Stephen Jenkinson: Personal Growth Won't Save Us

coming up on life as a festival. I understand the attraction of hope, but it is after all a kind of entry-level mistake to make. To imagine that you have to be hopeful so that I can count on you for the kind of work you and I describe. Your failure to be hopeful immediately disqualifies you from ongoing labors until you revive your hopefulness, your sense of what's possible, and then by virtue of your fascination with word potential, apparently you're ready for the labors of the day again. See, and while you're working on yourself, the rest of us have to compensate for your absence from the scene. So all of this is determined by the notion that you've got to get paid first, psychically speaking, and then you're capable of doing the work. But it seems to me, particularly in a time of trouble, that grownups have the responsibility to undertake the work minus the assurance that it's the right work to do. Hello, my friends and fellow travelers. Welcome back to Life as a Festival. Well, at long last, I have the venerated elder Stephen Jenkinson on the program, and I've been wanting to speak to him for some time. It's part of the fact that it's quite a heavy, challenging conversation and may not seem much like a festival, but these are troubling times and we must rise to meet them. This podcast is appropriately called personal growth won't save us. And as someone who's been involved in the realms of personal growth and healing for many years, I'm looking for something that will connect us more deeply to the work at hand. And thankfully, Stephen Jenkinson is the right person to reckon with. I'm not going to promise you answers. I think he'd be very disappointed in me if I did, but we are going to reckon deeply on these matters. So on the show, we start with a discussion of personal growth, which Stephen says a personal growth for its own sake is much like a tumor. Just to give you a bit of the tone of the show, we talk about healing and he goes into the etymology of the word healing and the issue of, again, healing for its own sake. Stephen talks about three beginnings that he experienced in Cadez, Plymouth, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And these stories, well, I'll just make a note, when you're listening to Stephen speak, you really need to pay some attention because he weaves things back in, he's defining words, we're all throwing arrows up in the air, trying to see if they land, and all the while not promising an easy bow-tide solution at the end. So pay attention to the stories, they'll make sense after all. We talk about catastrophe, the idea of all of these catastrophes around us as a kind of going down and going in, which fits very well in the sort of mythopoetic of initiation. He talks about hope, and when it comes to no surprise, he's not a huge fan. He says that hope works like a mortgage. We discuss that. So finally, we get to the end of the program, if not hope, then what next? And I actually walked away from this conversation. I don't want to say feeling hopeful, but in a sense, feeling that there's work to be done, and we are those who must do it, truly. So Stephen Jenkinson is a culture activist, he is a writer, he is a teacher, he teaches internationally, he's the creator and principal instructor of the orphan wisdom school. He co-founded the Knights of grief and mystery project with singer-songwriter Gregory Hoskins in 2015. He's the author of many books, including A Generations Worth, Spirit Work, While the Crisis Reigns, come of age, the case for elderhood in a time of trouble, and the award-winning Die Wise, a manifesto for sanity and soul, amongst many other works. Stephen is also the subject of a feature-length documentary film, Grief Walker, which is a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Knights of grief and mystery tours. So Stephen is a luminary, and this is difficult material, but he speaks with such poetic grace, such humility, and such earnestness that it's really a joy to hear him reckon with these matters that most of us don't wish to think about. But today, let's think about them and find our place in this work. And now, here's Stephen Jenkinson. Hi, Stephen. Nice to meet you. Good morning. Nice to meet you too. Oh, I should have mentioned this before we began, but my name is pronounced Amon. It looks like Amon, but is pronounced Amon. I've heard some Irish people speak from time to time, so that was my guess. Yes. It is an Irish name, although I am diasporic. So the Irish are way back, and they came by way of Australia, and ultimately, America on one side, and then Scottish on the other side. I'm a result, like all of us, of colonialism. So here we are. In other words, you're a fellow mut. I'm a fellow mut. Yes. I am a mut of the British Isles, primarily, with just a dash of Chinese. I can't brag anything is exotic. I've got the same mut or entity you describe minus the Chinese. Well, I'm not sure what the Chinese does for my particular genetic makeup, but it is an interesting aspect to consider. It is. So, Stephen, I just want to start this conversation by saying that I am somewhat nervous to speak to you. I'm not nervous because you are not an affable fellow, and you will not be generous or kind to me. I'm nervous because in what I understand of your work, you provide often a clearer mirror than I necessarily always feel up to stand to, but I want to, and so I'm grateful to be here, and very honored that you took the time to come on this podcast. So, I just want to preface that I have some feelings of nervousness about the subject matter today, and also just my gratitude that you're taking this time. Yeah, you're very welcome. We'll be just fine. I mean, we're fine already. You know, the first 10 seconds is always the most treacherous. We've gone through, we've burned through that. So, you know, greener pastures await us. May it be so, may it be so. Stephen, welcome to Life as a festival. I wanted to set the table by letting you know about the audience of this particular program, because I think that this audience really needs to hear some of your reckoning, or some of the reckoning that you have been doing with others and throughout your life. So, I imagine that you are familiar with the Burning Man experience. I've heard of it, yeah. So, the audience of this show, as apropos to the name, are Burning Man attendees, psychedelic explorers, a lot of personal growth junkies like myself, people who crave the experience of transformation, and often people, and I'll just speak for myself, which is what I like to do on this program. I am someone who wishes they could leap from peak to peak, and is terrified of the deep valleys that happen in my personal life, and seem very clearly on the horizon, and indeed, already happening in our collective experience. So, to put it all together, there are people listening to this program who are afraid to grow up, and maybe even don't know how. And I am a 40-year-old man, and becoming familiar with your work, I do not feel that I am on track for elderhood. And so, the meat of my reckoning with you today, and we can go many places, is a curiosity about how I might be more aware of my choices looking at a broader time horizon, and imagining a different perspective on what the world needs of me and people like me. So, this is the table I have set. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It'll be a stringent diet, probably, but you know, there's a lot of grain with the gruel in what you've just described. Between the two things, I think nourishments at hand. Well, that is very encouraging. I fear that it's going to be no fun. I think you're right about that. It's a good fear to have. Well, you know, and therein lies part of the problem of getting to work, is that I think that we are getting to work at the things that please us, that we think are in certain ways helpful. And we often, and I say we, let me speak to myself, I perhaps willfully blind myself at what may be in store, and have a bit of a pollyanna view, that if I just keep doing enough personal growth, somehow, I'll be ready at a start line that has already passed. Yeah. You know, if I may, the dilemma that you've articulated so far, begins and ends with the word growth in my estimation. And here's why I particularly identify this as the trouble inside the trouble, or the trouble inside the solution. Maybe that's even better. Growth, you know, that I worked in the death trade for a while, and so no surprise to you then, that the word growth was employed routinely in the cancer treatment realm, and the cancer defeat realm, same word. Growth was a synonym for tumor. Well, that's not happenstance, and it's not besides the point, and it's not a mistake. The way a tumor works, I'm sure you're in a general way alert to it, is the tumor literally grows itself to death. That's what it does, and the tumor dies just after the host dies. It's quite astounding. Its capacity for life is astounding, and it's misapprehended as a life killer, but that's not what it is. It grows itself to death, you see, and it is, in that sense, you could say sociopathic in the extreme tumor is, which is to say that by virtue of employing itself to further itself, it is unwed entirely, unwedded to the consequences of its growth. That's what for its own sake