09/20/2025
We live in a culture that has forgotten its thresholds. Instead of guiding youth across the wild and necessary crossings of adolescence, we abandon them in a no-man’s-land. Without elders, without ceremonies, without a container for their fire, they are left to invent ordeals of their own: violence, self-harm, addiction, numbing, social-media dramatics. Guns and TikTok become the false initiators, not because youth are “bad,” but because the culture has failed to offer true passage.
Adolescence is not just a developmental stage, it is soul threshold. It is the season when the young person must leave the protected circle of childhood and the village and step into the unknown: the forest, the dark, the challenge that terrifies and awakens them. In the old stories, this could be seen metaphorically as facing the wolf, the beast, the danger. Let's say the metaphorical wolf IS the ordeal, the hunger, the danger, that strips away innocence and demands courage. Without a conscious adolescent threshold, there is no real crossing into adulthood. Instead of a rite of passage, there is a culture of perpetual adolescence ...a culture that cannot grow up.
In traditional societies, initiation meant risk. Youth confronted fear, endured solitude, underwent ordeals that tested them to their core. But they did not do it alone. They were prepared by the community, witnessed by men, women or elders, and welcomed back as new beings, carrying gifts for the whole village.
Initiation was never about personal glory; it was about belonging, responsibility, and becoming medicine for the people. About finding one's destiny. About overcoming difficult trials and ordeals and returning with a story, returning with humility, returning with courage, returning reborn. Crossing over the threshold.
A culture that does not honor thresholds breaks. It fragments. It dissolves into distraction, exploitation, and despair. Adolescents are meant to encounter danger and difficulty — but in a way that transforms them, not destroys them. If we fail to provide initiatory containers, they will meet the wolf anyway — but in distorted forms: as gunfire in schools, as overdose, as exploitation. Instead of being tempered by the ordeal, they become the ordeal themselves.
We need to restore culture. We need to reweave rites of passage that honor the thresholds of life — birth, adolescence, midlife, elderhood, and death. We need to guide youth into encounters with beauty and terror that are survivable, meaningful, and transformative. Nights alone in the forest. Encounters with silence. Fasting. Vision quest. Rituals of courage and grief.
We need to tell them stories — old myths that map the territory of descent, initiation, death, and return. Stories where the wolf appears, not as random violence, but as the necessary ordeal to be met.
We need to say: Yes, you are crossing. Yes, it is dangerous. Yes, you can survive. Yes, you are needed on the other side.
the adolescent task is to discover one’s true place in the world — one's destiny. Not just a career, but a role in the great web of life. Without passage, youth remain rootless, endlessly seeking belonging in shallow places. With passage, they can become the young hunters, healers, visionaries, protectors we desperately need.
Imagine a culture where we normalize rites of passage, not violence. Where every adolescent knows that at 13 or 15, they will be led to the mountain, to the fire, to the story-circle, to the vision quest. Where adults prepare them, witness them, and welcome them home with songs, with feasts, with tears of recognition. Where fear is faced, not avoided — and where the ordeal leads not to trauma but to responsibility.
This is not a utopian dream. It is ancient, remembered in our bones. Our ancestors navigated the truth of this story for thousands of years. It is only in these modern times that we have forgotten, and have to work harder to go against the stream of materialism, of superficiality, of normalizing things that ARE NOT NORMAL in place of true meaning. This is the work of re-culturing ourselves. Because until we restore the rites, the wolf will keep finding our youth in shadowed ways — through violence, despair, addiction and disconnection.
Rites of passage are the architecture of a living culture. With them, we teach the young how to meet the wolf and return carrying medicine. Without them, everything frays. With them, everything has a chance to mend.
With them, everything has a chance to mend.
With them, everything
has a chance
to mend.
Words: The Wild Remembering
Stasha Ginsburg
Artist: Maria Chiara DiGiorgio
