circle on rock
School of Lost Borders
Newsletter
Winter, 2009
In This Issue
Generation Vision Quest:
Radical Joy for Hard Times
Rites of Passage for These Times
First Non-Profit Donations
Joshua Tree Snow

I sit here this winter morning remembering the dreams of my youth

How they did flutter
So alluring in their fiery promise.
How they did unfold like a tree
Every season a mark
Every agony a new turn
The bright sunlight of birds
Captured in shapely branches
The wind has removed many
Drought has taken its toll
A twisted trunk and eroding soil
Reveal roots where they enter the sweet earth

- Em North
Quick Links
What does Rites of Passage offer us right now?
An invitation to an ongoing conversation.

 
During a recent dinner conversation, Meredith and I found ourselves speaking, in a state of wonder and surprise, about the increased interest in the School's programs during these times of social and economic struggle. We asked ourselves how the School could best respond to these inquires, and to the subsequent tension caused by the increasing sense of loss, grief and hardship that so many are living through today. It occurred to us that such cultural transitions, although difficult, also offer a kind of sacred pause in which people feel a need to turn more fully into what is vital and important in their lives. This real but, simple, truth is part of the essential nature of rites of passage. Rites of passage are about letting the old, ineffectual ways die so the new can emerge. And there is no question that, as a country and as a global community, we are on the threshold of something very new.
 
As a culture we are in the same creative tension of loss and promise that call people to a vision fast. There is in the collective culture a huge litany of the devastation our world faces, and at the same time, there is an emerging longing for what is possible. In the US we now have a president whose campaign has inspired hope and has asked for a return to compassion and individual responsibility. How much has been evoked with the simple line of "Yes, we can"!  How similar this feels to the energy in circle when a quester speaks their intent and gives voice to the fullness of the life they are claiming. There is no separation. For the collective to live the promise of "yes we can", each of us must find our way to say "yes" to what life is asking of us. 
 
Just a few days ago, I received an email from a man I have never met requesting that we republish a quote from Steven that used to be on our web page. Steven's words reminded me that the connection between individual and cultural transformation is not only true now, but is also, as the title of the piece claimed, The Legacy of Lost Borders. "We began way back when, in the days when revolution was in the air, when rock and roll was filled with protest and the young were sticking flowers in the gun barrels of National Guardsmen. Even then, the answer to the dilemma of culture was clear: True revolution will never come about until the children find a way to get to true adulthood -- and the adults have a way to attain true elderhood and death. And none of this will ever come to pass until we learn the ancient art of birthing people via rites of passage in wild nature, our true home." What wants to come to pass now may not have the same revolutionary edge that was present in the 60's, but there is a similar call for a cultural metamorphosis that is calling us to our true home.
 
Rites of Passage is both an evolving entity and an ancient archetypal pattern. This is why the school has called our work a "modern vision fast". We have always tried to find a balance between honoring the many indigenous cross cultural roots of the ceremony while holding the understanding that the ceremony will continually shift and evolve in response to the needs of the times and our people. David Whyte speaks to this natural interplay in his wonderful poem "Working Together", "We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause."  Today I send my voice out in honor of our common cause. For all of you who are feeling the call, we are here doing our work as we have been for over 25 years and our simple bare bones ceremonies can guide you in shaping that life you long for. And we whole-heartedly acknowledge that it is the courage and dedication of each individual "yes" to this life that forms and shapes the School, inspires our work, and gives us the strength to move forward.


 -- Angelo Lazenka, Executive Director
Hawaii Rites of Passage for These Times -
Meredith LIttle


There is a rumbling in the fabric of our lives these days ... a sense of change, impermanence, and transparency.  The illusion that we are in control of the nature of things slips shimmering into the cracks of political, social, financial, and environmental crisis.  It becomes more and more impossible to ignore our fragility; and, standing in the truth of our relatedness, to not feel the potential of our natural resilience.
 
Being the fool that I am, I find myself fascinated to watch what these times evoke from us. We are being initiated by crisis and the potential of our species possible extinction; while teachings of global relatedness, resource limitations, economic priorities, and a re-evaluation of fundamental values, guide us inexorably toward a new story.  Awareness of death to the world as we know it informs us about how to live our lives, and for so many millennia rites of passage have offered guidance through times of such change.
 
There are some who optimistically envision an era of potential global and cultural rites of passage, a paradigm shift and "awakening" of a global nature.  I can only imagine what this might look like, and our imaginations are a tool of transformation.  Yet surely personal realignment is within reach now.  It happens as naturally as the season's cycle, and our body's age.  The question remains how consciously we choose to participate in our maturation.
 