means, you see. So the notion is that all as well as long as there's increase, and of course, carcinogenically, that's demonstrably not the case, but inside the tumor, it's probably always a sunny day, if you know what I mean. So being wedded to the consequences, the inadvertent consequences of your growth both underscores your growth and probably curtails it. If you're lucky, and if you do your work, it curtails it. And something about consequence ends the kind of heroic arc of the growth for the sake of growth thing. And that's the crash and burn of the arrangement, you see. And without the crash and burn, you know, you're forever soaring, as you say, from one peak to the next. I myself am a kind of flat lender just by inclination. It's not that I'm not drawn to the peaks, but it's that too much is left behind as so I've seen over the years. And so you'd be well advised, I think, to reconsider the growth mania, the chant. Not reconsider as in doubt it, just adopt a wider, more democratic, more tolerant understanding of what constitutes growth. And you'll realize that no matter how it's used euphemistically or in an advocating sense of the term, it is about increase. There is no real way to invoke the notion of growth without invoking increase. And the last time I checked, this is one of our principle, manious is increased in some fashion as a compensatory gesture to contend with our sense of not belonging, frailty, and the misapprehension that limits of all kind constitutes some kind of transgression into the natural order of things. Limits are the natural order of things. That's how the natural order knows itself to be so by virtue of how it limits. And the way it takes on limits upon itself. Here's an example. So oftentimes, I mean, I have been in front of audiences that could self characterize the way you characterize yourself as kind of solution junkies. I'm not sure you use the phrase, but you understand what I mean. I mean, in and of itself, it's not a crime to be a solution junkie. It's a bit of a narrow appetite, but still in all, it's, I mean, there are worse things. We all know that. But the solution, the notion of solutions as the primary vector for the real thing is just fundamentally intolerant, finally. And limits, frailties, endings, all of those sort of low grade, retrograde propositions. They no longer belong when you're about increase. They're for suckers, they're for people who don't get it. Therefore, they're for half measure people, for whom ordinary alertness is inadequate to the times that desperate times require desperation, first and foremost, which is what I understand. The leaping and soaring after solutions to be is pretty much desperate measures for desperate times. And a complete unwillingness, an understandable unwillingness to be tethered to the moment, to understand that the moment is actually the condition that's the mother load of your belonging, you could say. So you think of two words that are employed fairly routinely in the venues that you described to me. One of them is ecstasy. I'm not referring now to the drug. I'm referring to the etymology of the word ecstasy, ec, the prefix that means outside of like exterior, same prefix. And then stasis, of course, if you're all about leaping and cavorting, then stasis is such a drag, because it's the ruler for stable, stationary, you understand. So ecstasy is to be anywhere but where you are. And anywhere but where you are, turns you, turns you ectopic as a consequence. The word ectopic is usually used to describe a certain errant pregnancy in the fallopian tube, typically, which is possibly fatal to the mother in question. There would be mother. But to use it in a more broad application, ectopia means outside of place, out of place, topos, the Greek word for place. So these two things together are more reflection than they are a recipe, I think ecstasy and ectopia. And it's a kind of anywhere but here, religion, anytime, but now, anybody but you, that becomes the recipe. And that is the monotheist's vision of heaven, anytime but now, anywhere but here, anyone but you. That's where you got it from. Lo and behold, you thought you were leaving it all behind. But in truth, the vision comes from biblical monotheism and specifically the notion of heaven as an alternative to the garden, the garden that we lost, in other words. Anyway, there's a mouthful to get us started. And get started, we are. This is a beautiful place to start. And there's so many threads to pull there. But before we do, and before we attempt to reckon with this, obviously not solve any of this, but reckon with it, I want to bring another proximal concept here that is ubiquitous and is also I think a mania, which is this idea of healing. So on one hand, we have this personal growth, personal development. At any cost, I need to become better and optimized for some future day when something will be needed of me. But really, I'm just a kind of transformational junkie, as I say, attempting to leap from peak to peak. And then a parallel, and perhaps for some the same, pursuit is this idea of healing. That there is some wound in me, and maybe it has represented in my depression or in my attachment or in, you know, all manner of sort of modern ailments. But I'm in this ongoing healing journey. And my entire speech and way of relating is psychologized. And I'm constantly in therapy with my friends, as if I could arrive at some healed point. And once I do, once I'm healed enough, perhaps then I can be in the work of healing the world. But what is often said is, you know, secure your oxygen mask first so that then you can serve. You know, I need to do my healing. And in fact, maybe even my healing is, in a sense, it is healing the world because aren't I part of the world. So if I'm my optically focused on myself and my own healing, am I not healing the world since that will sort of biosmosis lead to healing. So these two things, this preoccupation with personal growth and this preoccupation with this never ending healing journey. I see it's quite similar. And as we jump into this material, I wonder if you see a distinction between the two and if they perhaps may be met in different ways or if they're kind of the same sort of argument. Well, you know, I probably do see it in that fashion, which is where your question comes from. But you know, the image that you've drawn down upon of the mask dropping, well, you know, that's it's perfect that you would choose that one to to illustrate and to carry forward the notion. It's it sounds like a recipe for a radicalized sense of responsibility that you take us upon yourself, the self-directedness for the sake of the greater good, the plane that's going down, in other words. So this entire image comes from people who are not on the ground, right, for whom oxygen is suddenly at the level of starvation diet material. And so it's it's a it's a it's a dictate of desperation and the distinct possibility that nobody's in charge, not even the guy at the front at the steering wheel and everything's in in plummet. And so take care of yourself first, you see. That's where the notion seems to come from. Now, I'm not saying that the opposite is somehow real or that you take care of everybody else and let yourself be a casualty. I certainly don't mean anything heroic that way. And I'm not sure that it's that it's as stark a choice as what both of us are imagining it might be. But as you knew there was a but, so here it comes now. So we have the etymologically four words that mingle and that are all joined at the hip, not fused, but certainly joined at the hip. We have heal, no surprise, we have health, we have hearth, we have heart. So these things, they don't all mean the same thing, but they're facets of the same jewel, you could say, or petals on the same rose. And I've had the yips when it comes to healing. I've never used the word myself. I was just talking about this on the weekend when it's teaching in California. And so it's very interesting that you've chosen it because it rarely comes up. And I was performing with a appearing with a woman who's done a lot of birth work and the gynecological reconstruction after traumas and things of this kind. And the word heal is common in her vocabulary, her psychic and emotional vocabulary, as well as the one she employs to speak. And the appeal is obvious and very strong. But a question I asked her was, I confess to getting the yips about it. And then I asked her whether or not there was room in the in the lexicon of healing for anything that didn't require some kind of amnesia as part of the healing, because that's that was my principal misgiving, that without the degree of forgetting, that seems to be part of the arrangement, that that's what getting on the other side seems to me. And then I wondered out loud about the etymology of forget. And you know, typically in modern English, the the opposite is to remember. But the verb to remember is rooted in an old understanding we don't have anymore of a more primary verb, remember. Now we use it as a kind of noun adjective thing, but it was once a verb. That's why it takes the form of remember. But the actual opposite of remember is not forget, it's dismember. That's literally, if you're looking for binary oppositionality, you know, to help you from time to time, it is a helpful thing