E170: Passage to Elderhood with Special Guest

Mark Jackson

E170 Introduction

It is something that I say often. That each chapter of your Hero‘s Journey will require a slightly different version of yourself. When you spend the better part of your adult life steeped in myth, initiation, and the Hero’s Journey, you tend to notice the important markers in your growth. For young men, maybe they notice that they don’t feel like they have joined the community of mature men. I have spoken of this on many occasions. How I was well into my thirties with a shadowy feeling of having not yet arrived in the company of men. The Mankind Projects New Warrior Training put all that to rest with a Hero’s Journey that brought me into the new version of myself.

Or you get sober and that acts as a powerful initiation with a before, during, and after version of yourself that other people notice and comment on.

Or you take on a spiritual practice or devotion practice that has you letting go of the things that just aren’t that important anymore. Its funny how initiations do that. What was SOOO important in the previous versions of yourself can suddenly seem quite trivial and may just sort of fall away, as if by magic.

Or you become a parent or grandparent or perhaps you lose a parent or loved one, and THAT becomes a mini or major initiation. Something that subtly yet definitively changes the course of you life.

It is with all this initiatory context as a background that my close friend Mark Jackson reached out to me. “Men need one more initiation, one that takes us into elderhood.” I could immediately feel the truth of his insight.

As men, we have nothing that signifies the necessity of this movement. In fact, everything in our society is rigged against men becoming proper elders. Collectively, we worship at the alter of youth and beauty and achievement. Our narrative would have us believe that these qualities are really the only ones that matter. How sad is that? There is nothing particularly Soulful about these shiny qualities, is there? Nothing to comfort us as we travel our unique Hero‘s Journey.

We have many things in common, you and I. One thing for sure is we are all inching closer to our passing, to our ultimate Hero’s Journey. How will we hold up? What rituals or people or guideposts will help us?

It is these questions in the back of my mind that I sat down with my very good friend Mark Jackson to kick the tires on why we need to properly mark the passage to elderhood. Enjoy!