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Sobonfu Some – Part 3: The Essential Participation and Wisdom Gifts of Elders and Youth in Evolving Our Cultural Dialogue
Appreciations:
“Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart. I just so appreciate you. It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you. It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you. And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell
“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear. Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview. Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” - May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas
Episode Description:
You can listen to and see the descriptions of Parts 1 and 2 of this 3-Part Dialogue on Programs 55 and 56 on this site.
The noted anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed: “For humanity to evolve, the conversation must deepen” – and, we might add, for our societies to flourish and even survive, the conversation must also broaden to include two groups often neglected and marginalized in our political culture: elders and youth.
As I said in Part 1 of my conversation with Sobonfu Some:
“We are all of us going through an initiation in the sense of being forced out of the comfort zone of whatever our particular literal, metaphorical, or mental “village” may be – just as you were Sobonfu in your life story. We are all now obliged to go out into a wider world, and learn another language or several other emotional languages, and to begin to weave a real planetary consciousness because it’s the only way we’re going to be whole. I think of dialogue as an essential element of this process. The dialogue between elders and youth in terms of age – and the dialogue between elder and younger cultures in terms of time on the planet. The dialogue between men and women, between ethnicities, between nations. Because everyone in this participation has a particular wisdom and a particular knowledge to give, including the younger cultures and the young people. Things are changing so fast on the planet that elder persons and cultures don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, no matter how long they have been on the planet. And so they themselves need this revitalizing connection with the younger ones who carry certain knowledge within them. And the young in turn need a certain kind of mentoring and embrace and respect in being seen by the elders -- and vice-versa -- in order to realize their full potential. So it’s such a beautiful but also very challenging initiation that we are being called to.”
In this Part 3, Sobonfu and I bring the larger story full circle in seeing with further perspective the essential roles that both youth and elders must play in our evolution for it to take place.
Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), Angeles Arrien (Program 52), and Coleman Barks (Programs 53-54), as well as Programs 13 and 14 with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell (editor of The Enlightened Heart, which contains the Kabir poem The Swan which I mention in this Part 3 dialogue with Sobonfu).
Here are some excerpts from this Part 3:
Sobonfu: I really believe that in order to be able to change the way things are, if we want to make peace or live in peace in this world, we have to really begin with our children, our youth, and with our elders…So far I haven’t seen any culture survive without their children…and the same with the elders, because the elders are the grounding force in the community. We don’t actually ask enough of their input and yet they have much to share. We simply think of them as being old. But in our Dagara tradition, the word “old” means someone who has been cooked in the juice of life and has now this lasting effect…
So if we can begin to see in our elders someone who has wisdom, great ways to share that wisdom, then we won’t have to recreate the wheel of life all over. We can simply draw from their wisdom and continue to stand proudly on the shoulders of our ancestors in order to be able to bring our gifts in the best possible way. But until that happens, until our elders and our children, our youth, receive support and respect, we are always going to feel lost in the middle because no one is there to support us or to create a bridge for us to walk on…
Duncan: …Some of the things that have been fragmented, and “broken” in Alice Walker’s phrase, by the younger, modern culture we might see as a necessary ritualistic and initiatic breaking away from prior traditional concepts that became and have become too closed. In any kind of mystery of initiation there is a breaking away. There is a breaking down and a replacement with a new and different form. If we look at this from a planetary perspective we might say that the intensity of the individualism of theWest has itself become too closed and stuck, and so has in that very stuckness called forth teachers from the older cultures such as your own and such as yourself and others from many parts of the world, as well as new fresh perspectives from a younger generation, to come and work together in a kind of mutual weaving and mutual healing, becoming whole, and mutual co-creation of a new planetary wisdom culture…