to do. Then that's a very useful distinction to make between forgetting, remembering and dismembering. So if you're at any act of remembering, which is mostly involuntary now, it's prompted, it seems more as a reflex or a habit rather than an act of realizing. There was a primordial state that the word suggests the time of remembering, the time when we were, we just didn't feel, but we were in fact parts of a whole, separable, but not distinguishable, if you will. And this is where our sense of everything possible came from, they say. So it could be an Eden-like vision, some kind of infinite garden vision. I don't know. Different cultures have different takes on what it would be. But the word implies that there was this kind of pre-lapsarian state where doubt was a sport rather than an affliction, you could imagine. Something happened. And the original antagonist that was the primary condition in that state was sundered somehow. And there's lots of stories as to what to play. Most of them have to do a disobedience in monotheistic take on things. We did something, we failed to do something, some combination of the two, and the consequence of our culpability in the matter is our dismemberment. That means our separation from all of that and therefore from each other. So the act of remembering literally means to gather back together again, that which was once intact and has subsequently been scattered. Let's go one step further then. The adjective intact doesn't mean whole. That's its secondary derivative meaning. The principal meaning intact is Greek for not touched. So it signals a kind of high evil state before there's any division, before there's any intrusion, before the before of the before, which if you've ever been in a romantic relationship with somebody you deem to be so perfect and so fine as to be untouchable. And then you inquired whether or not your unwillingness to touch was welcome. You may have been shocked to hear not so much, not so welcome actually. This kind of veneration is not good for human beings, right? Even though it's the stuff of romantic poetry but not so good for real life or daily life. Okay, what's he talking about? He's got a lot of things in the fire. Well, I'm talking about healing. So it seems to me that the precondition for healing now, one of them, not to throw the baby out entirely, but one of them is that you get over what the memory of the thing you're trying to heal from seems to have done to you. So there's a secondary order of damage, right? The principal one is the the onset of whatever it is. And the second one is the continued revisiting of the onset, which turns out to be worse. Somehow the onset's manageable, but the recurrence of the onset through memory is unbearable. So then we work on the memory, the willingness to remember the habit of remember and do everything we can to staunch the habit and change the meaning such that you can't remember it that way anymore. This is where my yips come from such that you can't remember it anymore that way. You're obliged to remember it now in a reconstituted fashion that carries no harm. And now we come to the word nostalgia. Now you know, and I know how the word is re-employed, these days. It's a kind of sepia-toned monella folder of life, you know, where the finer things reside, where the good old used to be somehow still is, that's some of sensibility. And you're not going to be surprised any longer for me to say, it hasn't meant that until fairly recently. The word nostalgia is available to you if you've ever looked at the label of any headache formula, any headache medication. The word "neuralgia" will appear. There's the root word "algia," you see. So you know, they're not talking about memory on the package of your anacin or buffer or whatever it is. So what does it mean in nostalgia? It means this is a little bit imprecise, but the imprecision is very fruitful. It can mean either or both of these things at the same time. The return of pain, or and the pain upon returning. So nostalgia, in that sense of the term, is a coefficient of memory. Okay, with all of that in place, it's time for Carl Jung, not because I'm a fan. I'm not really a fan. I'm certainly not a fan of what's been done with what he offered. But I mean, growing ups can wonder about these things without voting yes or no, without approving or disapproving, right? So let's try. As an old man, not me, him, in his late 70s, early 80s towards the end of a very long and remarkable life, he offered the following thing. He said, "If I'm forced to choose and very frequently I am, I'd rather be whole than be good." That's one of my favourite quotes, by the way. I love it so much and I'm sure I misunderstand it in its application in my life sometimes, and it gives me freedom to do things, perhaps, you know, feel like wholeness. But I thought you might say it and I love it. Please continue. Surely. Well, amen. I hear you. The excitement is real and it belongs. So it's a worthwhile meditation on secondarily of goodness. Now goodness for its own sake seems to be a more than legitimate goal for life, who among us doesn't really want to be a good person as long as the cost is not too high. As long as you can manage the subduing consequences, thereof it's a worthy enterprise. And he's wondering about it clearly in this observation. He's wondering about what the cost of being good is. And I think he's right on the money. This is far bit for me to say he's right on the money. I mean, I recognise something in his realisation, which I find stimulating in the extreme as you seem to do as well. And it's this, that being good is a subset of something else. It's not some kind of primordial condition that once you get back to it, you'll be fine and everybody want to be with you. It means that there's a cost to goodness for its own sake. And the cost is, as it turns out, of all things, wholeness. Being good for its own sake requires is an intolerant state in and of itself, because it can't contend with the rest of you. It tries to out-good the rest of you. In other words, the good part of you is trying to be good to the rest of you and finding it a very challenging enterprise indeed. Because the rest of you doesn't belong to the good part of you. I mean, I'm using the bifurcation, hopefully, it's far from that easy when you're undertaking it. But intolerance, I think, would be recognisable to you in what I'm describing. So then he says, you know, your capacity to be good is not a goal in itself. It's a consequence of something else, some other undertaking. And the undertaking is wholeness. And wholeness means a whole damn thing. All the inconvenient bits, all the stuff that doesn't seem to belong, all the unruly things, et cetera, you know. All the things that go screaming through a broken dike in the dark, you know, otherwise known as your childhood. And on and on and on. And the failure to the word they would probably use is integrate the failure to integrate all of that and make all of that answer to the word you. Rather than the preferred part of you, the failure to do so is the kind of functional schizophrenia. And being good for its own sake turns into a kind of regime of intolerant. Oh, I suppose pride is involved. I mean, I've never gotten where close, so I'm guessing at this point. This is an amazing observation and extremely fruitful and a beautiful recalibration of what a goal of life could possibly be if you're socially conscious and you're ecologically conscious. And you're psychically conscious. One of the consequences could be that the sooner you leave the COVID-19 part of yourself behind the sooner the new dawn can can occur. And Mr. Young in his age is saying, think again or think for the first time he's probably saying, no more running, no, make peace to the best that you're able with the part of you that's not peaceful. And would that that would be healing? My experience of the invocation of healing when I hear about it is leave that part out healing is then possible. Exercise, you know, the traumatizing business, no more trauma. And so I've never used the word heal to characterize anything I've been on about. And whenever I'm mistaken for a healer in an introduction, for example, I will be quick to correct the course of the enterprise that evening to the point where I'm remembering now being introduced one time as among other things, a visionary. Now, it's very kindly intended. And but if you're introduced to a roomful of people who look like this, that's an important detail. And you look like this too. And the person in the front of the room calls you a visionary. The chances are very good that you need the first 15 minutes of your presentation to get out from the hole that the introduction, introduction, dug for you. You need a step ladder just to start because people who look like me are not fond of people looking like me who are visionaries. We prefer our visionaries in the smaller, more cafe ole, huge way of coming about things. It's not, it's not understandable. But self-hatred is not part of being whole. It doesn't seem to me. It weighs against the possibility of being whole. So I stood up and I knew I had to deal with this visionary thing because the ripples of intolerance were just, you know, threatening to overwhelm the ship and we hadn't even started it. And so I said, I appreciated