The ancient, pan-cultural wisdom of rites of passage teaches us that first there must be a dying, a letting go, of those basic assumptions and self identities that no longer serve the new givens of our lives.  Then a step into the all-important fertile ground of the pause between "what was" and "what is becoming", the threshold time of opening to all possibilities while tapping the deepest resources within us.  Finally the challenge of stepping back into our personal and social lives to act in alignment with our new understandings, and creating a life style that supports this new story.
 
Personally, 2008 has been a year of questioning my own life style and self-definitions.  I have asked myself whether the work that I do continues to be relevant to the challenges of our times.  Does it truly support the oftentimes-harsh realities we are finding ourselves more keenly aware of?  Do rites of passage, strengthening our relationship with nature and our own nature, and exploring the dynamics
of living and dying, truly help someone who has just lost their job, or finds him/herself overwhelmed by awareness of global warming and cultural genocide?

 
I begin this new year feeling recommitted.  In the wide open, long nights of the Eureka Valley just before Thanksgiving, I more formally let go of what I'm aware no longer serves my life and these times we share ... while feeling such gratitude for the enduring wisdom of the land and our own precious nature that knows how to die and realign, as painful as it can be at times.

 
Hawaii Radical Joy for Hard Times:
Coming Together to Find and Make Beauty in Orphaned Places -
Trebbe Johnson


When Oneida Indian engineer David Powless received a grant to research and develop a process for recycling hazardous industrial steel waste, he scrambled jubilantly to the top of a towering mound of waste and declared, "I will conquer you!"

In an instant, however, he recognized that his attitude was all wrong. "I realized that the waste was an orphan that had been lost from the cycle of life," he says. "I saw that my task was to bring it back to the cycle of life."

With a new sense of beauty, community, and imagination, Radical Joy for Hard Times brings the orphaned places of our planet back to the cycle of life and in the process engages people in a new environmental activism based on love of the earth.
 
Discussions about environmental threats often leave us with the impression that avoiding catastrophe is our only reason to act. But what is really necessary to give us the impetus to sustain the Earth? Love.

We love our home planet. We love Nature in a direct and personal way, and we love the big, grand, wild idea of it (which is why most Americans adamantly want to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, even though few have ever been there). The natural world not only sustains us physically, it also moves, inspires, and comforts us. When we're happy, Nature mirrors our feelings, and our attention is drawn to blooming flowers and broad, sunny vistas. In moments of intense personal suffering, some small event-the sound of a robin singing in the pre-dawn dark, waves crashing to the shore-reminds us that we are not alone, that stubborn, persistent, teeming life will go on no matter what and will somehow carry us along with it. We even love those places that no longer seem lovable, or even livable, because we remember their former beauty and continue to feel our emotional connection to them.

Yet, as Carl Pope, President of the Sierra Club, once pointed out, "The literature on the environment is devoid of the word love."

Radical Joy for Hard Times affirms that when you love something, you long to express your feelings and act on them.

Why, then, turn our attention to places that have been degraded through clearcutting, dumping, urban sprawl or other degradations? Because our emotions, our memory, and our compassion are big and brave and compassionate enough to embrace what we've loved and seem to have lost-and because there are many simple and exciting ways we can create to bring them back to the cycle of life. Besides, when a dear friend is ill, you don't turn your back on her. You sit with her, hold her hand, exchange news, comfort her as best you can. Although you hope she'll regain her health, hoping is not
what brings you to her side. Love is the motivator. Similarly, Radical Joy for Hard Times goes to ailing places because we love them and refuse to abandon them.

These hard times of ecologic and economic insecurity demand a new way to get intimate with the land we want to sustain. This traininginvites you to reacquaint yourself with some beautiful and desecrated "orphaned" places, open your hearts to what you discover on the land and in yourself, find and create beauty there, and tell your stories. Through these simple steps, we revive troubled places through loving attention and embark on a path of passionate activism based on love, compassion, and creativity rather than fear and guilt.
 
Radical Joy for Hard Times will be offered by Larry Hobbs and Trebbe Johnson August 15-22 in the Seattle area (exact campground to come).
Man on Road  "Generation Vision Quest:
Rites of Passage for an Awakening World"
--
Gigi Coyle, Meredith Little, Win Phelps, and Will Scott

At the end of October, a small delegation of SOLB guides joined a gathering of rites of passage leaders from around the world on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Meredith and Gigi, both on the advisory board, represented the School (along with Win and Will) joining some eighty others from as far away as Australia, South Africa, Central America, and Alaska, for five days of networking, meetings, ceremony, council and presentations on the theme of "Global Rites of Passage."  Our meeting place was truly significant, beingone of the newest and most remote landmasses on the planet, and the ceremonies offered by the First Peoples there profoundly impacted the group and what happened throughout the week.
 
