But I’d like to reflect for a minute on the contrast between the way our society initiates its young and these more traditional undertakings. I don’t want to make a shallow statement that we’ve got it all wrong because we don’t ask pubescent boys to endure three days of biting wasps. There is danger and pain, as well as beauty and exultation, in some of these traditional ways of initiating people into adulthood. All over the planet, traditional cultures provide ritual experiences to adolescents, bringing them into contact with the deepest parts of themselves and their heritage. A newly-menstruating Apache girl becomes the goddess White Painted Woman in an intense, joyful ceremony which lasts four days. If you ever read any anthropology, one of the first things you notice is that primal cultures simmer up all their mystery and magic and ask their teenagers to drink deeply.Ī sixteen-year-old Dakota boy fasts until an empowering vision overtakes him. Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body to try the manners of different nations to hear the chimes at midnight to see sunrise in town and country to be converted at a revival to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud ‘Hernani.’ - Robert Louis Stevenson
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