the introduction and I do my best to, to in the fullness of time, try to resemble some of the attributes that were ladled upon me. But as to this visionary thing, I said, I just don't recognize myself in the accolade at all. However, as I thought about it, as I was listening, divisionary seems much more accurate. And so I don't know that that's a word in the dictionary, but it's a word in mind. And divisionary seems to fit. There's times for it. There's times. There are circumstances that are made for the likes of me, I will say, not because they resemble me, but because they employ what I seem to be inclined to do. And divisionaryness belongs in the time of clawing and, you know, arbitrary and artificial, what would you call it? Intimacy and closeness, just for the sake of warding off the solitude. So anyway, I should stop and give you a chance. So I'm aware of the fact that when you do interviews, you are not intending to provide answers or to fix things. And so I do not want to invite you onto my program and ask you to tell me what is to be done. That being said, I wish to move towards something and invite others that there is a worthy thing to move towards. For much of my career, that has been towards personal growth and towards healing. I love that you bring up the young quote because it has become one of my favorites. And indeed, I think I have become more useful as I have become more whole. And I have found, as many do, that my stinky underbits are actually some of my most helpful places and spaces to speak from, as long as they are held in a way that's moderately socially acceptable. But it is a place to teach from. I think moving towards wholeness is a place to move towards. And again, what we're talking about here is what is the track to be on to become an elder. And we're relating to your book Come of Age and your work in this space. If the idea is that the goal here is not self-aggrandizement or even creating meaning in one's personal life, but the goal is to actually arrive at the age of eldership as an elder, not just an old person, that we'd be moving towards something. I have thought that that was personal growth, and I believe that I am wrong. I have thought that that was healing and has turned into a never ending call the sack of healing. I believe that it is wholeness. And yet, I also feel that there is an individualism that is part of the preoccupation with the self, even if the project is to make the self-hole. I am concerned that there is not a path to eldership that is joyful, that it can only be tragic, and it can only be a hoeing bear earth, frozen earth, because that's what's left. And I want so badly for there to be a path that is like a festival, and not like a festival in terms of never ending entertainment, but like a festival in the sense of the camaraderie of people joyfully in pursuit. This is what I want, and I'm not going to put you on the spot and say, Stephen Jenkinson, make it easy for me, give me the playbook, I know you don't have one. But what I wish to reckon with is where shall we turn our boats, because I believe mine has been in the wrong direction, and I'm unclear on where to point it. So yes, I'd rather be whole than good, absolutely, and I've been consumed with the idea of wholeness, and yet I don't know that I'm necessarily on track to be responsible to the earth as I will need to be for the generations to come, and I want to reckon with that. So where can we start such a reckoning, considering the foundation we've already laid? Where do we put our direction now? You can feel that towards the end of your question, the willingness to keep it wide open and let's see what happens, crashes and burns, and it does in fact tell me what to do in question, even still. I know, I know I was trying not to do that, and I just I want to clutch for something. I feel like that's a common experience. This is what being whole sounds like. It's the the crash and burn of good intent. So we can take our first of all, the notion that there is a point of departure is something to wonder about before we start to wondering officially. And so I'll offer you a little vignette that comes from my own life of the last few years. Before the onset of the pandemic, I was traveling like a mother. I mean, all over the freaking place, and I guess this year's beginning to resemble those days. I'm not sure it's wise, but the one particular year I was taking to two places, three actually within a calendar year that were for a kid from the New World, so-called New World, a staggering and yes, it's absolutely staggering visitation. The first was the real place of departure of Columbus's Little Crew. Outside could be, as if I remember right, and it's now filled in swamp. So there's reeds and there's the remnants of an old well, and this is apparently where he outfitted the ships, the three, the Nino Pinto, and the Santa Maria, to make the trip. Even though little further down the road, there's provided by the Americans of, you know, bygone time, there's an immense statue of Columbus pointing in the direction of America. I mean, it's, it's obscene. It's herculean. It's just ludicrously big. But that's not where it happened. It happened where I was. That's where it really brought me to. It's no longer in use because of the, whatever, the change of the water table and so forth. So I was standing at the beginning of something, at the actual ground zero of something. And it was so intoxicated in the literal sense of the term. I was so beside myself with the, being a child of the, the effluent of all of that, that I looked in my pockets for something to part with in some kind of mute and ludicrous acknowledgement that all of this was so, and that here I was, you know, back on the shore, if you will. And I had a money, a silver money clip, you know, bill of fold clip in my, in my pocket. And the money I deemed to be useless, but the maybe not the silver. And I, I threw it back, I threw it in the weeds, in the reeds there. I didn't fix anything at all. I didn't make anything better. I just partnered with something in memory, in memory of how it might have been there otherwise, how it seems like it could have been otherwise, how it's so desperately is not otherwise. All at the same time. That was one. Second, I was on the banks of the river ply in, I don't know where this would be, Devin, maybe, in Southern England. And they had brought me to the town, Plymouth, the mouth of the river ply, at where it empties into the ocean. And for Canadians, this is not a big deal, but I know for Americans, there are a wash in the mythology of that word, Plymouth, because of course they used it to apply, to a place that they run a ground on over on the other side. No, no, no, now over here is Plymouth Rock. And I stood there on the, on the very same key that they departed from in the 16, whatever it was. And there's a sign, and it acknowledges that from this place, on this particular date, certain people called, quote unquote, the Pilgrim Fathers departed here, and so ensued America. And man, I was a wash in exactly the same, oh my god, you know, just from the simple beginning, if it remained a simple beginning that remembered its own simplicity and its own beginnings, that was, the whole thing was wrought by desperation and flight risk, right? And in inability to proceed, at nothing to do with freedom and all that other stuff. But of course this is all lost at Pond First Contact and all the rest, and the official version washes over this thing, and it's gone without a trace, and I'm standing there at the very place where in that moment it could have been otherwise. This is where my mind goes. It could have been otherwise, and clearly it's not, and I am the spawn of this thing. Come back to mourn, you see. And all the tourists are looking at me like, dude, what's the problem? I can't even take it, well, I don't have a camera, but I couldn't have taken a picture. I mean, it was, it was hard enough to see it without, you know, using it as a home movie. But man, I think maybe all of that paled in comparison to the third one. The third one, I was working in Israel. I'd never been. As a Divinity School graduate, I studied the place up down in sideways. So I kind of knew where I was at some level, but I was ill-prepared for my Israeli sponsors bringing me to, oh, you'll probably want to see this, they said very casually. And they brought me to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is the third ground zero in a year, for me. And not necessarily in capital letters, the big one, but probably in terms of its consequence and its capacity to eclipse, it might be bigger than the other two. I'm not sure. But there I stood against the wall with all the frantic comings and goings of the devout and prostrating themselves on the stone and wiping it away again, and all the various denominations parading through and chanting and incense in the whole wild thing, and a sense of what began here, and what could have ended here, none of which came to pass. And knowing, as a Bible scholar, among other things, something of the actual blow-by-blow history of the first two to three hundred years, of that particular enterprise, the whole thing was really beyond my can, as they would say in Scotland. It was too vast. It wasn't lost on me, but I knew there was only so much