A WILDERNESS RITE OF PASSAGE FOR YOUTH
The modern passage from childhood to adulthood is prolonged, ambiguous, and often painful. The young person must pass through a stage called “adolescence” which allegedly equips him to enter and survive the adult world. Adolescence is generally considered to be a troubled time of rapid emotional change and physical growth marked by clashes with parents and increasingly independent behaviour. During adolescence, the child is expected to apprentice himself to the complex roles of adulthood, to acquire feelings, insights, experiences, and values that reflect maturity. Nevertheless, he is to remain in his place until his eighteenth birthday. At that time he will be magically transformed into a legal, socially responsible, self reliant, sober member of adult society.
In Childhood and Society (1963), Erik Erickson speaks of the modern adolescent’s need to “self-initiate” himself in order to cope with a culture which inhibits his realisation of full ego-identity. Because we do not provide meaningful, coherent and challenging adulthood initiation experiences, young people often create and experience their own. In our small rural town of Stroud in Gloucestershire, the rites of adulthood chosen by many of the young involve drinking, drug-taking, wild partying, underage “thrill driving,” house breaking, theft and violence. None of these activities are encouraged by the community or the law. Yet these adolescents are drawn to such activities because they consider them confirmation of their ability to behave maturely. These self-initiated growth-events, and many more, cannot be discounted as meaningless, destructive, or childish behaviour. They often produce significant spurts in personal growth. Undoubtedly, there are some adolescents who, by virtue of their ability to learn from their experiences, are “adult” long before they reach the legal age of eighteen. Nevertheless, “delinquent” adolescents are a drain on community resources and their parents and families. One mother recently lamented: “Can’t they find a legal way to prove that they’re grown up?”
The “legal” means by which youths prove their maturity can hardly be said to comprise a coherent or meaningful rite of passage. The all-night vigil on the sacred mountain has devolved into an “all-night party.” Few, if any, cultural rites attend a girl’s first menses, a teenagers loss of virginity, the first paid job, the driver’s license, or the attainment of voting rights. Age seems rather to be the primary cultural determinant of maturity. One needs to do nothing to “earn” adulthood but to grow older.
Because our culture lacks coherent, meaningful, and generally sanctioned rites of passage to adulthood, the modern puer aeturnus has emerged – the eternal juvenile who ages, but never leaves childhood, who repeatedly attempts to prove his maturity with self-initiated growth events that are no longer appropriate to age and station.
The puer aeturnus archetype flourishes within our culture primarily because such individuals were never properly initiated into the mysteries, responsibilities and privileges of adulthood. They are still using adolescent means to prove to their peers that they are mature. Until we reintroduce meaningful and commonly sanctioned rites of passage for our young, the eternal juvenile will not only flourish but become an ever more dominant force in our everyday lives.
A Modern Rite of Passage
Our intention here is not to lament the absence of meaningful puberty rites. Rather, we wish to propose the implementation of coherent, authentic, and traditional rites of passage among our youth. Specifically, we would like to discuss a particular rite, based on traditional, pan-cultural “vision” or “dream quest” practices, which have been used among modern adolescents for the last twenty-five years. The model presented here presents but another step in our evolving search for rites or ceremonies of passage that are both relevant and challenging to modern youth growing up in a milieu nearly devoid of such practices.
Though it has many variations, a vision or dream quest always contains three necessary ingredients: fasting for a prolonged period of time (here, four days and nights); complete solitude; and a natural or wilderness setting. These essential ingredients are antipathetic to cultural mores that say:
1. If you go without food you are starving.
2. It is dangerous to be alone without the support of others.
3. Nature in the “wild” is fearsome and perilous.
Hence, such ingredients are rarely found in culturally sanctioned rites of passage. The intent of modern culture seems to be to eliminate the element of risk, to pare down to blandness the existential content of its passage rites. Nevertheless, many modern youths have been challenged to fast alone in the wilderness. Their interest is an indication that the many-thousands-year-old rite is still relevant, regardless of perceived risk. The multi-dimensional benefits they receive from participation will become apparent as the model is presented.
As we practice it, the “vision quest” or “wilderness fast” is a therapeutic form devoid of specific theological content. It is an empty, ceremonial framework filled with, and given meaning by, the values and perceptions of each individual. The central issue is not validation of the belief system but validation of the candidates’ readiness to assume a new life station.