Inspired by Melissa Michaels (Surfing the Creative) and Joshua Gorman (Generation Waking Up), the Generation Vision Quest Conference was the "seed gathering" for a larger endeavor called Global Passageways, which seeks to bring international dialogue and recognition to the topic of rites of passage in our modern times.
 
G.P. "...is a growing community of our world's leading rites of passage specialists, positive youth and elder development specialists, and social change movement leaders who are gathering together to revitalize the role rites of passage have in the healing and transformation of our lives, our societies, and the planet Earth."   ~ (www.goldenbridge.org/global)
 
The gathering was both inspiring and verychallenging, as it brought into one room nearly a hundred leaders and attempted to navigate the waters of cultural diversity, language barriers, indigenous ceremony,"western" schedules, intergenerational dialogue, many different definitions of rites of passage, and a wide variety of leadership styles -- all while trying to maintain a thread of discussion on our shared work.  It was a lofty endeavor, fueled by the fires of the nearby volcano and full of frustrations, empathy, turmoil, beauty, confirmations and realizations.
 
The question of a global rite of passage danced around the room and across small tables of discussion over meals.  What does it mean to be alive at this precarious and amazing time on the planet?  Is it true that humanity as a whole is just now evolving out of its adolescence and into a more adult phase of existence?  And if so, how do we participate in a species-wide rite of passage?  Who are the youth that will guide us, and the elders that will welcome the human race back across the threshold?  And what does it look like for humanity to collectively claim our adulthood, endowed with all the gifts and responsibilities therein?
 
Generation Vision Quest did not produce answers to these vast questions.  If anything, the conference provided a template for asking them all the more vigorously and realistically.  What emerged clearly from our time on the Big Island, was the sense that the work we are doing is incredibly valuable in this day and age; that it's not ours alone to do, but ours to share with peoples, cultures, and methods from around the world; and that perhaps more than ever before there is a global calling for youth to be seen and honored through their life-transitions, so that we may help to create the next generation of empowered leaders and visionaries to carry us through.
 
Along with many others, SOLB had lots of materials on display.  We presented our work in a breakout session, sitting in a circle rather than using the lecture format. Meredith was asked to be part of a panel and gave an initial description of rites of passage to the full group at the beginning of the conference.  Given some of the challenges and difficulties presented by the larger conference dynamics, neither the materials presented nor the breakout groups received much time and energy, and yet the personal connections made always seem to make such meetings valuable.
 
Diversity was a hallmark of the work presented and of the group as a whole. The idea of a rite of passage is being used in the wilderness, in schools, neighborhoods, prisons and urban centers, on nearly every continent, for a wide range of young people (as well as "middlers" and elders), from Latino gangs to the Girl Scouts.
 
The Global Passageways project we trust will move forward, challenged and invigorated by the gathering in Hawaii. It was a great gift for many, and those of us from SOLB who attended feel it was a challenging and revealing mix of ceremony and conference, and a provocative conversation on the wide-ranging uses of our work around the world. We look forward to playing our part in this growing global network, and to watching the mystery of a global rite of passage unfold.

 
 From our Board of Directors

"Our First  "Non-Profit" Donations"

So many of you, over the years, have taken many a turn at the SOLB mailings, sitting around tables, stamping and pasting! As a new Board member, my turn came with the snail mailing of the letter announcing our new non-profit form. Angelo worked to send out the same letter by our electronic e-mail letter format. These were all sent in mid-December.

Lo and behold, we happily announce that we have received over $5,000 in donations so far! Meredith has commented on the fact that some are from people who go way back with the School, and have not even participated in recent years.  This work matters in people's lives, and they are demonstrating that even in hard times there is money to give to what you love; to what has heart and meaning.

How to expand our donor base, how to keep raising money is a big topic as a non-profit...an on-going topic, obviously...but our first effort we felt was successful.
 
Upcoming Events

Mid-Winter Vision Fast, February 15-25th,
Death Valley

Dying as a Rite of Passage, February 28th-March 8th,
Death Valley


 group shot


The School of Lost Borders is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization committed to creating opportunities for people from all walks of life who seek ways to mark and celebrate the significant transitions in their lives. Solitude and silence in wild nature, the commitment to community, honoring of personal intent, and the acknowledgement and responsibility to bring forth one's gifts are the foundation of our ceremonies and teachings.


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