The founding vision and the people who carry it
Every traditional culture on earth developed some form of conscious initiation for its young people. These were not accidents of history. They were responses to a fundamental human need: the need to be seen, named, and welcomed across a threshold by the adults who came before.
Modern Western culture has lost this almost entirely. We have replaced conscious passage with the gradual accumulation of legal privileges: a driver's license at sixteen, a vote at eighteen, a drink at twenty-one. None of these mark an interior crossing. None of them require anything of the young person except the passage of time.
When a culture stops providing conscious initiation, young people initiate themselves. Through substances. Through screens. Through risk and recklessness. Through the desperate search for something that will finally make them feel like they have arrived somewhere real.
Wild Souls Pathways exists to restore what has been lost. Not to recreate what any traditional culture did, but to build something true for this time and this land, rooted in nature, held by community, and guided by adults who have done their own interior work.
Nature as the primary teacher and container. Wild places, sit spots, streams, fire, and soil as the curriculum no classroom can replicate. The land does not lie and does not flatter.
Initiated adults who have done their own interior work standing alongside young people, modeling presence and vulnerability. What we ask of the youth, we do first.
Multi-year developmental programming following the natural rhythm of initiation: severance, threshold, and incorporation. Transformation is not an event. It is a sustained process held by a sustained community.
Both programs are designed as multi-year journeys, not single events. Each year builds on what came before. Each cohort advances together.
An opening. An introduction to the possibility that growing up is something a young person can do on purpose. The first year is not a full rite of passage. It is an invitation into one.
Where the gifts of Year One are tested against real life. The brotherhood or sisterhood has a year of shared history. The work goes deeper. Solo time extends. The questions become more honest.
The full rite of passage, for those who are ready. A sustained ordeal, elder witnessing, and a ceremonial return to the community as someone who has been genuinely changed.
Young people are not told in Year One that there will be a Year Two or Three. What comes next emerges from what the group is ready for.
Wild Souls Pathways does not exist in isolation. It stands on decades of accumulated field wisdom built by men and women who devoted their lives to this work. We name them here because gratitude and lineage belong in the open.
These six men form the philosophical, mythic, and practical foundation of Fire Keepers. Three provide the deep theoretical ground. Three provide the field intelligence of men who have been delivering this work with boys for decades.
Eco-depth psychologist and founder of Animas Valley Institute. His Soulcentric Developmental Wheel maps human maturation across eight stages rooted in nature’s seasonal cycles. This framework is the precise reason Fire Keepers frames Year 1 as awakening rather than full rite of passage. The twelve-to-fourteen threshold corresponds exactly to the developmental stage Plotkin calls the late-childhood passage: an awakening to soul, not yet a full descent into it. Every structural decision in the Fire Keepers arc rests on this developmental map.
Poet, translator, and foundational architect of the modern male initiation field. His 1990 book Iron John established the mythic vocabulary that every practitioner in this work draws from. Bly named what happens when boys grow up without elder transmission: they initiate themselves through risk, substances, and the peer group, finding their own brutal passage where a conscious one was never offered. This is the wound Fire Keepers exists to tend. Iron John is required reading for the full Fire Keepers mentor council.
Mythologist, storyteller, and founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation. Meade draws from dozens of world traditions to illuminate what genuine initiation actually does to a young person: it breaks open the false self, calls forth the genius that was always there, and puts the young one in the hands of elders who know how to witness a real crossing. His teaching that every young person carries a genius within them that cannot be found through academic achievement or social performance is woven into how Fire Keepers mentors see the boys they walk alongside.
Founder of Cascadia Quest in Eugene, Oregon, and designer of the Young Men’s Initiation and Darkness Rite programs. Miller has been running wilderness initiation for boys in the Western bioregion for years, combining primitive skills with council, ceremony, and a multi-night solo that marks the center of the arc. His program is the closest operational parallel to Fire Keepers in the country, and his design choices, including the structure of the calling letter, the pacing of challenge across the year, and the place of darkness in genuine initiation, have directly shaped how Fire Keepers is built.
Co-founder of Twin Eagles Wilderness School in Sandpoint, Idaho, drawing from two decades of boys initiation work rooted in Jon Young’s 8 Shields lineage, indigenous tracking traditions, and the men’s movement. His sit spot practice, which gives each boy a personal place in nature to return to across the full year, is embedded in Fire Keepers. His calling letter protocol, which summons each boy by name before the program begins, is the model for how Fire Keepers first reaches its young men. His commitment to passing these gifts to the next generation shapes how the mentors hold their own formation.