that a mere wisp of somebody in his early 60s could have taken in. I did my best, but as Leonard Cohen said, I did my best, but it wasn't much. I couldn't feel so I learned to touch. Yeah. There I was, and between those three things, I stagger still, actually, with not a sense of lost opportunity, but a sense of the tragedy that underscores the allegation that we're willing to have it otherwise. I'm not sure we are willing to have it otherwise. I think it's an allegation. I think it's propane. It's butane. It wouldn't be great if we were not us, but we are us, and it is the way it is in large measure because this is what we've done. Not because we couldn't think of anything better. This is our better. This is the sum total of what we're capable of. You know, if the allegation that everybody's doing their best is a tragic allegation. I mean, if we're doing our best, and this is it, man, I'm not sure what the word human means anymore. If on the other hand, we're not doing our best, and this is what we have, I'm not sure that the word human means what we continue to use it to mean. So without these realizations, without the sorrow and the extinction and the execution of possibility for its own sake, without that, nothing happens. So we're talking about beginnings here, you know, and beginnings have already begun. You know, I'm not holding back here. So I'm not pretending you and I are not talking that this is somehow a proto-conversation in advance of some real, more real-ass conversation. I mean, this is it. So this brings us to the word catastrophe, as seems only proper, and it's more etymology time. So you know what catastrophe means. Today, we're apparently in the midst of one or several, and if that's what the word means, how could you disagree, or you disagree at your own peril, you could say, but that's not what the word means, until fairly recently has never met that. It comes from two Greek words. Forgive me if you're well aware of this thing, but maybe a few people are listening not so much. Next time they use the word catastrophe, they'll hesitate. Maybe they may stutter step instead, and that'd be all right. So the prefix is spelled in Greek K-A-T-A, and it's a preposition in Greek, and it answers the question where, or kind of in what direction, or secondarily, by what attitude, you can say, and people generally will say down. That's what it means. It means down. It's the direction down. It doesn't quite mean that it infers a little bit more. It means down, long enough, and then eventually with great perspiration in. That's the implication of it. So it's a great kind of descent for the sake of overcoming the boundaries of the threshold. So down and in eventually, if you've really done your work, and you don't pull up prematurely, so it's an observation of liminality among other things, and then the necessity of it, not trying to thwart it, but understanding that there's certain things that the thresholds end to forbid, and so you have to understand the threshold, literally, stand under it, so that things foundational become available to you, and you to them. That's catan. And then the root, which is a word we, I don't, I can't think of a word we use in English, except there are people who study certain lyrical constructs from medieval times, or earlier Byzantine music and so on, or certain phrases, poetic structures, and they'll use this word in a very official way to designate something like a haiku, something very formal. But the word has a much older meaning than a particular sentence structure, or verse structure, or rhyming cadence, or that kind of thing. It means something like so. There are disparate things. They're brought into a certain kind of alignment, not really side by side, something else, some other means of organizing or assembling, whereby the nature of their assembly lends to the gathered thing, the degree of strength, employability, and consequence that wasn't there when things were not assembled. So a very good example would be this right here. This is your braid. For those who are not seeing a video, this is your braid. Sorry, yeah, yeah, that's right. So a braid of hair is a strough, okay. So if we dolly back one step from the very practical, it comes from weaving, you can tell or or cinching or like a very, very old way of making cordage. So it's a very, very old understanding that by virtue of assembling these two or three or four things or more, you achieve something as inconceivable as you keep them separate. So you can see how it lends itself to all kinds of secondary elaborations and metaphoric take on things which absolutely belong. So let's reassemble the word and what is a catastrophe? What has been a catastrophe ongoingly until recently? The answer would be it's a way of going down into the mystery days that you would be so unlikely to choose for yourself by virtue of the nature of descent that left your own devices you'd never do so. But such is the compassion of the arrangement that as it happens though you will do so alone and you must do so alone because failure to be alone will distract you from the descent, will persuade you against the wisdom of the descent, understandably so but unfortunately so. So this thing is undertaken alone, not by choice but by parsing out and by winnowing you do so alone. And the the course of your aloneness is inescapably trying it says however it says the allegation of your aloneness is slightly overwrought and unnecessarily a steer because the truth of the matter is you are following a path though you meet no one on the path the fact that you're descending there is something that you're following unbeknownst to yourself not through intent but simply as a consequence of one foot psychically or otherwise in front of the other and the path that you're following was made by people who descended before you who you will not meet but you will meet their descent. Now you know why we use the word descendant to describe those who came before you see. And so the understanding of the word catastrophe is there's a way it has been made for you to enter into the mystery days and though you'll have no companionship of the obvious kind your predecessors will be your companions their example will be your your companion and the allegation of your aloneness suddenly is modified you see and these are both true at the same time and maybe that's what the old man meant by whole so we could use a good catastrophe is the point and a catastrophe is it's understandable that it's taken on the secondary tone that it has now which is things deeply unsought and unwelcome because you know one of the precursors of the descent is the unwillingness to do so or the goofy often drug addled alleged inclination to do so which these are thin these two things the inclination and the drug inflamed inclination are very close to each other they're not opposites at all but the descent in spite of yourself is a much more useful proposition than the self initiated one and this is why in examples of cultural initiation of you know young children it's not the kids idea and as soon as they become the kids idea they short circuit the initiation and finally then we're in the realm of blessing as a result of this and if you've ever contemplated the word blessing probably you've dead ended at the notion of upside you seek a blessing you're seeking someone's approval for something you mean to do and you think it could be bettered by obtaining this approval first a kind of approval permission matrix that's what a blessing would seem to be but of course it's never meant that until recently so this is an old Anglo-Saxon word so it has Germanic origins and if you say it properly you can actually hear it so bless although it's flattened in our mouth now in contemporary English comes from the old a Saxon word blood yeah so as a verb then to bless means to bloody does it mean to kill it probably did at one time very closely related to the act of making sacrifice right of bloodying so the understanding then has nothing to do with approval said everything to do with the realization that for something to proceed otherwise to break the habit and the claim of the habit upon us culturally speaking or even psychically speaking individually the principal undertaking here has to be a rupture of the habit preferably not so violently but sometimes it seems to take that for example our age would be a good example that how bad does it have to get you wonder from time to time and you think well how about a good old pandemic surely the god that's bad enough and low and behold three years into the proceedings it's clear it's not bad sadly so to bless if you ask for a blessing what you're really asking for or as we would say in the vernacular you're asking for it but what though you're asking for a pass a get out of jail card no collect $200 and keep going no what is it then well you're asking someone to end what you've grown accustomed to to bloody the transom if you will the the way of coming and going the place the threshold of coming and going and so you know where you get the notion of Passover from then which the Jewish people still maintain on a yearly basis and then literally the blood on the on the transom above the door marked you know who made the cut who didn't if you will so it's no surprise it's blood because that's blessing