The dynamics of a wilderness fast, or of any rite of passage, were first defined in 1909 by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. The model we describe follows his classic three-phase formula: severance (“separation”), threshold (“marge”), and incorporation (“agregation”) (van Gennep, 1960). First, the child is severed from parents and childhood home and prepared for the trial that confirms his adult, not his adolescent, abilities and sensibilities. Then he goes alone and without food to a wilderness place and remains there for a period of time. The solitary experience of this time of seclusion is called the threshold. Alone and hungry in the threshold world, the candidate is “in the passage,” moving from a former to an antecedent life stage. When the trial is over, the candidate returns to his community and to his life as an adult. The third and final phase of the passage rite involves the incorporation of the candidate. He “in-corporates” by taking on the body of the adult world.
We shall now explore these three phases in detail.
SEVERANCE
The severance period of any rite of passage ceremony is marked by commitment, study, pre-threshold meetings, and preparations on the physical plane. We prepare the students wholistically (physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually) to endure the threshold trial and to incorporate on the other side as adults. The candidate is asked to set his life in order, to “square himself” with parents, peers and loved ones, and to review his childhood with an eye to ending it. An important part of the preparation has to do with helping the young person review his childhood years to find the symbols, archetypes, dreams, teachers, loved ones, gods, heroes, and events that will be relevant to his adult life. He is encouraged to let go of those aspects of childhood that are no longer relevant or realistic. “Who am I now that I am no longer a child?” is a good question to start with. Any answer to the question involves a personal strategy for survival that precludes certain old forms of immature behaviour.
Pre-Threshold Meetings and Classes
The candidate is given time to formally prepare. There is no use in his attaining adulthood via a “quickie” rite of passage. The ideal arrangement is at least two months’ preparation time before the candidates cross the threshold. Thus the course is offered to volunteering seniors in their last term of school.
Pre-threshold preparation includes instruction in self-generated ceremony: i.e., how to perform simple ceremonies for one’s own benefit or for the sake of others. Candidates are shown how to use sound, silence, movement, empowerment, symbols, abstention or taboo. The student studies these basic elements and decides to use them, not to use them, or change them as they see fit.
Instructional Materials
Instructional materials are provided or recommended to the candidates once they have officially declared their intention to participate. We keep this preparatory material simple and relevant to their life passage. They are given a list of formal questions and asked to return the answers in writing or to record the answers in their journals. A typical list of questions runs as follows:
- Why was I born?
- Why will I die?
- Who or what is God?
- What is my relationship to God?
- When I am afraid, how do I conquer my fear?
- Can I live without my mother, father and home? If not, why?
- What am I going to do about those things that stand between me and full emancipation from childhood?
- What do I really want to do with my life?
- Am I willing to go for it?
- Who are my real friends?
- What do I plan to do when I return from the wilderness? Specifically what?
- Who are the real heroes and teachers of my life?
- What gifts have I been given to live this life?
There is no dearth of literature, film and drama pertinent to the childhood adulthood theme. The enterprising teacher can arrange for meaningful discussions based on a central myth, story or film. Emphasis must be placed on the relationship of this story to their lives, for now is the time for them to begin working with a realistic yet challenging myth populated with their own kind of monsters, their own teachers, and their own symbols.
Cleaning Up the Room.
Candidates are advised to do whatever they can to “clean up their rooms” before they cross the threshold. This means more than just the actions of picking up clothes, cleaning out rubbish, vacuuming, dusting, or rearranging things in their oft-maligned but private refuges called “bedrooms.” Of course, there is no reason why they cannot do that too. Rather, we emphasise their need to symbolically sever from their childhood by picking it up, dusting it off, cleaning all the junk out, and reassembling it in the shape of adulthood. They cannot do this by laying back and reminiscing about the carefree days of innocence and fun. They have to demonstrate to their parents and to themselves that they can “clean up their rooms” on their own without prompting or help.
One way to “clean their rooms” is to clean their bodies and to make them ready for the threshold trial. This means not only diet preparation but also abstention from drugs and alcohol. The candidate cannot cross the threshold with toxins, residues or other impurities still clinging to his body. He is also asked to prepare himself through training workouts or physical exercise to present himself in good physical condition.
Working responsibly on his own, the candidate collects required signatures and information for his release and medical forms, gathers the necessary equipment together, and comes up with the money to pay for his participation – if this is not possible then a fair exchange of energy can be worked out. The fact that he has to come up with money, by his own efforts, or work it off somehow, enables him to value his participation more than if it has been free. He is reminded that his ability to pay his own way either in cash or work is indicative of his ability to survive as an adult in this culture.