Sub-chief of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne and co-founder of the Tree of Peace Society. Jake Swamp (Tekaronianeken, Two Roads Parallel) spent his life as a carrier of Haudenosaunee traditional knowledge and as co-creator of the Thanksgiving Address, also called the Words That Come Before All Else. The Address is a living practice of giving thanks to every being in the web of life before any human business is conducted: the people, the waters, the animals, the plants, the fire, the sky, grandmother moon, the stars. It is not a warm-up. It is the foundation. Fire Keepers draws from the spirit of this teaching: before the circle opens, before the Brotherhood Vow is spoken, before anything human begins, we acknowledge what holds us. Tim Corcoran, one of Fire Keepers’ other guiding teachers, carries Jake Swamp directly in his own lineage, creating a living thread between these two streams of the work.
Four women whose program designs directly shape the architecture of 13 Moons, and two Indigenous grandmother wisdom holders whose teachings ground the spirit and ceremony of the work in something older than any program.
Founder of Earth Path Education and creator of the Growing Goddess rites of passage program. Eastes has been holding the threshold for young women for sixteen years, building a decade-long initiatory pipeline from age eight through eighteen. She calls herself a thresHOLDER. Her multi-generational mentor team, her integration of daily fire tending, Red Tent, water ceremony, and elemental theming, and her Village Send-Off and Welcome-Back ceremonies that formally involve families in the threshold crossing, have each found their way into 13 Moons’ ceremonial design. Her insistence that indigenous elders be full collaborators in the container, not guests or decorations, is a practice 13 Moons holds as an ethical commitment.
Co-founder of Twin Eagles Wilderness School and creator of the Girls Rite of Passage and Emerging Girls programs. Tidwell has built the most formally articulated multi-year girls initiatory arc in the field: a Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3 return structure in which the girls who have already crossed come back to stand behind those who are crossing now. This living elder model is exactly what 13 Moons is building toward. Her wilderness-rooted approach, her intimate group sizes, and her escalating solo time across the three years are all structural elements that shape how 13 Moons thinks about depth and pacing.
Founder of Wakeful Nature and creator of the Journey through the Elements curriculum. Reimer’s four-element arc, Earth through Water through Fire through Air, moving through the seasons with ceremony, nature practice, ancestral ritual, and expressive arts, is the backbone of 13 Moons’ own seasonal design. Her moon cycle tracking practices, her ancestral lineage work, and her teaching that the seasons of the year and the seasons of a girl’s body are the same curriculum, have shaped how 13 Moons holds the full arc of its year. Her work is the closest available model to what 13 Moons is building.
Founding Director of Love Your Nature in the Bay Area, with twenty years of experience running the school-year-long monthly circle model that 13 Moons mirrors most closely. Frost’s work demonstrates that this kind of program can be built and sustained in California, with real girls, over real time. Her co-facilitation model, which makes the relationship between the women guiding the circle a teaching in itself, her explicit parent education running parallel to the girls’ circles, and her body-honest Real Talk curriculum addressing sexuality and consent with age-appropriate clarity, are all elements that have shaped 13 Moons’ thinking about what it means to hold this threshold with full integrity.
Elder grandmother, water keeper, and social worker of Havasupai, Hopi, and Tewa descent. Mona Polacca is a founding member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, formed in 2004, which brought together grandmothers from across the Americas, Africa, and Asia to transmit traditional wisdom and hold the threshold for the next generation. Her teaching on water as the first medicine and the first teacher, rooted in Havasupai tradition’s understanding of water as sentient and sacred, a carrier of memory and healing, lives at the center of 13 Moons’ summer immersion, where emotion, body, and the blood mysteries are held through water ceremony. Her grandmother presence, and the image of a council of elders holding the world’s children, is the elder archetype 13 Moons aspires to carry.
Cherokee and Appalachian poet, author of Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom, and teacher of sacred reciprocity. Awiakta draws from the Cherokee story of Selu, the Corn Mother, who teaches that life feeds life, that the feminine principle is not passive but creative, and that genuine transformation requires giving something of who you were before you can receive who you are becoming. For 13 Moons, her Corn Mother teaching provides the mythic anchor for the program’s descent phase and final ceremony. The question it raises for each young woman crossing the threshold is the one at the center of genuine initiation: what am I willing to give so that something new can grow?
We are rooted in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Moonrising Wild in Boulder Creek, nine acres of old-growth redwood adjacent to Big Basin State Park, is the primary ceremonial land. This land is not a backdrop. It is the primary teacher.
Jodi is the President of Wild Souls Pathways and the lead of the 13 Moons girls program. She has held the girls circle for three years and is now building a mentor council modeled on the Fire Keepers structure. She is the organizational anchor of this work.
Chris is the Secretary of Wild Souls Pathways and a member of the Fire Keepers mentor council. He is the steward of Moonrising Wild, nine acres of old-growth redwood in Boulder Creek that serves as the program's primary ceremonial land. He brings thirty years as a technology executive and a lifetime as a sacred artist.
Tahra serves as Director of Wild Souls Pathways, bringing organizational grounding and community vision to the board as the organization grows into its second year of delivery.
Wild Souls Pathways is a California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation · Entity B20260142438
EIN: 41-5193791 · 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt Organization
All donations are fully tax deductible · 150 Oxford Way, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