so without endings you don't have initiations of any kind so it's a very inclusive but not entirely tolerant regime of blessing it doesn't blink it doesn't let it pass it won't let it go for your sake it seeks to end a certain conviction that you might have that's remained unexamined and that the world needs changed sorry you're about to ask me a couple of things some time ago and I kept going but I'll stop now now I understand well I'm learning to understand the way that you weave your points together and how certain things need to unfold in their time so I by no means desire to interrupt you the reason I was gesturing is that I wanted to offer a poem in a particular moment because it is my favorite poem and it is the poem by Hafez which is don't surrender your loneliness so quick do you know this poem I don't let reminds me of staying the course in the context of a solitary descent and this great Sufi poet writes don't surrender your loneliness so quick let it cut more deep let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can something is missing in my heart tonight has my eyes so soft my voice so tender my need for God absolute I wanted to bring that into the mix because it's very special to me and it is a kind of balm for this sort of experience as I hear you describe catastrophe as going down and then to finally go in and that there is a desire to pop out of the going down not finally go in for a while go in for a while go in fair what I was thinking is you go down to the point of the going in so there's a down going until such a time as you go in was that inaccurate sure and not say that you end in but it's not to say you win precisely and would it were so I think about going down to go in as analogous to autumn into winter that the shedding of autumn is a going down and that the internal stillness of winter is the in what you have said about if you don't pop out of it then you will get to a point where you go in and the not popping out of it I think is the tricky part here because I vibe with this reluctant invitation that the way forward it's not you're choosing but you go down and that this is a liminal experience that this is what was symbolized in rights of passages in different indigenous cultures it's reluctant and you don't want to do it it's obviously quite unpleasant but you need to you need to go all the way through with it for it to have its medicine this is what I'm believing in what you're saying and how I'm understanding this and also in my own wrestling with rights of passage including doing indigenous rights of passage myself as an attempt to self-author something like this is that it's quite painful the process as much as I have had glimpses of this process which is part of the reluctance of it and the desire to pop out is great and I would imagine that never in human history have we had more ways to pop out of a descent you know there have been no greater distractions up until this point in history and I imagine moving forward there will continue to be greater and greater distractions and perhaps that's part of the trouble of our times is that we're not called into this liminal space because none of us want to do it and we've designed an entire world so we don't have to so I'm laying that all out and I'd like you to tell me if I've groked to your point that this is we're trying not to be fix it e so it's not the way forward but perhaps a way forward if I'm understanding that correctly and if so I have two questions about it which is one how do we stay in and not pop out and while I know there's no certainty on offer here but how do we know that we are in a process of going down to go in and that it is for lack of a better word good to be doing this or towards wholeness to be doing this or it's just a mental health crisis we're just we're just getting more fucked up and more incapacitated to do the work of being present with the world in this mode of eldership that we're trying to as opposed to arrive at so in some how do we avoid popping out and how do we know that there's a kind of perhaps mythopoetic arc of going down in that that leads us somewhere and that we're not just all going crazy because I honestly think about that whenever I'm in something that I feel is akin to what you've described so did I get that right and if so do you have any answers for me? Oh God well you know we got a lot of arrows in the air at this point right so do we let any of them land or do we just keep firing I think we land but I trust your judgment yeah well I don't know how wise that is but you don't have much choice in the matter so I mean I believe you are wiser than I so just by virtue of perhaps earned experience right right well I appreciate the accolade but consider the source of the observation if I'm wiser than you how would you know okay I'm just going to let you take it from here I'm just digging deeper okay well all day long I think about it and then at night I say it where did I come from what am I supposed to be doing I have no idea if I could taste one sip of an answer I would break out as prison for drunks but as it is I'm like a bird from some other aviary time is coming when I'll be off but until then who speaks with my mouth and who sees with my eye what is the thing called the soul so it's from the same more or less time period as mr. Hafez isn't it so this is this is roomy of course you that you would have guessed and it's a nice twin to your observation your recitation to make me think of it well look you know the the the requests for life rafts in the midst of a storm are completely understandable and not to be disqualified but that is after all among other things what you're asking for and the questions that you've just asked me how do you not pop out you said it about three or four times obviously it's an important consideration for you and you know in your bones what the answer is and you're asking me as a way of eluding the answers that's already available to you which is this you don't or put differently if you derive ways of making sure you don't pop out you've popped out that's the nature knew it yeah you knew you knew it but you didn't want to know it and I don't blame you this is what I meant in the beginning about the reflection this is why I was nervous to talk to you because I knew you wouldn't let me get away with things please continue yeah well of course it's not the motivation to quote not let you get away with things I'm what I'm doing is I'm sympathizing you know not not in a kind of well it literally in the sense of patronizing yes in what it actually means which is patronizing means to engage in the work of fathering that's what the word means has nothing to do with what it's the way it's used today so from that point of view yes I think this is true I'm sitting there not somebody who's above the fray myself at all but I hear the longing after a kind of surely somewhere and all of this there's a path that's delightful and that can translate into an apriori reassurance that this is doable so you know what comes the rest of the observation has to be this any solution any venue that weeps affirmation before it's undertaking is the great grief bypass that it is that's what it is you don't get to know that the work is going to be efficacious prior to undertaking the work you just don't that's what hope is and I understand the attraction of hope but if you've read anything I've ever said on the subject you know I find hope transgressive terribly transgressive particularly the more troubling the time the more transgressive being hopeful tends to be what do you mean by that I mean this you and I are talking right now we're employing this machinery and the friggin the eons between us in order to try to do so and I think we're doing pretty well in serving the circuitry in so doing but shit I forget the I forget what I was just about to say we edit so take your time yeah can you run me of what I said the second last thing is it well now I'm blanking now I'm just thinking about the machinery comment that you just made we're talking about the the patronizing and the fathering and that if we could affirm it before we meant then it would be hope and hope is transgressive thank you thank you yeah no reason to edit any of that out this with that really belongs so so how does hope work so you and I are sitting here talking right now and here's what's not required for us to do so you may have hopes for the outcome you may have hopes for the process I may have my own but none of those hopes are necessary for us to occupy the seats and go back and forth in other words what this is what I'm saying we don't have to hope we're sitting here talking in order to sit here and talk in fact it's ludicrous thing even to surface as a as a thing that's not necessary you wouldn't even occur to you you wouldn't even sit here and go geez I hope I'm hopeful that we can talk and all the compound variables there are so what I'm saying is by definition being hopeful predisposes you against the conditions of the present moment in favor of something else which we normally call the future near future or other some of the kind and in that sense the way hope works is very much like a mortgage so if you've ever undertaken a mortgage which is a very inauspicious term undertaken because the truth is you're taken under by a mortgage