The Edges of Becoming
On Soul Initiation and the Need for New Maps
Lately I’ve found myself searching for more vision and inspiration. I do get my fair share from the children in my life and for that I am immensely blessed . But lately I’m needing more to keep balanced with all the shit going on!
Like many people, I look around at the world and can easily become overwhelmed by what seems to be unraveling around us. Some days it feels as though we are witnessing the slow collapse of a civilization that no longer knows how to care for itself, one another, or the living earth. Rather than becoming consumed by the endless cycle of headlines and outrage, I’ve found myself searching for people who are asking a different question. Not simply, How do we fix what is broken? But, How do we become the kind of people capable of creating something altogether different?
That search has recently led me back to the writings of Bill Plotkin, Joanna Macy, and others who have courageously imagined what a more life-centered civilization might require of us. Alongside their work, I’ve also found tremendous encouragement over recent years in discovering the Mad Pride/Psychiatric Recovery movements and communities like the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, the Icarus Project, and the Hearing Voices Network. After spending much of my life understanding my own experiences through the narrow language of psychiatric diagnosis, finding people willing to hold these experiences as potentially meaningful, transformative, and deeply human has felt like coming home.
These writers and communities, along with the children, have renewed my sense that another way of being human together might actually be possible. Whether I live to see such a civilization is beside the point. Seeds still need to be planted, and every generation has the opportunity to tend some small part of what comes next.
One of the ideas that has stayed with me from Bill Plotkin’s work is that we cannot create a life-centered civilization using the same consciousness that created our current one. We need new maps. Or perhaps, more accurately, we need new ways of seeing. Plotkin suggests that finding our way requires something much deeper than new ideas. It requires what he calls soul initiation, a profound transformation that loosens our attachment to the assumptions of the dominant culture and opens us to a deeper relationship with ourselves, one another, and the living world.
Central to his work is the idea that individuals and entire cultures can become developmentally stuck. What Plotkin believes, with examples all around us, is that most of us are stuck in early adolescence. Just look at who we glorify and choose to lead us! If this is true, then the transformation we long for asks far more of us than better policies, better technology, or even better education. It asks us to mature. It asks us to become different people than the culture has conditioned us to be.
As I have sat with these ideas over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself wondering whether my own life has been shaped by a kind of soul initiation I never would have chosen and certainly didn’t recognize while I was living through it.
If so, it arrived through two very unexpected teachers.
One has been more than thirty years spent alongside young children.
The other has been a lifetime shaped by experiences once labeled bipolar disorder.
At first glance these seem like completely different stories. Looking back, I no longer think they are. Both have slowly invited me toward the edges and, from there, back toward something heart-centered, wild, generative, and creative that feels like part of our human birthright. It is a journey I am still on as I enter my sixties while simultaneously wondering more deeply about what it might mean for me to become an elder, as well.
As I reflect on my life, I realize that much of my deepest learning has happened in what I have come to see as edge spaces: places where the assumptions of the dominant culture loosen just enough for something else to become visible. Not outside our culture, but simply close enough to its edges that I could begin noticing what often remains invisible from the center.
My experiences of madness brought me there first. Not romantically or gracefully, and certainly not without tremendous suffering. They dismantled many of the assumptions I had inherited about identity, success, certainty, and even reality itself. They left me disoriented for years, searching for a language capable of holding experiences that seemed far too large for the medical explanations I had been given. It has taken decades, along with the companionship of communities like IDHA and the broader Mad Pride movement, to begin weaving those experiences into something that resembles wisdom.
I also wonder what might be lost when people who experience the world with unusual intensity are treated only as problems to be managed. The sensitivities that can accompany madness are not always gifts. They can be overwhelming, destabilizing, and dangerous when a person is frightened, isolated, unable to sleep, or without the care they need. But those same sensitivities can also carry profound empathy, imagination, perception, spiritual longing, and an ability to notice what others overlook.
Perhaps, if we view these experiences as a reflection of a sick culture needing to heal it may help us approach them and ourselves differently?
When met only with fear, control, or attempts to make the experience disappear, these capacities may never have the opportunity to mature. When held within care, community, patience, accountability, and meaningful guidance, perhaps some of what first appears only as disorder can become part of a larger process of human development. I sometimes wonder what visions, insights, and forms of healing our culture has discarded simply because we did not know how to care for the people carrying them.
And then there are the children who became my second teachers.
