my son needed the support of other men to make the journey from childhood to young personhood.
A few men agreed, and even fewer committed. Over nine months, we stepped into the unknown together through meetings, wonderings, confusions, conflicts, and revelations. We learned from one another, wrestled with big questions, and found our way as we went.
And then came the day when three men took my son into the woods for three days, and a circle of friends and family welcomed him back. Since that day, my youngest son has also been initiated into the community by another two men.
The ripples of this communal labor have changed everyone involved—not just the boys—in ways that have yet to reveal themselves. But when I see these young men care for an elderly stranger on a bus, head into the woods for days without their phones, or sit with a friend through heartbreak, or laugh until tears run down their cheeks, I can’t help but wonder: who would they have been without a dozen adults caring enough to help them cross the threshold from childhood toward personhood?
For these young men, and many others as fortunate, that question will never need answering as there were men and women willing to guide them across the threshold.
Today, I live on the island of Orust, on the west coast of Sweden, where I share my experiences and help parents cobble together home-grown rites of passage for their boys, rooted in their own communities—so that the beauty and spark of their boys might grow into a warming fire of adulthood in service to life.