you know no matter the the volume of the the death the mechanics are notorious and the way it works fundamentally if you just think about house mortgage to you the obvious one so you enter into a regime of indebtedness which is principle and interest and in so doing there's many things that were once available to you in the present moment that are no longer available because you're mortgaged so the money and everything that it could have been that would have gone elsewhere goes to your death mostly your interest not so much your principle for the longest friggin time certain things that were possible in your present moment cease to be possible as a result of you counting on the future that's how hope works that's how being hopeful works now there is no now for hopeful people there's then for hopeful people so I understand the attraction of hope but it is after all a kind of entry-level mistake to make to imagine that you have to be hopeful so that I can count on you for the kind of work you and I describe your failure to be hopeful immediately disqualifies you from ongoing labors until you revive your hopefulness your sense of what's possible and then by virtue of your your fascination with the word potential apparently you're ready for the labors of the day again see and while you're working on yourself the rest of us have to compensate for your absence from the scene and then once you get your shit straight then you're entirely responsible now until such time as you go off the rails again and here we go again so all of this is is determined by the notion that you you've got to get paid first psychically speaking and then you're capable of doing the work but it seems to me particularly in a time of trouble that grownups have the responsibilities to undertake the work minus the assurance that it's the right work to do this is not a recipe for do your thing baby not at all this is a recipe for a lot of discipline inquiry and the occasional lunge as a consequence of the inquiry the inner work you're describing indeed has born fruit but it turns out to be a lot bitter than you imagined it would be okay so it's not like there's no consequence consequence is the order of the day this is in fact what the word awake actually means etymologically it doesn't mean to be highly friggin alert and on the other side of all the doubt no that's not what now you can wear white all the time it's not what it means the word awake old Anglo-Saxon word again so it's good stuff the prefix the app prefix doesn't mean not or un which it's just what it means typically in Latin or Greek derived words it functions prepositionally again and it means something like of or pertaining to and then you have the real word wake which we use in English from time to time in one of two settings typically one is post-mortem so you have this event that is called into being by virtue of what somebody passing from among us that's what so without the absence you have no wake easy and then you come to the other meaning which is when you make your way through water or through air or through life something fans out behind you which if you stop it stops I mean with entropy it stops and that wake means if you reassemble the word the condition of being awake means to be caught up now in the web of consequence it emanates from all of the undone and the done things and the meant things and the unment things the things that you said the things that you failed to say and you're failure to recognize the failure of being able to save them and compoundedly and exponentially and the condition of being awake is not the condition of being quote free or enlightened it's the condition if you will of being indarkened or being gathered into the way it is which the last time I checked is what makes you reliable as a human being especially in the time of trouble that as you know the old adage being something like this what did I live in such a way that nothing human is foreign to me but this undertaking is borders on the monstrous because you have to let a lot of things in that aren't quote you unquote certainly not favorable and the part of you that rides heard over you would never authorize your access to this part of you that you've already disqualified called the darkness in other people or or the troubles of the times okay so let me speak directly to your question about how do I know what the work is well the question how do I know what the work is it's time out from the work okay because the how anything that begins with how do I you know it's a calculation and what's its purpose is to get to the quick as soon as possible cut to the chase eliminate the middle man psychically and spiritually and psychologically and dynamically and ecologically and all the rest is to get there quick so this is a particularly North American compulsion and attraction this notion of immediacy what the word immediate actually means is nothing in between and you know Americans in particular are immensely fond of immediate relationships with John Lennon called instant karma you know let's feel close and then we can do something whether it's a romantically or or politically or whatever so you you collapse the distance between people and now things are possible well that's true certain things are possible as a result of this collapse but the word intimate has never meant an arrangement of preference it means a relationship of proximity instead and when you eliminate the in between when you eliminate the intermediary the medium in other words you you collapse discernment completely and you're you're in octane land so being able feeling able feeling readyed feeling called feeling that the thing is you know it's quick and it's soon and it's now and it's it's like surging and it's uh ayahuasca induced and it's and you don't have to wait for anything and it's you know the film between you and the world is dissolved completely in God you're a child of the universe that the white snake is coming through your eyes and blah blah blah so while you're puking your guts out with realization you know the rest of us are doing the ordinary shit isn't it and it's not true the rest of us are doing it sorry that's not that's too cheap a way of saying it I think you take the point it doesn't need to be elaborated not usefully any longer but you can tell my predilection for understanding first is waning it's almost it's virtually not there anymore and you could say well look at your age I mean what else what would we expect from you you could say that and there's no defense against me being 68 and I obviously don't feel any need to defend myself against the allegation that by virtue of being 68 I'm kind of past the discipline the mental discipline thing and I'm just out in the pasture isn't it just chewing well the truth of the matter is I'm not out in the pasture just chewing I'm working my ass off all the fucking time and I do mean all the time I just did a month of work mostly on East Coast and the West Coast United States and I'm about to work most of this coming year I'm not bragging what I am saying though is everything you're hearing from me doesn't come from me sitting in the corner with my arms folded feeling like you know I've done everything I needed to do I've answered the call and this is this is the rumination of things casual so this is this has come from a book that I wrote about a year and a half ago called a generation's worth and it's the way I concluded the book so there's an old adage in counseling or therapy psychotherapy they say pay attention to the first two minutes and the last two minutes there is the times negotiable but that stuff is when those times are when the stuff comes out so here we go here's my PS on the matter of elderhood while the crisis rains there is a cloud of merciless unknowing this rising now the isolation that's been forced upon the human world over the last year has clarified things egregiously and we are truly living out the unment consequences of our choices now the crisis has collapsed the old order of self-determination and so there is a regime of mental distress that's coming and it will gather and it will manifest after the all clear signal is given when we're told that it's safe enough to come out and play a few years ago the Canadian government decided the time had come for formally acknowledging the presence of indigenous survivors of residential school in our midst and in this matter recognition meant confession in fact they required and so as part of the public display of acknowledgement there was a public display of governmental culpability in the matter and there was a companion announcement that a fund had been established to recompense the survivors and their families for the lost childhoods and for the carnage and all the survivors needed to do was formally apply for their pay now the rest of the story that I'd like to tell relies on anecdotal stories that I've heard and I may overstate the breadth of the consequences came next but be that as it may with official recognition and with the government's mayor culpah and with the grief grant all now in the open there was suddenly an alarming spike in the rate of suicide amongst the aging survivors of residential school now what they endured in the schools only they know they and those of their tormentors were left and the consequences for