Early in my growth as an educator, I slowly realized that the children needed far more space than I had been taught to give them. They didn’t simply need better lessons or more carefully planned activities. They needed room to work with what was already there, already alive within them. As I stepped back, I discovered that they were becoming my teachers much more than I was becoming theirs. In learning how to support their maturation, I was also being asked to shed some of my own fear and conditioning, and continue with mine.
Day after day, year after year, I watched children create communities from almost nothing. They arrived each year as strangers carrying different temperaments, histories, fears, gifts, and ways of moving through the world. Over time they became something more than a collection of individuals. They developed rituals, shared stories, inside jokes, ways of working through conflict, unspoken understandings, and a growing sense of belonging. It was messy for sure, yet beneath all of it I kept noticing a relational intelligence that emerged most clearly whenever adults resisted the urge to manage every moment.
It’s pretty clear that modern education is firmly rooted in fear and preparation which quickly stifles the imagination we so desperately need. We are so busy fearfully preparing children for the future that we rarely pause to ask what they might already know about living well together. I believe now that our most important work is not manufacturing better human beings, but creating the conditions in which the deepest qualities of our humanity can remain alive long enough to mature. If we are listening the planet is screaming for this!
What children may need far more than fearful preparation for an uncertain future is the protection and cultivation of their imaginations, along with a deep grounding in how to live inside questions without immediately demanding answers. We will not find our way through the challenges ahead by relying only on the systems and habits of thought that brought us here. The problems we face will require immense and practiced imagination, not imagination as an escape from reality, but as the human capacity to see possibilities beyond what already exists.
Children naturally practice this every day. They create worlds together, solve problems, try on identities, change the rules, follow unexpected threads, and imagine possibilities no adult could have planned for them. They are remarkably capable of remaining inside uncertainty, but they also need mature and initiated adults who can protect the space, help parents see beyond the fear, offer meaningful boundaries and help them carry what is too large to hold alone.
Perhaps one of the most important shifts in education would be to stop treating every question as a problem that must quickly be answered. Our systems tend to reward the correct answer, the efficient answer, and the ability to repeat what is already known. But the future may depend upon people who can remain present within uncertainty without immediately retreating into fear or reaching for false certainty. Instead of constantly steering children toward our conclusions, perhaps we need to become more willing to grapple alongside them with the larger questions facing us all.
“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart… Try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them — and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
None of this becomes possible without attending to the emotional life of the community itself. Before children can imagine boldly, wrestle honestly with difficult questions, or grow into people capable of caring for a larger world, they need to experience what it feels like to belong. They need communities where conflict can be repaired, differences can be held, emotions can be expressed without shame, and each person discovers that their gifts matter to the whole. In my view our greatest educational task is not preparing children for the future but helping them experience, day after day, what a healthy human community actually feels like.
So much of what we may need is already here when we take the time to fully observe a group of children just being themselves. If children really do arrive carrying these relational capacities within them, then maybe our greatest misunderstanding is not educational but cultural. Perhaps we have misunderstood human nature. And if we misunderstand human nature, it should not surprise us that we also struggle to imagine how healthy civilizations come into being.
Joanna Macy called the transition from an industrial growth society toward a life-sustaining civilization the Great Turning. What inspires me about her vision is that she did not present this turning as something guaranteed to happen or as a future event we can simply wait for. It is a choice we make through the lives we are already living. It happens whenever we protect what is alive, interrupt what causes harm, create new ways of organizing ourselves, or recover a deeper awareness of our belonging to one another and the earth. The Great Turning may be unfolding quietly all around us, carried by people who may never know whether their particular contribution made a difference. Maybe our task is not to know how the story ends, but to discover what small part of the turning is ours to carry.
So here I place a few small contributions toward a new map, drawn from where life unexpectedly asked me to stand. It is less a clearly marked road than an overgrown dirt trail. I cannot see exactly where it is leading, but a rediscovered child like curiosity keeps asking me to follow.
Somewhere between thirty years of listening to children and a lifetime of learning to make sense of madness, a different map has slowly begun to emerge beneath my feet. Just a small path that may connect with the paths others are discovering from their own places along the edges.
If this path has taught me anything, it is that the future may depend less upon inventing something entirely new than upon remembering, protecting, and helping to mature something deeply human that has never completely left us.
That is the path I hope to follow from here…..Maybe I’ll see you on the trail :-)
Much Love!
The Mad Preschool Teacher (He/Him)