In a very real sense, the preparations that the candidate makes before the threshold determine the world to which he returns. If he leaves his life messy and his affairs in arrears, then he returns to the same disarray. No one will cut his childhood umbilicals for him. Parental participation in this area is vital and encouraged. No one knows better than the parents the true state of the candidates preparations to take on the roles of maturity. The signs of independence from childhood are varied and many, but letting mum or dad do all the work is not one of them. Yet mum and dad are accustomed to doing the work and often have a difficult time keeping out of it. The candidate is counselled to shun parental help when it is offered in this preparatory phase, even when it would save him time, effort or money. Once his parents see him preparing independently, they begin to adjust their perceptions of his abilities and to treat him as though he really is emancipating himself from them.
THE THRESHOLD
The time arrives for the candidates to be removed from the socio-cultural context of their childhood homes and neighbourhoods and be taken to a wilderness place where they can fast and live alone for four days and nights under the supervision of their guides. The guides have to be experienced and well trained in the ways of the wilderness. Their main objective is the safe conveyance of their charges through their threshold ordeal. To that end they have carefully prepared the candidates to survive their isolation and hunger without mishap and with minimum impact on their environment. Mastery of the subject matter of his survival is the most important part of the student’s preparation – and of the guide’s teaching – for the underlying objective of any vision quest ceremony is safety. Hence, threshold area selection, screening, field survival instruction, environmental awareness, emergency and first aid instruction, travelling procedures, basecamp safety, first aid and emergency procedures, are all a part of the curriculum.
Alone and exposed to the elements, he experiences and discovers his relationship to the natural world, of which he is an inseparable part. His solitary sojourn in the wilderness is not a simple camping trip. Literally, he is bonded to the natural environment, and in order to survive, he learns how to accept and live in his surroundings. With a great deal of empty time on his hands, he is compelled to look within and without himself from new perspectives. Because there is no one to help him, he has to face these fears and find his own way of mastering or accommodating them. Fear becomes an ally, bracing him with surges of alertness, insight and courage.
The risk factor of a four-day-and-night solo fast in a wilderness place for youth, or adults, might seem high. Indeed, foundations and insurance companies certainly find it so when we have approached them for funding or for an affordable insurance policy. Nevertheless, we find the model to be safe; certainly to the extent that no one has lost their life or even suffered any grave injury. There have been a few cuts and bruises, to be sure, and a few people get lost (only to find themselves several hours later). The experience produces little if any psychotic reactions, although occasionally psychosomatic ailments are reported. The buddy system, an old Outward Bound technique, makes it possible for the candidates to maintain invisible but daily contact with each other and with base camp in case of emergencies.
A spotless 12-year safety record is due in part to the care and skill of an experienced staff. Another important factor is that of the candidates themselves, who display remarkably good sense, balance, and self-care while they live alone without food in the natural world. They have respected the land they lived upon. They do not challenge or defy it. They are compelled to accommodate themselves to it.
Returning Early from the Threshold
Sometimes a young person will return early from the threshold period. About one in ten “abort” in this way. Untried, inexperienced in the art of measuring themselves, they sometimes bite off more than they can chew.
Extra time is spent with these young candidates who often sink deeply into feelings of “failure.” But the threshold is a “self-test” and in a self-test there is no failure. Every candidate is unique. Adulthood itself is presented as a way of testing oneself in the world, not an examination to be passed or failed. Candidates and their parents alike are advised to hold this in mind. The early return of a candidate gives him an opportunity to know his limits and to see what kept him from enlarging them. The experience of “failure” is incorporated within a positive educational orientation to personal growth.
Parental Participation
It is typical for a young candidate to return from the threshold claiming that while he was alone and starving he remembered his parents with great fondness and love. During the threshold trial the “participation” of parents reaches its fullest extent. Of course, the parents were not even there: the child was alone and on his own – beyond their direct intervention.
Most parents are understandably proud when their child announces his intention to participate in the passage rite. They are pleased that their parenting has led him to be challenged by such a test. He has chosen to demonstrate his maturity in a meaningful way. On the other hand, they are understandably anxious. Have they done right by their child? What about all the times they failed, or were weak? What about the storms that are even then breaking at home? Parental anxiety often reflects the current status of emancipation struggles between parents and child.
