Now you look at kids and they're all in designer wear. It's almost like uniforms in a different mode. Most of what they get into is so prescribed in such an attractive way by the forces of consumerism that it's very difficult to know how to really converse with them. There're a lot of brash kinds of certainties and convictions that are paraded around. But if you actually take time to talk and listen to young people, it's amazing how the conversation can get real, and how you can get at the underlying emotion, which is often desperation, isolation, loneliness, fear of the future, distrust of authority structures and today's educational system, and a massive anxiety about what they're actually going to do to improve their lives.
Life is made of different phases-the earth, the ground, the garden.
The forest of childhood is a place of rootage, so that when you went on and you grew farther into your life, you had the mystery world behind you to anchor you. The Celtic tradition offers us a sense of the freshness of spirit and the world of spirit. The Celtic imagination offers the world the seeds of a new understanding of what friendship is, and rescuing our postmodern times from the absurd mathematics of acquaintance and acquaintanceship, and brings us in to that kind of embrace where there is real friendship, where otherness is not reduced but embraced as the greatest gift that anyone can give you. Carl McColman is the author of Spirituality and The Aspiring Mystic . This article originally appeared in the July 1999 issue of New Leaves.