We are working together to create a planetary culture by appreciating the history of our own and different cultures and sharing our stories. This is what I have sometimes called the “repository of lived wisdom”, the “deep memory and stories of the culture” that reside in true elders of whatever chronological age, and I have such appreciation for the gifts that you have given…I believe part of it from my own perspective is that we are all becoming planetary citizens…
It reminds me when I was traveling in the great ancient holy city of Varanasi in India, where one of the things I wanted to do was to make a personal pilgrimage to honor the connection and appreciation I felt with the great 15th century poet, Kabir, a weaver by trade who was both Hindu and Muslim and beyond both. My guide and I searched and searched until we found his effectively anonymous birthplace. It was marked by a tiny temple, next to a little “tank”, as they call it, a small pool of water constructed in the middle of an urban neighborhood with winding alleyways. There were twelve people gathered around the temple at sunset saying his poetry, and they invited me to share in our mutual appreciation of Kabir. I spoke a poem of his that had touched me deeply -- about the heart’s journey, symbolized by the flight of a swan, to its own true home (translated in its own pilgrimage from the original Hindi into English by Tagore, then into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, then back into English by Milosz and Robert Hass). In return they said to me: “Yes, very good -- Kabir says ‘we are all pilgrims on this great earth’”. I think from any culture in any time period we are all pilgrims (the Canterbury Tales comes to mind), sharing our stories as we go along together through this heartfelt journey into and ceaselessly manifesting the beauty of the creation which is our common source.”
And that is precisely what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.
After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.
View all episodes
By Duncan CampbellAppreciations:
“Thank you Duncan for all the ways that you are enabling people to share their wisdom, and also for holding the torch for everybody to know how to find their way, and for just having a golden heart. I just so appreciate you. It is always so great to talk to you and to see the bright light you always shine on so many different subject matters. So thank you.” - Sobonfu Some
“For all that you’ve done Sobonfu I just want to honor you and just thank you. It’s been such a pleasure just to get to know you. And what I really appreciate about you is your ability to feel the depth of all of this range of challenges and sorrow and isolation, and as you put it loneliness and boredom, that are part of our world and yet find this beautiful sunny brilliance of spirit and humor especially to share with the world as you have.” - Duncan Campbell
“Living Dialogues are transformative! The very best "interviews" you will ever hear. Duncan Campbell, a world-class 'interviewer,' is sufficiently fascinating and well educated himself that he would make a good subject for an interview. His talent is to first, choose the great thinkers with whom to dialogue. He is then able to somehow not only 'see' the brilliance in each one, but to bring that out in his fantastic dialogues, which are more like a cosmic dance than an interview. Blessings are the result of experiencing the Living Dialogues. I highly recommend them. Five Stars!” - May 12, 2008, Sunshiny from Clarksville, Arkansas
Episode Description:
You can listen to and see the descriptions of Parts 1 and 2 of this 3-Part Dialogue on Programs 55 and 56 on this site.
The noted anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed: “For humanity to evolve, the conversation must deepen” – and, we might add, for our societies to flourish and even survive, the conversation must also broaden to include two groups often neglected and marginalized in our political culture: elders and youth.
As I said in Part 1 of my conversation with Sobonfu Some:
“We are all of us going through an initiation in the sense of being forced out of the comfort zone of whatever our particular literal, metaphorical, or mental “village” may be – just as you were Sobonfu in your life story. We are all now obliged to go out into a wider world, and learn another language or several other emotional languages, and to begin to weave a real planetary consciousness because it’s the only way we’re going to be whole. I think of dialogue as an essential element of this process. The dialogue between elders and youth in terms of age – and the dialogue between elder and younger cultures in terms of time on the planet. The dialogue between men and women, between ethnicities, between nations. Because everyone in this participation has a particular wisdom and a particular knowledge to give, including the younger cultures and the young people. Things are changing so fast on the planet that elder persons and cultures don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, no matter how long they have been on the planet. And so they themselves need this revitalizing connection with the younger ones who carry certain knowledge within them. And the young in turn need a certain kind of mentoring and embrace and respect in being seen by the elders -- and vice-versa -- in order to realize their full potential. So it’s such a beautiful but also very challenging initiation that we are being called to.”