their ability to live a family life of any kind only they and their families know now but how then to understand that after a life of all of that the last straw was the apology and the payday and how is it that the long awaited vindication of personal pain amounted to the unindurable to the unlivable in a way that the pain itself never did well something like that awaits us now when the powers that be tell us that it's better now and that we can go back to normal many of us won't many of us won't be able to many of us will have lost track of normal we'll mistrust what normal will do to our memories of acute isolation and the beggaring of self-determination and many of us will have seen things in ourselves or in our close kin or in our friends that we will not be able to look away from they will be at least as bad as the confinement was and we won't believe what it's done to how we see things or to what we seem capable of now or worse the rest of the parade will just go on as if the whole thing was no big deal and so the elders those of them left will need to show us over and over what deepened by diminishment looks like because they will be the frontline workers of the armistice they will be the essential workers of the all clear I couldn't say it better than I said as to what in a time like this elderhood should be reasonably expected to deliver upon but it turns out it's not the hallelujah chorus it's not the echo of amen resounding in the valley it's a sob that's the time we're in that the sound upon awakening is the sound of a sob and that's what you're hearing from me a very prolonged sob that can't find quite its reason to stop there's other things too but that belongs and it's a worthy response to what's become of us and what we've done with how it could have been otherwise whether you're talking about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or outside Cadiz or Plymouth or self-determination or this burning man situation or anything in between the times are such you know hunter Thompson said it as well as anybody did his line was when the going gets tough the pros turn weird and weirdness seems to be the order of the day as long as you understand that the word weird is an old Anglo-Saxon word it doesn't mean strange it's translated pretty close to not weird but fate and fate is best understood not as for closing of what's possible but as as follows well the gods clearly have spoken now what shall we do it comes as no surprise that we end our conversation with a question I knew it would be so yeah and nevertheless I am in live end perhaps in some of my more sorrowful pieces and parts of myself but in live end nonetheless by sharing this time with you and I'm sure that our listeners have been as well and I can imagine that there will be people who are just becoming introduced to you by hearing you speak today and will be well want to know where to go next because there is no possible way we could exhaust all of your thoughts on this matter and and others and so I'm doing the same thing that I said I wouldn't do and I've been doing the whole time which is to say what next how what's the doing direct me be be that be that that father in a time of no fathers for me now and for our audience and I guess the final question is where to next and perhaps it can be as light of a question as what of your works shall we read where can we continue this conversation but I I guess it just comes back to the same yearning and perhaps it's the yearning for eldership generally which is to say please direct me because I'd like to go forward right completely understandable man and of course you know it's going to be a thwarting answer or response and it and it goes like this I think I learned this either in a death trade or the counseling days that I've repented from doing somewhere in there this is what occurred to me and you remind me of it now so we are in a dark place right and I don't mean metaphorically I mean literally is dark it's not it's getting dark too dark to see is Dylan said so we're down in some subterranean situation we got one light between us right one of them uh forehead lights whatever they call them and let's say we've decided you're going to wear it because usually the inquirer inquirer wears the lights if you will they point in the direction they want to go so it works like this I'm behind you not in front of you I'm not I'm not I'm not clear in the way you're going you're going as you go I got my finger hooked into your belt loop from behind so we don't become too too separate but the end of the day I keep having to say to you tell me what you see next and then you report what's in the beam and then I say okay turn to the left by two degrees or turn to the right by a couple or look up at just a little bit now what and then you report accordingly and between your reportage and me not losing track of the belt loop something happens you see and it's not quite what you're asking for but you know the old ad is you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows not really so it's not I'm not a weatherman I'm just a divisionary who hasn't lost track and it's found some way to keep my finger in the belt loop of the people younger than me but I'm behind you I'm not in front of you I'm not clearing the way I'm not the way but I'm familiar with the notion and it's not a complete stranger to me and I've been deep deepened by diminishment and to that extent I belong I'm not waiting for affirmation and I'm not asking for I'm not asking for permission occasionally I'll ask for forgiveness that's as close as I can go between then and now what happens next is the answer is not it's not hypothetical we'll see literally we'll see so what you do I mean when people ask me something like that my response tends to be something like well there's a track record of we'll see you have seen so what did you do the last time you saw because that will probably inform what you do now so you don't need me to tell you you already know what you've done question is how reliable do you want your track record to be such that you want to do it again that way because generally the questions come from the same place I'm after time and so the challenge is to find a question that survives the answer instead of a question that's executed by the answer and I'm fairly good at that now I make them freely available right so you hear me mostly wondering but not wondering blindly wondering the way the way that image of the you know the subterranean place and and us having catastrophized and for the moment down will work but you can't live down there that's the nature of catastrophe they're temporary and you should want them to be temporary but not to be over too quick and there's the that's where the discipline or the discernment happens you can't want it forever because you'd be a bad junkie then but you can't want it over fast neither because that's a different kind of junkie state so when you're there you're there and I'll leave it at this when I was working in the death trade a lot of people had their parents dying no surprise and they'd be around maybe late late teens early 20s and so they're away at university many of them now they got one of their parents dying and nobody was planning on this bad timing and so they're in a terrible dilemma about should they go back to school because they're going out of town right or out of state or out of country whatever it is and so they would ask me literally what's the right thing to do my answer was always the same which was not really an answer in the terms they asked but an answer nonetheless and it went like this listen if you're going to go back to school then you go back to school and that's where you are because you made your peace with you're not going to be here if on the other hand you stay here you're not going to school you're learning now then you stay here and this is your school now but you got to choose and you will then you got to live with the consequences of the choices and you might but somebody's going to die no matter what you do and you're not going to fix that so the question becomes when it's your time to die is this the memory you'll want to have conduct yourself accordingly there Stephen it's been such an honor to finally meet you and I'm so grateful that you're in the world amen thank you so much for the invitation and listen let this not be the last time we can answer the question that way too I would love that I would love to be more connected in the future and perhaps meet you in person during one of your many many tours and journeys it means a lot to me that you came on the show and I know that people listening have been able to wander in a different way because of it so thank you all right very good thank you too thank you for joining us for life as a festival if you like the show you can support it by sharing it with your friends following it on Spotify or reviewing it on iTunes if you'd like to get more involved you can join our Facebook group life is a festival where we talk about the show and you can suggest new guests if you really like the show and maybe want a little bit more visit my digital tip jar at patreon slash life is a festival.com whatever you do I hope today's podcast helped you make your life just a little bit more like a festival and I'll see you on the dance floor