Parents often express the desire to participate in such a way as to maximise the benefits they and their child receive from his candidacy. Their participation at pre-threshold and/or incorporation meetings is encouraged, for the meetings often prompt a dialogue between parents and child regarding their and his ideas of what constitutes adulthood. Many parents regard the wilderness fast as an important step toward maturity and expect more adult attitudes and behaviour from their child when he returns. A young candidate can be strengthened in his own sense of maturity if his parents are willing to open a more adult environment for him within which to practice his new responsibilities and privileges. The incorporation phase is made a thing of beauty when the parents are prompted to talk about topics like love and family and the impending time when Susan or David will no longer live at home and there will be a clean, empty bedroom in the house.
We have found it beneficial to invite the parents of candidates to meet together, without their children, at least twice during the course of the passage rite. One meeting is held during the four-day-and-night period during which their children are fasting in the wilderness. A period of silence is maintained in honour of them.
A second meeting is convened in the incorporation phase, within a week after the candidates have returned. The parents meet to talk about changes that have occurred in their relationships with their incorporating children. Again, the accent is on the positive – not on their misery as parents but their opportunities, challenges and learning situations. The parents are encouraged to look ahead to the time when they will no longer be actively parenting. What else does their life story hold in store for them?
INCORPORATION
The candidate’s “birth” into the secular body of adulthood is almost always accompanied by “contractions” far more powerful than those he might have experienced during the threshold phase. Now the child-adult has to start the painful process of proving he is “grown-up.” Personal preparedness and ceremonial attention to the re-entry process, always a dangerous and challenging time, can mitigate the confusion and bewilderment of the return. If guides and parents alike take certain precautions, the difficulties are eased.
Incorporation, the third and final phase of the passage rite, is the most critical. The returnee need validation and understanding. He also needs to sever from the “guides” and from the threshold passage itself. The passage has to be “sealed off,” psychologically speaking, so that the candidate cannot go backward through it and wind up in childhood again. Thus the guide warns the candidate not to become nostalgic about his threshold journey. The new adult cannot go back to the womb now that he has left it. He has to be turned gently but firmly toward the world of civilisation and experience that he must inherit – where the “doing” of his vision awaits him:
“I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.”
(Black Elk)
The candidate has to return and prove that the rite he has experienced has truly confirmed his worthiness to be adult.
Ideally, as a graduation exercise, the fasting quest might be offered at the end of the last year of the candidate’s schooling. The candidate might then return to a post-school life and the beginnings of adult responsibility apart from the placenta of home and school. Family, peers, and the community at large would honour his new life status. In our experience, however, this ideal is hardly ever attainable. Candidates often return to the holding pattern of adolescence and to the family they left behind. This incorporation within the childhood context hardly approximates the transformation in social station accomplished by a traditional rite. Nevertheless, some of the ancient power is rescued when the candidate returns to at least a modicum of support. Some of this support is elicited by his own behaviour, which manifests shifts in personal values and life goals. Some validation and support comes from parents, siblings or friends. With the aid of significant others, the candidate drops certain symbols of his childhood and replaces them with new ones from the adult world. He begins to look even more seriously at the practicalities of making it on his own, without relying on the help of his parents.
Regardless of the homes they return to, candidates are reminded to set concrete and realistic goals for themselves. Ambiguous or currently unrealisable goals are not necessarily discouraged, for the seeds of a visionary life might be present there – emphasis is placed, however, on the candidate completing the first, practical steps of incorporation. If he cannot take these steps, he might very well lapse into paralysis or lassitude. Among the first practical steps might be:
- Getting a job
- Performing well at school
- Living responsibly and in peace at home
- Improving relationships and communication with parents or siblings
- Ending drug or alcohol dependence
- Starting to live with financial responsibility
- Making careful choices about who was really a friend
- Ceasing to blame others for his own situation.
Such practical actions are the skeletons to which the muscle and nerve of the candidate’s life story begin to adhere.
When the parents see practical actions being taken by their returning children, they are encouraged to open the door marked “adulthood” even wider. A variety of sensitive issues are raised when the parents play their cards right. Many decide to confer new levels of responsibility and privilege on their offspring in exchange for commitments to the wholeness and well being of the household as long as he dwells there. Some choose to let him in on family or personal matters previously withheld from confidence.
From the perspective of the “midwives” (the guides of the rite), the passage rite has not been completed until each candidate has taken necessary formal steps in incorporation. The candidates emerging from the threshold ordeal can be seen as infant adults. They have to be carefully incorporated into the bodies of adults, “grounded” and “centred” within the circles of their new intent. Simple but meaningful activities are built into the first few hours of their return. These serve to focalise their purpose and illustrate the challenge of adulthood. The preparation and sharing of food, giving gifts, making speeches, thanking the earth for protection, cleaning up camp, hiking out, washing off the dust of the threshold world and changing into clean clothes, are given special emphasis.
Council of Elders
In Native American societies where rites of passage were an integral part of cultural life, those who returned from the threshold were often brought back to a group of community elders who listened to the returnee recount his experiences, discussed with him their meaning, gave him a new name, and validated (formally accepted) his new life status in the community. In modern times, by and large, such councils do not exist with the power to confer adult status on the child. Nevertheless, they can be of great worth as an additional step in the incorporation of the new adult. Our “elders’ circles” consist of guides and older adults who are familiar with the fasting quest process and are willing to stand as witnesses to the young candidates’ accomplishments.
The elders’ questions cover the various aspects of the quester’s participation in the vision quest. They make comments, share insights, and generally support those aspects of the candidate’s character which they consider heroic, balanced, sound, strong, self-reliant, mature, etc. The basic assumption shared by all is: as the candidate has behaved and reacted during the threshold trial, so he will behave and react in his life. Emphasis is clearly placed on the candidate’s ability to solve his own problems. Parents participating in the council further enrich the meaning and long-term effects of their children’s experience.
Long-Term Benefits
The candidate’s journey into adulthood is not merely outward, toward physical or social objectives, but also inward, toward self-realisation. The incorporating returnee now faces the adult wilderness. The vision quest of his life has begun. Now he discovers the truth of the old adage, “One does not go to the Sacred Mountain merely for oneself but for the good of one’s people.” The young adult has created a new balance from an imbalance in the body social and in his family. He has successfully marked his passage from the uncertainty of adolescence to the challenge of adulthood. In the process, his parents, family, friends, and relations all benefit. The entire culture is enriched by his solitary journey.
In the end, it is exceedingly difficult to draw hard and fast rules about how the incorporation process works. Every returnee travels a unique path. There are no valid criteria by which to measure his success or failure to negotiate his own labyrinth. Some candidates go off to further studies (another kind of holding pattern), but at least they have left home. Others find jobs and are emancipated from home within a year or two. Some enrol at the local community college and continue living at home. Some enrol in the armed services, often as an alternative to living in an insufferable home situation. A few have married before they were twenty-one. A small percentage has run foul of the law (we also offer the fasting quest to “at-risk” youth) and a smaller percentage still has served time up in prison.
An evaluation of the programme for youth entering adulthood turned up predictable shifts in attitudes, values, and behaviours, such as “strengthened self-image, increased independence and self-reliance, positive, long-term changes in family relationships, and feelings of being supported by parents and siblings up to six months after the threshold period ended.”
But statistics do not tell the real story.
The real story is told by the subjective life experiences of each individual. There are ups and downs. There are times of clarity, illumination and growth. There are also times when the person wonders if he has made any progress at all. The depressions, nevertheless, are essential to the continued growth of each one. As the yogi told his disciples, “After samadhi, we sweep the floor.” A young person cannot be incorporated into adulthood when his head is in the clouds – he would fail to see the dust seeping through the cracks and the dirty dishes piling up in the sink. Dreams and visions will not clean the house or put food on the table. No doubt, however, the visionary resolve he brings back from the threshold will bring him many floors to sweep.
CONCLUSION
British culture is many years away from wholehearted adoption or implementation of such traditional life-passage ceremonies as the one described here. Though there is a tendency to accept the basic assumption that “such activities are good for our youth,” there is a corresponding tendency to fear or denigrate such activities as fasting or living alone in the wilderness. Many westerners have been so set into the “modern way” of convenience, plenitude, and immediate sensory gratification that the very idea of “going without” is a threat to their sense of well-being and propriety. Obviously, until they are acceptable to the culture, passage rites will not be a part of the British State School Curriculum.
In the meantime, it is hoped that the practice of fasting alone in the wilderness will grow modestly but steadily throughout the country, propagated by private and alternative schools, drug rehabilitation centres, and outdoor education programs. Twenty years ago, such programmes did not exist in British culture, except in isolated instances where far-seeing parents or relatives of teenage children provided such experiences for their charges. As the practice of the vision or fasting quest gradually becomes a part of our culture, more institutions dealing with the young or with “at-risk” youth will open their curricula to include it.
In these days, many say that the health of our culture depends on our ability to provide a “growth context” in which our children can mature and find meaning and purpose. Many also say that the current cultural means of providing “growth-events” are inadequate, that children are growing up as spectators rather than participants, that too many of our youth are content merely to dream the dreams of others instead of acting on their own. Many say that the times are critical, not only for us here in the British Isles, but for the world, that we need young men and women of courage, imagination and commitment who are not afraid of the challenge of the future. This proposal addresses that need.
“…..for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant…… nothing if no that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the condition of contemporary life.”
Joseph Campbell – “The Hero with A Thousand Faces.”
Appendix
Excerpts from teenagers’ journals made during their threshold time indicate the quality and tenor of the experiences and the insights they gained:
Eric, 15:
Why am I here, Wind? What purposes do I have in this world? How can I control my emotions, like anger and fear, and all the others, so that they will help me instead of tearing me apart?
Your purpose is to help and make happier the people on earth.
Who am I, Wind?
Take off your ring. What shape is it?
It is a circle.
What are you sitting in?
A circle.
How many sides does a circle have?
It doesn’t have any sides.
Good. Now, where does it end?
It doesn’t have an ending.
You are right.
But what does this have to do with the questions I’m asking you?
Have Patience and listen. I am like a circle. I have no ending. But when my cycle ends, your cycle ends.
Why is this?
Because you are a part of me and I am a part of you. Remember this: when our cycles end, the world ends. Understand the circle and you will understand yourself. As for your emotions, you do not want to control them, but to understand them. Then you will be able to deal with them. This goes the same with people.
Wind, how do you know these questions before I ask them?
Remember, I am a part of you and you are a part of me. Now go and enjoy your surroundings. Tonight I will speak to you again.
Thank you, Wind.
You a welcome, Companion of the Wind.
Annette, 17:
The thunder is shaking and I am scared. . . . I sure hope that there are no flash floods. Don’t rain, please. I am not ready for rain. I want someone to hold me. I feel lonely, very lonely now that those rain clouds are coming. . . .I hate the fact that all I can do is sit and wait, sit and wait. I can feel what loneliness is . . . . I HOPE IT DOESN’T RAIN! I’m not the homesick type, but I would give almost anything to be with my parents.
Sue, 17:
Today I made my circle and named myself Lone Stone Among the Rest. . . . Then later this afternoon I sang my name and walked around my circle. Doing this gave my name more depth and meaning. After I had been walking around my circle I had to quit because I was losing my balance. I started singing it again, when I got to my place overlooking the valley. I started to cry yet I continued. My name symbolised my cutting the line connecting me to my parents, making me a separate and unique human being.
Keenan, 16:
Crisp and cold. I awoke with a bloody nose. I’m tired today; my energy is gone. I sit in darkness surrounded by light. My eyes see beauty, but my bones feel death is near. My mind tells me that soon I shall rejoin and rejoice with my people. . . .Oh, the wind is cold when it blows across my body. It makes me feel so alien — though why should this be? My ancestors lived with the land for hundreds of thousands of years. But I feel so puny, so exposed, like the spark of life within me is so small.
Rich, 18:
I can’t overcome this intense feeling of loneliness. I keep thinking I won’t make it. But I know I just have to. The day is so long. The sun never seems to set. I’m very hungry. I just can’t go to sleep. I cried tonight. I cried because I’m real lonely. I’ve never experienced anything so awful.
Claudia, 17:
I saw a bright, fiery ball. There was a black hole in the middle of it. I felt my whole being rushing, as if vacuumed, toward that hole. I entered it. Blackness all around me. So peaceful. The feeling of being received, accepted. I opened my eyes. I was here, on Earth! I realised that that image symbolised my Passage. I was born to this exciting, beautiful, ugly, dangerous, receiving Earth.
David, 18:
At dawn I awoke to find myself surrounded by “Wessex Longhorns” I could just make out their faces in the mist. What could have been a very scary sight was in actual fact very comforting, I had a strong sense that these cows were in fact protecting me as I moved through the passage to becoming a “Man”. No, they were actually helping me. Eight Longhorns, in a perfect circle around me, each one touching horns with the next. They were all looking at me in the centre of the circle, covering me with their breath. Through the breath of ancient cattle I became a “MAN”.