In this Part 3, Sobonfu and I bring the larger story full circle in seeing with further perspective the essential roles that both youth and elders must play in our evolution for it to take place.
Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are the Dialogues I have had with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), Angeles Arrien (Program 52), and Coleman Barks (Programs 53-54), as well as Programs 13 and 14 with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell (editor of The Enlightened Heart, which contains the Kabir poem The Swan which I mention in this Part 3 dialogue with Sobonfu).
Here are some excerpts from this Part 3:
Sobonfu: I really believe that in order to be able to change the way things are, if we want to make peace or live in peace in this world, we have to really begin with our children, our youth, and with our elders…So far I haven’t seen any culture survive without their children…and the same with the elders, because the elders are the grounding force in the community. We don’t actually ask enough of their input and yet they have much to share. We simply think of them as being old. But in our Dagara tradition, the word “old” means someone who has been cooked in the juice of life and has now this lasting effect…
So if we can begin to see in our elders someone who has wisdom, great ways to share that wisdom, then we won’t have to recreate the wheel of life all over. We can simply draw from their wisdom and continue to stand proudly on the shoulders of our ancestors in order to be able to bring our gifts in the best possible way. But until that happens, until our elders and our children, our youth, receive support and respect, we are always going to feel lost in the middle because no one is there to support us or to create a bridge for us to walk on…
Duncan: …Some of the things that have been fragmented, and “broken” in Alice Walker’s phrase, by the younger, modern culture we might see as a necessary ritualistic and initiatic breaking away from prior traditional concepts that became and have become too closed. In any kind of mystery of initiation there is a breaking away. There is a breaking down and a replacement with a new and different form. If we look at this from a planetary perspective we might say that the intensity of the individualism of theWest has itself become too closed and stuck, and so has in that very stuckness called forth teachers from the older cultures such as your own and such as yourself and others from many parts of the world, as well as new fresh perspectives from a younger generation, to come and work together in a kind of mutual weaving and mutual healing, becoming whole, and mutual co-creation of a new planetary wisdom culture…
We are working together to create a planetary culture by appreciating the history of our own and different cultures and sharing our stories. This is what I have sometimes called the “repository of lived wisdom”, the “deep memory and stories of the culture” that reside in true elders of whatever chronological age, and I have such appreciation for the gifts that you have given…I believe part of it from my own perspective is that we are all becoming planetary citizens…
It reminds me when I was traveling in the great ancient holy city of Varanasi in India, where one of the things I wanted to do was to make a personal pilgrimage to honor the connection and appreciation I felt with the great 15th century poet, Kabir, a weaver by trade who was both Hindu and Muslim and beyond both. My guide and I searched and searched until we found his effectively anonymous birthplace. It was marked by a tiny temple, next to a little “tank”, as they call it, a small pool of water constructed in the middle of an urban neighborhood with winding alleyways. There were twelve people gathered around the temple at sunset saying his poetry, and they invited me to share in our mutual appreciation of Kabir. I spoke a poem of his that had touched me deeply -- about the heart’s journey, symbolized by the flight of a swan, to its own true home (translated in its own pilgrimage from the original Hindi into English by Tagore, then into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, then back into English by Milosz and Robert Hass). In return they said to me: “Yes, very good -- Kabir says ‘we are all pilgrims on this great earth’”. I think from any culture in any time period we are all pilgrims (the Canterbury Tales comes to mind), sharing our stories as we go along together through this heartfelt journey into and ceaselessly manifesting the beauty of the creation which is our common source.”
And that is precisely what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.
After you listen to this Dialogue, I invite you to both explore and make possible further interesting material on Living Dialogues by clicking on the Episode Detail button at the top left of this program description, and by taking less than 5 minutes to click on and fill out the Listener Survey there (or click on the Listener Survey icon to the left of this column).
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan.