Itineraries 2009 | Orange County, NC (2025)

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• Bird Wisdom by Margaret Owen Thorpe

Creating a “Compassionate Society” by Bolton Anthony

Beyond “the tired ideological battles of the 1960s.”

Once again — with the election of Barack Obama — “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

Though he was born in 1961, Obama considers himself a member of the post-boomer generation. He readily acknowledges that “the victories that the 60s generation brought about… made America a far better place for all its citizens,” and his election itself is the crowning achievement of that long struggle for racial equality which reached its boiling point during the decade of the 60s. But, in electing Obama, Americans were responding to his clear call to move beyond the fiercely waged culture wars which marked — and marred — the presidencies of Clinton and Bush and focus on “those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans” (The Audacity of Hope).

It seems likely that no member of the boomer generation will ever again wield power from the highest office in our land. In this changing of the guard we might see — writ large — the future that awaits all boomers as they move into later life. To what work will they set their hearts? Will they move on to become globe-trotting citizens of the world, or will they retreat to the ranch to write their memoirs?

To frame the choice this way is, of course, not only to stay stuck in the old caricatures and shrill discourse of the past eight years, but to perpetuate a false dichotomy. As we learn from the living example of our elder statesmen, Jimmy Carter, later life is a season for both action and reflection; they mutually sustain and enhance each other.

All of us on the verge of our own “post-presidencies” should take to heart the words Tennyson attributes to the aging Ulysses: “Some work of noble note may yet be done. ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.” Not too late, for a generation blessed with uncommon gifts and long life to set about “to build a compassionate society” — a society where those “who no longer have to worry about raising a family, pleasing a boss, or earning more money… can think deep thoughts, create beauty, study nature, teach the young, worship what they hold sacred, and care for the planet and each other.”

These words by Theodore Roszak help draw the broad outline of the challenge before us, that of Creating an Elder Culture. During all of 2009, Second Journey will focus on that theme.

We will devote the Spring, Summer, and Fall issues of Itineraries to exploring it, inviting contributions from a range of writers. We will host webinars on the topic and seek to seed seminars and discussion groups which use Roszak’s The Making of an Elder Culture as a launching point for engaged conversation.

— Bolton Anthony, Founder, Second Journey

Reading Roszak in Des Moines by Cecile Andrews

Cecile Andrews’ work has been featured in the PBS video, “Escape from Affluenza,” and the TBS video, “Consumed by Consumption” (featuring Cecile, Ed Begley, Jr., and Phyllis Diller), CBS News “Eye on America”, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, and various PBS and NPR programs. She is the author of Slow Is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre, and The Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life and the co-editor, with Wanda Urbanska, of Less is More: Embracing Simplicity for a Healthy Planet, a Caring Economy and Lasting Happiness. A former community college administrator, Cecile has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and affiliated scholar at Seattle University.

Some time ago I got an e-mail from Bolton Anthony, the founder of Second Journey, the nonprofit organization which first published Ted Roszak’s Making of An Elder Culture in four online installments. He said he’d read my book Slow is Beautiful (albeit while walking on a treadmill!) and had realized — by the number of times that I quoted something from one of Roszak’s books — how much I admire his work. And indeed, over the years, I’ve always come back to Roszak’s books and ideas.

Further, Bolton could see my passion for spreading ideas through conversation — my belief that social change happens when we talk together. He thought I might like to write something that would bring people together to talk about The Making of an Elder Culture.

Now, when you think about social change, conversation isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But I’ve always been inspired by John Dewey’s words, “Democracy is born in conversation.” Sociologist Etizioni said that the way you bring about social change is to start a national conversation. And I found the same theme in Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone — Putnam says that the culture in which people talk over the back fence is the culture in which people vote. In other words, conversation is crucial.

I responded with enthusiasm to Bolton’s invitation — as the fact of this article attests.

I was entranced and excited by Roszak’s vision of baby boomers finishing some of the revolutions they started in the Sixties. But I realized that there was one revolution that few people know about. Incredibly, it was this little-known revolutionary idea that helped start it all. It started in a place called Highlander.

Have you heard of Highlander? Did you know that’s where Rosa Parks was trained not long before her historic refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, AL? No, her act wasn’t, as we’ve often been lead to believe, a totally spontaneous one. It was an act born in conversations held at Highlander.

Highlander was founded in the Thirties with one main philosophy: To solve the problems of our country, we must bring the common people together to talk and tell their stories — a revolutionary idea, indeed, in a culture that turns to experts for its answers. As people talk, they begin to formulate answers. They go out and take action, and return to reflect. The wisdom is in the people. It’s not the experts or authorities who have the answers— it’s the people. Rosa Parks was one of those people.

Highlander conversations helped give birth to the Civil Rights Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement helped give birth to the Baby Boomers.

I mean this. We were reborn through the passion and joy we felt as we stood in churches with our hands joined, singing, “We Shall Overcome.” We had come from the North, often from repressed, fearful suburbs, and were transformed by the Civil Rights movement. We cautious and careful people were set free.

From that experience of liberation we went on to help shape the other liberation movements — the Women’s Movement, the Peace Movement, the Student Movement, and on and on. The Civil Rights Movement was about liberating Black people, but of course it liberated all of us.

Now we need to reclaim the revolution that started it all — the liberating art of conversation. But few people understand its importance. Americans are doers. We denounce people for being “all talk.” Americans give little time to deliberation, and maybe it’s our fatal flaw — we rush after every new thing, regardless of the consequences.

Women, in particular, know what I’m talking about. Many of us participated in consciousness raising groups in which we told the truth about our lives and discovered that others shared our truths. For many of us, this was the first step in our transformation. Black people came together to talk at Highlander. Women came together to talk in church basements and homes. We all came to understand that the wisdom is in the people. Long ago we took to the streets. Now we need to take to the cafés — to talk.

So I am proposing that we reclaim this forgotten revolution that was so crucial to the formation of the baby boomers’ counter culture — that we come together in conversation about Roszak’s ideas! It’s the way to finish the revolutions we began, asking ourselves, “What have we learned?” It’s a way to harvest our wisdom.

But we need to come together not only to develop our ideas, but to contribute to our own well-being. Research has found that social ties are the biggest contributor to our health, happiness, and longevity, and many of the destructive forces, like consumerism and television, are a compensation for loneliness and isolation.

Roszak wants us to continue to spread the ideas of justice and liberation, but it seems to me that what he is really talking about is a revolution of caring. For example, Roszak talks about spreading the entitlements of Social Security and Medicare to everyone. That is a revolution of caring. When we come together in convivial conversation, we learn to care about the other, and thus we learn to care about the common good. If we can help people understand the importance of connection and social ties, that could be as significant as the Civil Rights and the Women’s Movements.

So I hope you can see how important it is to come together and talk about The Making of an Elder Culture. Not only will we transform our views of aging, but we can help complete the revolution of caring that we started in the Sixties.

//

Elder Culture Conversation Circles

It would be nice if I could just stop here and rely on your experience to know what to do. It would be wonderful if I could count on your understanding how to conduct such a group. But my experience tells me that’s not true. We’re really not that good at conversation. We’re just too competitive. We learned to debate, not converse, and the competitive drive doesn’t make for convivial conversation.

Further, we’re out of practice with conversation: In recent decades social ties and community have diminished. We have fewer friends and participate in fewer groups. So, since the art of conversation has been on the decline for a long time, let me offer some guidelines.

Guidelines

Again, this shouldn’t be like most book clubs — an opportunity for people to compete to be the most intellectual or literary. (One study found that the competitiveness of book clubs has actually driven people to therapists in order to restore their tattered self esteem!)

In a conversation, we enjoy ourselves and explore ideas — it’s not a contest to prove you’re right. Think of conversation as a “barn raising,” not a battle. No one has the “truth,” and our ideas are always a work in progress. Our minds are always open. Our approach is echoed in the words of Gandhi: Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

You would think it would go without saying that we don’t attack or denigrate others. But I’ve been surprised over the years about how deeply ingrained our will to win is, and how often people attack each other — even when we’re seemingly political allies!

In fact, I don’t think we should even try to persuade others. It’s not that you shouldn’t make a good case for your ideas. But if there’s only resistance from the other side, drop it. I always feel that if I’m trying to convince the other person that I’m right, that I’m basically showing disrespect for them. Winning becomes more important than the relationship. So it’s enough to simply state your views.

I recommend that you use often these phrases: “In my experience…,” “I’m wondering…,” “What do you think about…?” Ask questions, but don’t challenge, criticize, or argue. There should be no speeches, no tirades. Instead, gentle humor and laughter are the hallmarks of these conversations.

I know these guidelines seem obvious, but observe conversations around you this week and see how often we violate them. I think you’ll be surprised at how combative we can be. I’m afraid this is deep in American culture, and we’re all affected. And my feeling is that congenial conversation brings about greater change than combativeness. In any case, it’s certainly more fun!

Structure

Finally, let me give you some ideas about how to proceed:

I favor having people meet once a week. When you meet once a month, you don’t form a community as quickly, and further, this book deserves a more in-depth consideration than a monthly meeting allows you.

The best size is 6-8 people. Any larger, and some people don’t get to talk. If it’s a large group, split people into smaller groups, coming together at the end.

Try to speak from personal experience when you can. Explore and discuss the ideas that affect you. Read one chapter for each session, and come with just one idea that really struck a chord for you — something that moved you, stirred old emotions and new ideas. And be prepared to explain why it affected you. Tell your story. This is how you connect with people — by being real.

Begin by taking turns going around the circle to hear people’s ideas. Usually a theme will develop that you will proceed to discuss.

When a theme emerges, define it in terms of how it affects the well-being of people and the planet.

Then, explore solutions at the level of the personal, the local, the institutional, and the political. Let me give you an example: For instance, you might be talking about problems of the consumer society.

At a personal level, our egregious consumerism puts people into debt and separates people, so learning to live more simply as a personal solution involves spending less, using less energy, finding simple pleasures, and so on.

At the institutional level, you might explore the role of the corporations — how they destroy the planet and keep people in poverty for the sake of profit. The solution here is not only regulation of corporations, but the rekindling of the local — shopping and eating locally.

Finally, at the political level we might discuss policies and laws that reduce the inequality in our country or limit work time.

Thus, we explore the problem and the solutions at many levels, not just the personal level.

First Meeting:

For the first meeting, have people talk about their experience in the Sixties. Have people tell their stories. Explore which of the movements excited them the most; talk about regrets; explore some of the mistakes we made. Finally, have people talk about what they’re doing, or want to do, today.

Conclusion

Americans have always been a people who take action. We get things done. But we’re out of balance. We don’t spend time deliberating — thinking and talking. If we’re to reclaim the wisdom from the Sixties, here’s where we start, because here’s where it all started — people coming together to talk. We must come together and reclaim conversation.

My hope is that you begin to realize how important conversation is to this revolution. We must move from a “me first” culture to a culture in which, as President Obama has said, “We’re all in this together.” To make that move, we have to connect with each other. Conversation is one way to do that.

The Gifts of Winter by John G. Sullivan

Here is a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez called “Oceans:”

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

—- Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?1

Among the ancient Chinese, winter is associated with the deep waters. Let the image sink in. Winter and the deep waters. Think of moonlight over the ocean in winter. Moonlight across the waters in the depth of night. Silence. Solitude. Stillness. Darkness and deep listening. Dwelling at the depth and truly not-knowing. All mysterious. “Darkness was over the deep waters and the Spirit was hovering over the waters.”2

Such vastness, such realms of the unknown, produce fear. Our ancestors felt this fear. Could we get through the winter? Would there be a new year? Would renewed life return? The clue is in the image itself. In deep waters, the surface may be stirred up, yet at the depth there is peace and calm. All proceeds according to its own nature and norms. So we may find, beneath fear, a more basic trust. “Fear not” is the biblical message.

What sort of trust lies at the depth? Not the trust that comes with sight — neither foresight nor hindsight. Rather it is a trust that lives in the darkness, that learns to navigate without sight. Relinquishing sight, we rely on hearing. We sense the subtle rhythms by listening deeply. Winter encourages the practice of deep listening — listening to what is said and unsaid, to the sounds and the silence between the sounds.

“Johnny,” said the first grade teacher, “You’re not paying attention.”
“Yes I am,” replied Johnny. “I’m paying attention to everything.”

What would it be like to listen attentively to everything? As if everything was laden with meaning. As if everything was a teacher for those with ears to hear.

Suppose that we think of the atmosphere as an invisible ocean. We might think of ourselves as already living within the ocean. Rumi writes:

Late by myself, in the boat of myself
no light and no land anywhere, cloud cover thick
I try to stay just above the surface, yet
I’m already under and living within the ocean.3

Anne Joy, the 5 year old daughter of a colleague, was sitting out on the porch with her father on a July evening. They were watching a storm come in. She suddenly said, “Sometimes I think about things.” Like: why am I in this world? I could be in a different world…”4

I would gloss my young friend’s remarks in this way: The different world can be this world seen in a different way. If we are awake and alert, we always have the choice: Will we live in a world that is conditioned and constricted by personal and collective patterns? Or will we begin to notice those structures and realize that they are just part of the story, just part of the movie? We could be living in a different world — a larger, deeper world — a world beneath the surface certainties, a paradoxical world — in time and beyond time.

“There is another world and it lies within this one.”5 So speaks Paul Eluard. I think of a deeper dimension, the inside of the inside of things. To discover this dimension may be like awakening from a black and white world into Technicolor. Or like hearing more subtle music in the midst of the ordinary. Our relentless and often ruthless certainties are suddenly understood to be illusory — lines drawn on water, pretending to be fixed.6 They fall away. Something new stands before us.

The mystics tell us that, if we shift our interpretive frame, the deeper world (or deeper dimension of this world) will manifest all about us. Here is a slight rephrasing of William Blake’s quote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to us as it is, infinite. For we have closed ourselves up, till we see all things through narrow chinks of our cavern.”7

//

Winter invites us to open the doors of hearing, to open a third ear, to listen in a new way. Suppose that we are always living in a story (which we take to be real). Seeing our life as a story invites us to take that story less literally and to live more lightly. “It is only a movie,” we say. So likewise, we can say, “It is only a story.” Here the “only” allows certitudes to fall away, or at least be loosened. Once we confront our lives as a story then we may ask: What kind of a story are we co-creating? A faith story? An emerging universe story? A tragedy or a comedy? How can we listen to life-as-story in such a way as to reveal the mysterious and liberating layers of what is said and what is unsaid, of the tones and overtones?

When I engage in the ancient art of storytelling, I ask my listeners to follow three guidelines:

1. Approach each aspect of “the story” as having multiple layers of meanings.Avoid seeking one moral of the story. Let the story remain richer than any one interpretation. Indeed, what we know is incomplete, and what we can tell is even more unfinished, more provisional.
2. Consider that you are all the characters in the story — the one you think of as yourself plus all the other characters, the main ones, the supporting players, even the villains.Understood in this way, the characters in the story reveal parts of you. They come to you (mostly unknown to themselves) as teachers, perhaps even as severe teachers who have wronged you in myriad ways. We might say, shifting an old aphorism: When you listen with the ears of a student, all things teach you.
3. Think of the story as a commentary on your current life, as happening here and now in support of your own transformation and that of others.In this way, story becomes parable and directs us to a deeper and more meaningful life in the present moment and in the presence of mystery.

Deep listening opens a world that is soul-size. Here we might think of soul not as an individual possession but as an individual participation in the World Soul — something our ancestors glimpsed. Imagine this “soul of the world” the way our ancestors did — as Sophia, a wisdom that connects through love. In this fashion, the “ocean” in which we dwell is an ocean of meaning and value, an ocean of insight and love. We might speak of living in and from the Soul of the World. We might speak of living in the nurturing Spirit. Whether called soul dimension or spirit dimension, we come to it through letting go of old identities, old opinions (personal and collective), and listening to what lies deeply within and around us.

Sometimes, in whatever way it comes to us, we may have a sense of the glory all round us.8 Blessed are such times. At other times, we may feel, as the opening poem said, that nothing is happening. Then we practice a trust even in the dark times. A trust that each event has many meanings. That each being is a teacher in disguise. That our living is in service of our transformation and that of others.

Winter encourages the discipline of waiting — in trust, in faithfulness, in hopefulness, in love. Silence. Solitude. Stillness. Soul. Spirit. Signs of the deep waters.

//

T. S. Eliot teaches that again and again we return “to where we started and know the place for the first time.” We return to the beginning, to “the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree.” They are “not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.” “Quick now, here, now, always — a condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything). And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well . . .”9

The true gift of winter, I am coming to understand, is unknowing. This unknowing is very different from ignorance. It is more like the ability to hear the story anew — with loving attention to the concrete details, with awareness that all the details and all the characters have something to reveal to me. And further, this listening is a holy listening. For I am not in the story passively; I am with the storyteller uncovering insight and renewing life in the ever-surprising present. For example, part of my story may be the view that my colleague Paul is rude to me. Yet as I live more deeply and symbolically, I may play with what the wonderful Byron Katie calls “the turn around.” How am I rude to Paul? How am I rude to myself? How is Paul not rude to me?10

Then a part of my story re-forms, deepens. Perhaps laughter and lightness return. Perhaps the sage-in-us appears as the Fool, happily deconstructing old certainties and allowing new possibilities to shine forth.11

//

The gifts of winter are always available — to listen deeply in unknowing to what is unfolding at the surface and in the depth. Yet they have a special place as we draw closer to death. Earlier in life, we live through the death of each season, as we live through the death of winter into spring. And we may neglect the downward and inward side of life in a rush to define ourselves by outward “doing.” We may fail to honor the winter energy of stillness and silence and solitude and simplicity as we rush about seeking to construct our life. Yet these very qualities beckon more insistently as we move closer to death.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi speaks of life in a biblical perspective of seven year intervals. And he maps those intervals onto the months of the year. In this fashion, October looks to ages 63-70, November to ages 70-77, and December to ages 77-84 and beyond.12 These are the Winter years or Autumn–Winter years in a lifetime. In his eighties, Reb Zalman is in his December years. And he speaks these days of being drawn to solitude and the contemplative life. In these later years, contemplative practices call us. It does not mean that we need to withdraw from the world. It does mean that we cultivate, more and more, a different world. Being silent, we listen and, even in speaking, we can speak in a listening mode. In action, we have the opportunity for what I will call “trim-tab living.”

Buckminster Fuller called our attention to the trim tab. He was thinking of a great ocean liner like the Queen Mary. He remembered that the ship is steered with a rudder and, at the edge of the rudder, is a kind of miniature rudder called a trim tab. A small movement of the trim tab causes the rudder to move and, as the rudder turns, the entire ship turns. Fuller thought of himself as a trim tab.13 I would say that any of us — by attunement to the currents — can engage in trim-tab living.

In “trim-tab living,” we live more simply and yet more powerfully because we do not rely upon our own powers alone. Listening to what is unfolding in the deep, in the “not yet manifest” realm, we say a word. Or omit a comment. And we do this with loving intent. As we align our thoughts and words and actions with the deeper life we sense, as we participate in the great story unfolding, we bestow winter’s gifts and are at peace.

If we dwell in the story told by the religions of the book,14 we image the ultimate in a personal manner. Then we can say in listening to the deep story anew: “Ah, you appear like that. Ah, you appear like this. Everywhere there is the face of faces, veiled as in a mystery.”15

Here also we might say with Dante, “And His will is our peace. (E sua voluntade è nostra pace.). It is that sea to which all moves that it creates or nature makes.”16

//

In the East, one can also image the ultimate in a non-personal manner and call it, for example, the Tao (pronounced “dow”). The Tao is the Way of the universe. We glimpse the Tao in meditative mind, in nature and in the appearance of the Masters, the large-souled ones. Here is how the storyteller (Lao Tzu) speaks of these masters in the Tao Te Ching (the Classic of the Power of the Way):

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.
The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable,
All we can do is describe their appearance.

[How do they appear?]

Watchful, like those crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men and women aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests,
Yielding, like ice about to melt.
Simple like uncarved blocks of wood.
Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

[And what is the teaching for us?]

Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?
Who can remain still until the moment of action?
Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by change.17

Have we not here other pointers to winter’s gifts? To a way of dwelling at the depth of life?

So, in light of these reflections, hear anew the poem with which we began —Juan Ramon Jimenez’s “Oceans:”

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

—- Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?1

//

Notes

¹ The translation is by Robert Bly, see Robert Bly, ed. The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), p. 246.

² See Gen. 1:1-2<

³ See The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1995), p. 12.

⁴ The young philosopher was Anne Joy Cahill-Swenson, daughter of Ann Cahill and Neil Swenson. The incident took place in July of 2008 when Anne Joy was almost 5 years old.

⁵ Paul Eluard quoted in John Tarrant, The Light Inside the Dark(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 4.

⁶ I owe the phrase “ruthless certainties” to my friend, Robert Knowles. It echoes a theme that the cultural critic Ivan Illich sounded throughout his writings.

⁷ See William Blake’s poem: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

⁸ Some experience an opening of the sense of sight; others, a subtle hearing.Perhaps all the senses can be activated in new and different ways.

⁹ The lines are the closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”

¹⁰ For more on Byron Katie and the turn around, see Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell, Loving What Is(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002).

¹¹ For more on Winter and the Fool, see my Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality (Laurel, MD: Tai Sophia Institute, 2004), chapter 12.

¹² See Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing (New York: Warner Books, 1995), pp. 271-272.

¹³ Buckminster Fuller’s remarks can be found in the February 1972 issue of Playboy magazine.

¹⁴ I am thinking here of Judaism, Christianity and Islam which all accept and respect the Hebrew scriptures – what Christians call the Old Testament.

¹⁵ I am echoing here St. Nicholas of Cusa’s remark: “In all faces is shown the Face of Faces, veiled and as if in a riddle . . .” Quoted in Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1973), p. 81.

¹⁶ See Dante, The Paradiso, Canto III, lines 85-87.

¹⁷ See The Tao Te Ching, trans. by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1972), chapter 15. Passage modified for inclusive language.

The Importance of Being Silly by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

FOOL: If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’ld have thee beaten for being
old before thy time.

LEAR: How’s that?

LEAR: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 5

Every time we see an ad touting a product designed to raise the libido, increase potency, and stimulate eros, the conviction gets ever more imprinted on the eldering population that the only fun you can have is in the bedroom. When you get older, however, more subtle and more deeply joyful possibilities arise..

Mardi Gras and Purim are approaching — seasons of rejuvenation. It seems to me that there are a number of ways in which elders can create possibilities for fun for themselves that not only will delight, but will refresh, stimulate, and heal the cells of the body. Norman Cousins healed from his illness by watching funny movies. You have surely heard the phrase, “Laughter is the best medicine.”

This is the season in which we can allow ourselves to be silly. My friend Bernie DeKoven is known as Dr. Fun. He is helping people find delight in win-win games. In fact, we had a conversation the other day. He is starting a play community. A play community! For years we have talked about how to let Silly out of the cage. Both “Serious” and “Silly” co­exist within us. Bernie thinks Serious has Silly imprisoned in most of us.

These two forces operate in our consciousness. Silly can’t take action because the force of Serious — who likes to think of itself as the Great Manager — overrules. Silliness gets bound up by the business-like approach of Serious, whose first question is always, “What’s the use?”

I once said to my son, “That was a stupid movie.” He replied, “No Daddy, it wasn’t stupid. It was silly, and I like silly movies.” That’s very, very discerning. Silly doesn’t get out often enough— so there’s this conspiracy not to let Silly out because Serious says Silly is stupid.

We need to re-learn how to play and let Silly out so that we can simply have fun. Sometimes the child in us does play, but we feel guilty. Sometimes the parent in us scolds us for gambling with or wasting our time. Very seldom does the adult in us get to play with high consciousness: High play facilitates the kind of communication in which my heart can communicate an emotion with your heart. Imagine that I put some music on and, with all my eighty-plus years, I look in the mirror and begin to dance. Objectively, I’m not a ballet dancer. But subjectively… OY! Am I a ballet dancer! If can make a leap, if I can make eight scissors on the way up! We don’t have a chance to use Silly in this way often enough. Someone once told me that people don’t stop playing because they get old:. But no, people get old because they stop playing.

Silly brings us lots of vitamins! I once read of a research study in which they took samples of T-cells (cells which indicate immune function and general health) of elders before and after the experiment and got folks to wear the clothes they wore in the 1950s. The researchers then played the music of that era in a room decorated from that time and had them dance to the tunes they danced to in the 1950s. They then took T-cell samples again and showed an increase in T-cells after the merriment. It seemed to the participants that the burdens of the serious years had been lifted from their shoulders. They experienced more vitality and energy.

My suggestion is that you invite some friends over who would like to play silly with you. Dress up in funny clothes, play games in which everyone can win, and make time for fun and hilarity. Chances are that you will like the experience and that you will want to repeat it with your friends at least once a month. I suggest full moon times as the best time to invite Silly as a Master of the Revels. Now go have some fun with this!

//

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was an internationally recognized loving teacher who drew from many disciplines and cultures. He has was at the forefront of ecumenical discussions, enjoying close friendships with the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and many other leading sages of our time and was the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement which laid out the foundations for 21st-century Judaism.

He was instrumental in inspiring the convergence of ecology, spirituality, and religion and in his later years put special emphasis on Spiritual Eldering, or “Sage-ing” as he called it in his seminal book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older. Reb Zalman’s “Sage-ing” work — work which commenced after he was 60 — was seminal in the emergence of a conscious aging movement in America and the inspiration of our own efforts with Second Journey. He died on July 8, 2014, at the age of 89.

Poems, collected by John Clarke

Depression in Winter
by Jane Kenyon

There comes a little space between the south
side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green….

I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness–
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened and calm.

//

from Memories of My Father
by Galway Kinnell

Those we love from the first
can’t be put aside or forgotten,
after they die they still must be cried
out of existence, tears must make
their erratic runs down the face,
over the fullnesses, into
the craters, confirming,
the absent will not be present,
ever again. Then the lost one
can fling itself outward, its million
moments of presence can scatter
through consciousness freely, like snow
collected overnight on a spruce bough
that in midmorning bursts
into glittering dust in the sunshine.

//

Ask Me
by William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

//

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert E. Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early and
put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

//

Winter
by John Clarke

Camus found
invincible summer
within himself
in winter’s deep.

Now in arctic night
a newborn polar bear
— barely inches long —
floats in the mother’s
great fur cradle.

The stream of blood
below your temple
flows as the stars
dream across this
vast December night.

Together now, we
sound earth’s pulse
ever deeper. As
dark, then light,
lengthens.

Invisible snow
settles, drifts, cups
intangible skin,
planet’s crust.
No melting.

Still, fallen
sun and heart
pump warmth into
the world, our hands,
as we drop asleep.
No ceasing.

Extraordinary in the Ordinary by Linda and Jim Henry

Astonishing us with her amazing voice, many people worldwide have heard of Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old unemployed church worker from Scotland’s West Lothian district whose voice and story captured the hearts of millions. Described as a very quiet, unassuming, plain, down-to-earth woman, she was greeted with snickers as she walked onto the stage to audition for Britain’s Got Talent show. The audience laughed at her drab and common appearance. However, as she began to sing, the crowd stood in amazement and cheered her remarkable voice.

Michelle Bowman, Longmont, Colorado PrestigePLUS wellness program manager, shares the extraordinary story of her visit to the home of a dear 92-year-old-friend where she happened to observe a number of cruise ship brochures laying on the table. Her friend, Irene, abruptly informed Michele that the two of them were going on a cruise together. She said, “Maybe if I take you on a cruise to find you a new husband, I can leave this planet. You know I’m ready to pass on. Besides, I booked and paid for us to go on an arthritis association cruise.” Amazing as it sounded at the time, the two friends subsequently went on the cruise. When the ship docked at St. Croix, they were met by Jon Bowman. Irene said emphatically, “That’s him! I told you we would find you a new husband.” Michele and Jon were married four months later.

These two different stories underscore James Hillman’s premise in his book, The Soul’s Code, that all humans have an exceptional component to their lives, whether recognized or not. And, when we explore people’s stories intentionally and extensively, we soon uncover the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Jim has listened to hundreds of stories in his more than 35 years in career development, and he has never met a dull person. Career guidance professionals seeking to uncover people’s satisfying talents often face resistance from people who claim their lives have no significance. Many people resist sharing their stories because they fear that it sounds like aggrandizement. However, those with healthy self-esteem and a sense of God-given personal value enjoy the process of uncovering strengths and aptitudes.

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“Seasoned humans,” as we like to call them, over age 65 are especially blessed with passionate talents, many years of experience, and related stories. The metaphor of a filing cabinet comes to mind. Like the operating system of a computer, the bottom drawer of the cabinet comes filled with a working structure containing information handed down through the ages: genes, instincts, ancestral heritage, instructions on how to relate to parents, and other facets of the environment. For example, studies indicate that, even before birth, babies can process sound and respond to rhythm.

After birth and moving through the developmental stages of youth and adulthood, our imaginary filing cabinet begins to fill with input from parents, culture in general, education, and overall life experiences. The final stage of elderhood is represented by the top drawer.

One method of more clearly identifying your extraordinary history is to look through your various imaginary files and identify peak, positive experiences. These were times when you felt enthusiastically engaged in a task or project, when time seemed to fly because you enjoying yourself. You experienced a joyful concentration that energized you. If you are drawn to this approach, attempt to identify five or more such experiences during different periods of your life. Next, look for patterns of talents and skills common to most of the joyful experiences. Share stories about them with other people. You will soon discover how this will enliven you and provide a sense of pride-filled heritage. You may even uncover a sense of life purpose.

After about age 65, imagine the top drawer of the cabinet beginning to fill with experiences unique to this later stage of life. As they adapt, seasoned humans begin to embody insights and talents seldom found in younger people. Elders are not just older adults. Carl Jung, well-known explorer of the psyche, spoke about individuation in later life, broadening self-understanding of “Who am I?” Psychologist Erik Erikson studied developmental stages; the final stage of mature elderhood he called ego integrity, a tendency toward the acceptance of self and others, life completion, and a return to life satisfaction. Swedish gerontologist Lars Tornstam speaks of gerotranscendence, elders rising above the cultural demands of adulthood and moving towards maturation, wisdom, and spiritual growth.

Based upon the research of Jung, Erikson, Tornstam, and others, listed below are some developmental characteristics often exhibited by seasoned humans. Check each statement if you believe it at least somewhat describes you, or someone you know age 65+.

• It is easier to embrace the mysteries of life. I welcome with awe the many wonders of the universe.
• I see more clearly the many sides of myself, both positive and negative.
• I see myself as part of the whole of humanity and am less self-absorbed.
• The pieces of life’s puzzle seem to be falling in place, and I feel more content with myself.
• I embrace a faith system that provides a coherent pattern to my life.
• Desiring to simplify my life, I believe that owning too many things becomes a burden.
• I am much less interested in assuming roles in life. I tend to present my authentic self.
• My perception of time seems to be changing. I can look back on past events with new and experienced eyes.
• The quality rather than quantity of relationships is more important to me.
• I enjoy “positive solitude.”
• While acknowledging mistakes and having regrets for things left undone, I sense that my life has purpose and, at least in small ways, I am making a difference during my life.
• Fear of death seems to recede; I see it as a natural part of the life process.

//

Unfortunately, in a culture that tends to deny the value of growing old, many of these elder qualities vital to the health of society go unrealized and appreciated. It’s as though younger generations simply dump the contents of the top drawer. Thankfully, as the age wave of baby-boomers floods the coming years, the worth of elders will undoubtedly re-emerge. Extraordinary in the ordinary does not just refer to the 88-year-old person who climbs Mt. Rainier or the 105-year-old pediatrician who finally retires because her eyesight begins to fail her. They are people like social worker Marty Richard’s dementia client who has the ability to “pick up nonverbal signs of stress in my life.” All elders have an extraordinary depth of history. Adult family home provider Lisa Jackson affirms, “My women have so many interesting stories to share.” Retirement home activities director Maria Giampaolo reports about elders making “lessons of a life time” quilts designed to preserve a person’s legacy. Like many seasoned humans, they have become “big picture” people skilled at making connections and synthesizing information.

Never underestimate the extraordinary circumstances and events of your life that can also lead to extraordinary actions. Nobel Peace prize co-winner Jody Williams reminds us, “For me, the difference between an ‘ordinary’ and an ‘extraordinary’ person is not the title that person might have, but what they do to make the world a better place for us all.”

//

Linda and Jim Henry are authors of four holistic, healthcare-related books, the latest of which, Transformational Eldercare from the Inside Out, Strengths-Based Strategies for Caring was published by nursesbooks.org. National speakers and experienced workshop facilitators, in recent years they have presented to more than 30 nationwide healthcare and eldercare organizations. One of the workshops offered by the Henrys focuses on the theme of this issue of Itineraries: Igniting Passionate Purpose in the Second Journey. The Henrys live in Seattle.

Passionate Pursuit of Purpose by Helen Harkness

Helen Harkness, Ph.D., founded Career Design Associates, Inc. (CDA) in 1978. She is a futurist, consultant, researcher, experienced speaker, teacher, writer, and a pioneer in the development and implementation of career management programs. She has worked with more than 10,000 clients by looking at the realities of today’s workplace in light of her intuitive eye for what’s next. Her books include Capitalizing on Career Chaos, Don’t Stop the Career Clock, and The Career Chase. Dr. Harkness broadcasted a weekly show, discussing current career issues affecting the workplace. Visit her website at www.career-design.com.

Igniting our passionate purpose is seen as a rapidly increasing necessity in today’s chaotic and complex changing world. We are all aware that the 40-year “Womb to Tomb” job is totally defunct! There is no longer any safety net, except what we, the individual, create. I have labeled this career revision the “Yo Yo Model—You’re On Your Own!” You and I are responsible for learning to successfully balance our own career on the current edge of constant change, chaos, complexity, and uncertainty. Though painful, frequently fearful, and characterized by a “miserable middle,” discovering the purpose you can pursue with passion requires activating a major step of growth, creativity, coherence, and order for our work lives.

Helping adults identify and achieve their passionate purpose has been my mission for more than three decades. I can say with certainty that it is the best anti-aging medication we can possibly have in order to live long and die fast! Personally, while I usually sleep very well, occasionally I wake up feeling as if I’ve been run over by a truck! However, staying in bed is not an option since I have client appointments that are critically important to keep. I arise, ignoring the discomfort, and surprisingly 30 minutes later I feel great and am totally unaware of any aches and pains! I begin what will be a long and busy day committed to providing the process, resources, insight, and contacts to help my clients realize and take the action on the purpose they can successfully pursue with passion.

My career clients include a wide variety of professionals: 25% are lawyers, 10% are physicians, and a large number are women, many coming out of a divorce after years as a housewife and mother. Many clients have succeeded financially but now realize that meaning is missing in their lives. Daily I talk with talented, seemingly successful adults who privately see themselves stalled in inane, pointless, unchallenging, and frequently abusive work situations. Countless people feel powerless, directionless, cynical, victimized, and trapped in a career that pays the bills but has no meaning or purpose for them.

Without thought, many of my clients have been imprisoned in a vicious cycle by what is seen as material needs, so they spend money to fill an empty hole in their gut because there is little other purpose in their lives. Burned out and sensing that their work life is out of control, they long for something different and better. They can’t name it, can’t find it, suspect they wouldn’t recognize it if they ran into it or that they might be too fearful of the risk involved to take it. “I’m looking for the second half of my life. I could get it, if I just knew what it was!” The successful executives who told me this echoed what I hear constantly from clients seeking their career options today.

I urge my clients in pursuit of purpose to realize and remember always that today we are pioneers on a new frontier. To become successful today we are being forced to distance ourselves from the familiar and head toward the unknown and the unnamed. While this is fearful, it’s a challenge and an opportunity to be a modern pathfinder, creating new routes and directions for ourselves and others who follow us. The colliding and overlapping of the old age and the new age of being “here or there” (but maybe both in a single lifetime) has created a breakdown in our expectations for the ways things are supposed to be. Their loss of myth, assumptions, and rules has created great anxiety, doubt, and extreme uncertainty about the way we are to live our lives. The current reality is that we live in an increasingly complex world, riddled with chaos and the “future shock” predicted by Toffler in 1970.

We can view the chaos in our work as a cry of disappointment or a stirring call for a new purpose. Discovering this meaningful purpose and direction strengthens the will and resolve to bring work into alignment with belief—the head with the heart. Our reality is that security in the past conventional sense is an illusion, and success itself must now be redefined. “Freedom is knowing our options.” This is my mantra, but I also stress that this freedom carries responsibility to discover, develop, and creatively utilize our potential to leave our world a better place. I explain clearly that taking creative control and changing careers can be incredibly challenging, but ultimately unbelievably rewarding. A career change can happen only for a client when their pain is greater than the fear, hence the formula: CC = P > F. After three decades of focusing on helping thousands of adults make this transition, I assure them that we can achieve positive results with their thoughtful and dedicated commitment. How do I accomplish this?

I communicate carefully to my clients that discovering and gaining their purpose is a four-step process of: 1) Looking Inward to identify values, skills, strengths, and possible career matches; 2) Looking Outward to research career realities; 3) Looking Forward to name the specific career matching the purpose; and 4) Action Steps to gain the purpose.

The Looking Inward Step is critical to identifying and igniting the purpose to pursue with passion. While I use countless assessments and exercises to achieve this, the main activity is completing the following chart.

This list of “glass balls” becomes their written prescription for what they are seeking. After careful thought, we analyze their list to determine their Meaning Magnet, their tap-root, the passionate purpose that ties all their glass balls together. As an example, mine is the following: I am a grower—of people, ideas, trees, and plants. As a teacher for thousands of clients, I follow up and am delighted when a client moves forward toward their career purpose. As a naturalist, I have an 8-acre yard that was originally a burned-out Texas cotton farm with one tree. Currently there are over 600 plants of all sizes and species which I water and look forward to their new leaves or branches. It isn’t necessary for the plant to be exotic or the client to be famous or unusual, but merely for both to grow in its natural way and place.

A 30-40 hour Skills Workshop for about 10 clients of various ages and careers represents a major component of discovering one’s purpose. Participants write about talents from various times in their lives and then share their stories in group sessions. These are stories about skills they (1) did well, (2) intensely enjoyed, and (3) remember with pride. Each listener in the group takes notes about the skills they have heard and shares the results with the speaker.

Frankly, this Skills Workshop is ranked the best part of my Career Design process by my clients. I am frequently amazed at their positive response gained from the interaction with each other and the opening up and trust that develops. They bond and stay in touch, helping each other and frequently starting businesses etc. together.

The following is the final summary sheet my clients complete: (Notice that Purpose is listed first..)

Pursuit of Personal Power

Balancing Life and Career at the Edge of Chaos

In summary, to know and ignite your passionate purpose, our current “Yo Yo Model—You’re On Your Own” requires the following: (1) Assess and verbalize your skills; (2) Identify achievements where you successfully used these to bring successful outcomes; (3) Know your Success Criteria, your “Glass Balls,” the fundamental bedrock essentials necessary for your success and motivation; (4) Align these with the direction and needs of your profession; (5) Exude energy, intensity, stamina, and flexibility; stress enthusiasm for challenges and the ability to creatively cope with complexities created by change; and (6) Lead—don’t merely follow! Act—don’t always wait to react.

Legacies of the Heart by Meg Newhouse

Among the things that make the “second journey” something to anticipate rather than dread are the developmental “tasks” or “urges” that we now understand come with the territory. Most salient among these catalysts to continued growth are finding purpose and leaving a legacy. My own recent absorption in the topic of legacy has made me think more about its relationship to purpose. I believe they are separate but overlapping, or perhaps flip sides of the same coin. They nourish and reinforce each other. Our most authentic and powerful legacies come from living “on purpose,” that is, giving our unique gifts, guided by our core essence. These gifts of ourselves, both tangible and intangible, the imprint of our lives that reflect our purpose, will necessarily be legacies of the heart. For this and other reasons, I advocate clarifying our purpose and being intentional about our legacies early in our second journey, as we harvest and pass on our inner wealth while there is still time to reap the many rewards.

Purpose and Legacy “Defined”

Both purpose and legacy are huge, multifaceted subjects. Since this entire journal is devoted to purpose, I offer here only a rudimentary working definition that shapes my understanding of the relationship between purpose and legacy. I’m using purpose in the sense of “life purpose” or “calling” — our unique combination of core values, gifts, passions, and essence (Soul/Higher Self) that, when recognized and offered in service, give our lives meaning, wholeness, and joy.
Despite its narrow, concrete primary dictionary definition, namely, “a gift or bequest of property,” to me legacy is:

• as broad as the imprint of one’s life that lasts at least into the next generation and as specific as a single piece of property (e.g., a family heirloom) willed to a survivor;
• as mighty as a religious or scientific paradigm shift or great artistic output and as mundane as a single family recipe passed down the generations;
• as public as an architectural monument and as private as a letter written to your children or grandchildren;
• as tangible as a bank check and as intangible as a seemingly casual word of advice;
• as life-enhancing as a lifesaving Heimlich maneuver and as life-denying as the Holocaust.

In navigating this thicket I have found
a few distinctions particularly helpful:

• Macro/Micro: Macro refers to the level of societies and cultures, the traditions, values, and world views we inherit from our cultures, typically unconsciously and unquestioningly. It also includes legacies left that change cultural mores, esthetics, knowledge, religions, paradigms, etc., occasionally by a truly great individual and, commonly, by the cumulative small acts of thousands of individuals over time. In contrast, micro refers to the individual or family and is the focus of this essay.
• Intentional/unintentional: My assumption is that most of us are relatively unintentional about our legacies until late in life, if then. That is, we don’t think in terms of what we are leaving and want to leave behind. I argue here for intentionality earlier rather than later.
• Heart/Soul-based/Ego-based: By the former, I mean legacies stemming from our life-purpose, essence/Soul, which I assume reflect higher-order values such as love, compassion, generosity, tolerance. Ego may well be involved, but only in the service of these values. Legacies of the heart are true gifts, without strings or expectations. In contrast, Ego-based legacies reflect egoic values and instincts such as fear, competition, lack, exclusion, control. I hypothesize that the more aware and intentional we are, the more we will want and try to leave “legacies of the heart.”
• Tangible/Intangible: Tangible legacies include monetary and other material things, such as real estate, family heirlooms, memoirs, photos, and recipes; more public buildings (financed, designed, built); organizations founded, funded, or shaped; and artistic creations of all genres. Intangible legacies range from the beliefs, world view, values, life lessons, accrued wisdom we transmit, to the love we model and the forms in which we do or don’t communicate it, to the imprint of our core essence and our deepest values to benefit those we love and to improve the world. Ideally, tangible legacies express and symbolize intangible ones.

It is worth noting that on their deathbeds, most people want to know only three things: 1) Have I given and received love? 2) Did I live my life or someone else’s? Do I feel complete? 3) Have I left the world a little better than I found it?1

Legacies Received

Most people, when they start to think about legacies they have received think first of intangible legacies. For example, 80–90% of participants in workshops and legacy discussion groups I’ve led respond to an open-ended request to “Think of a legacy — any way you want to think of it — that you’ve received from someone who cared about you,” by mentioning intangible legacies, such as:

• a social justice ethic from one or both parents (or grandparents) — or thrift ethic, work ethic, or (name the value).
• a scientist father’s essential curiosity, wonder, amazement, and optimism that now shapes his daughter’s work of integrating science and spirituality.
• support and life-changing advice from a mentor teacher, in one case, receiving a B instead of the expected A in a graduate counseling course, with the comment: “You think you know more about other people’s lives than they do.”
• watching a brother transform himself in his last year of life, redefining success, living fully, and creating an end-of life ritual of forgiveness and gratitude.
• a 100-year-old grandmother’s question “When are you going to finish your studies?” that caused her granddaughter to get a valued Ph.D. in mid-life.
• a few ensuing “real” conversations with my family

Some of these legacies were negative or at best mixed:

• Seeing a father die relatively young unfulfilled in his work, which sent his daughter the message: “If you don’t do what you want to do, it will kill you.”
• A tradition of martyrdom from a woman’s maternal Italian side, which it has become part of her life work to interrupt
• Family feuding or squabbling over property “unfairly” bequeathed
• Family secrets causing lasting shame

Even when material legacies pop up first in this workshop exercise, they almost always reflect the values, beliefs, or other intangible emotional or spiritual gifts of the giver. For example:

• a family vacation home that represented the strong value placed on family
• family recipes and food traditions that recall broader family values and experiences around the dinner table
• In my own case, four material legacies from my revered grandfather that profoundly shaped my life: 1) a savings bond given at my birth that paid most of my college tuition, 2) a loan when I was 16 that allowed me to buy an excellent second-hand flute, 3) his autobiography, written shortly before his death, a tangible record of his values, wisdom, and life story, and 4) a typed collection of about 100 of his favorite poems, most of which he knew by heart.

Leaving Legacies

It is much easier to recall and ponder legacies we have received than it is to contemplate the legacies we are leaving. For one thing, our hyper-busy lives discourage being conscious about our legacies. For another, we can be discouraged by feeling inadequate (“I’m not leaving anything worthwhile behind”) or overly humble (“I shouldn’t feel proud of this thing I did”) or overwhelmed at the perceived gap between what Frederick Buechner called “the world’s deep hunger” and our own capacities. Moreover, being intentional about our legacies requires us to confront our mortality and the meaning of our life, which this culture discourages.

And yet, as we age and begin inexorably to confront our own mortality, many of us begin to think and care more about the meaning of our lives, our contributions, and the legacy we want to leave behind for those we love as well as for generations to come. We want to bequeath our inner wealth and the question becomes: How do we want to do that beyond what we have already inevitably left behind simply by living and working in the world, with more or less awareness?

What I’m seeing is a widespread desire to leave material “legacies of the heart,” concrete evidence of our passions, purpose, and learning from life. I see it in the importance discussion group members come to place on material (mostly non-monetary) inheritances or keepsakes from loved forbearers. I infer it from the exploding interest in memoir/life story writing or scrapbooking as evidenced by numerous books and courses. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi captures this idea memorably: “Are you ‘saved’?” he asks. “I don’t mean it in a theological sense but in a computer sense. Are you saved? Have you downloaded your life experience for coming generations? Have you started doing your legacy work?”2

It is not uncommon for purpose-based legacies to grow out of the dying process. For example, lung cancer struck a 40-year-old nonsmoking friend of mine who was a lawyer specializing in health care. As it advanced to a terminal stage, he wrote an influential article, published in the July 16, 1995, Boston Globe Magazine, on the importance of compassionate caregiving within the entire medical community. This led to his planning with family and close friends to found the now thriving Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, whose mission is “to support and advance compassionate health care…in a way that provides hope to the patient, support to caregivers and sustenance to the healing process.” More recently, Randy Pautscher, facing a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, gave a “Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon University (created mainly for his young children), which spread through the media — news, web, Oprah and, finally, Jeffrey Zaslow’s book by the same name, leaving an unexpectedly broad and powerful legacy.

Obviously, these are legacies of unusual scope, and there are many more examples of “small” private legacies that are inspired by the immediacy of death, including the example of a brother’s dying ritual mentioned above. While we are blessed with these inspired deathbed legacies, how many people never leave any legacies because they put it off until it is too late? And how might our families and communities and even the world benefit from our leaving them sooner rather than later?

Examples abound. A friend of mine, who was widowed with three very young children and few financial resources, 15 years later created The Wildflower Camp Foundation, which enables children who have suffered the loss of a parent to attend summer camps. This legacy grew out of her loss and the healing role such camps played for her and her children through the generosity of several camp directors who provided scholarships to them.

For the past three years, the small but influential non-profit Civic Ventures has annually awarded Purpose Prizes (money and recognition) to passionate social entrepreneurs over 60 who are taking on society’s biggest challenges, creating new programs, and making lasting change. One of the 2008 winners was Catalino Tapia, an immigrant gardener who raises money from other gardeners, his clients, and local businesses to fund scholarships for Latino students dreaming of college. Such stories are inspiring partly because many of us could do something similar, assuming we possessed the requisite passion and purpose around a cause.
BUT we don’t have to be a social entrepreneur, and it doesn’t have to be a public or large offering. A colleague of mine, having taken good care of various family treasures (furniture, pictures, jewelry, silver, etc.), has gradually over time written short notes about the origin, family stories, and importance of individual items and attached them to the items. To her, these messages are more important to hand down than the actual items, and she has the current reward of a 9-year-old granddaughter’s rapt attention.

On a personal note, I have embarked on a legacy letter-writing project, akin to an “ethical will,” which involves writing letters over time to my family (husband, children, grandchildren, and siblings) — some individual letters of appreciation, some common letters laying out my beliefs, values, life lessons, wishes for end-of-life care and after-death rituals. I imagine that this project will evolve into some memoir or family/life story pieces. It is challenging to carve out the time, to write from the heart (as opposed to ego), to face the possibility that the recipients will react with indifference or even alienation to my bared soul, and to trust in whatever impact there may be. But the rewards have been worth it:

• my own growth and learning — clarifying values, purpose; rediscovering meaning, threads and patterns, unfinished business;
• a few ensuing “real” conversations with my family
• a certain satisfaction in offering my vulnerable, evolving core self in the service of an unknown legacy to my children, grandchildren, and perhaps beyond. Perhaps this then becomes part of my own life purpose.

In summary, I believe most of us are best served if we reflect on and act intentionally to leave our legacies throughout rather than at the end of our second journey. And that is simpler, though not necessarily easier, than we think. We simply need to discover or clarify our life purpose — our deepest values, longings, “woundings,” gifts, passions, essence — because when we are living and acting with awareness from our purpose, we will have a powerful, positive impact on the people in our lives and a clearer idea what we want to bequeath to them and future generations. The authenticity and purity of intent is the key factor, not the magnitude of the actual legacy. What matters most is that it comes as a gift from the heart, without strings and expectations, but with love and a desire to self-express, serve, and make a positive difference. These legacies will be received if, when, and how according to the readiness of the recipients, and they will be passed on in ripples impossible to imagine.

Indeed, if enough people were to consciously leave such legacies of the heart, we could incrementally transform the culture and preserve the planet for future generations. And who is riper to leave such a legacy than second-journeyers?

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Meg Newhouse is a nationally known pioneer in Third-Age LifeCrafting and an experienced group facilitator, teacher, coach, and program designer. As a catalyst for living with passion, purpose and grace after 50, she gives talks and workshops, writes, and consults to organizations, helping people create vital, fulfilling later lives that express who they are and how they want to contribute. She is currently working on a book on purposeful legacy. The founder of the Life Planning Network, she is the co-author of Life Planning for the Third Age: A Design Guide and Toolkit. Meg holds a BA from Wellesley College, MAT from Harvard University, and PhD in political science from UCLA. She is an avid learner/seeker on many fronts, a serious amateur flutist, and devoted friend, family member and grandmother. Visit her website at www.passionandpurpose.com.

Excavations in Three Parts by Bolton Anthony

The great reward from mining our life experience comes when we strike that vein of purpose and find that the seemingly diffused endeavors and commitments of our life cohere. A hidden pattern is revealed, a “strange attractor” around which the once random trajectories of our life now constellate, disclosed. And we arrive at the place where “everything belongs”—ready, as the poet Yeats says, “to cast out remorse” and “live it all again and yet again” (“Dialogue of Self and Soul”).

When I arrived, I could find no one to show me to my class. I’d been hired—mid-term—to fill a vacancy caused by an illness or death; and as I wandered the empty cavernous hallways, gently pushing open classroom doors, and climbing the wide, seemingly endless flights of creaky wooden stairs, I became increasing angry that the school was so poorly managed. I was a teacher, and somewhere in this ancient building there was a class that needed me.

Why did God make you? Every Catholic of a certain age—as part of their early catechetical drilling—will have been asked this sixth question from the Baltimore Catechism and been expected to answer: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven. If the child took this teaching to heart, he stepped through a door and embarked on a quest to untangle the mysterious threads of purpose in his life.

Of the four parts of the answer, it was the third—perhaps because it seemed the only one I could do something about, the only area of action in my control—that ignited my passion. Like all great teaching, the “answer” is just a trove of further questions: How did I serve God in this world? What was my calling, my vocation? What was to be my work in the world?

But there was something too constricted in the way these questions came to be framed for me. For a life to be worth living, it had to be a life worth dying for. That became the test of authenticity. For the child that I was, enfolded by ritual, with a love for learning and a gift for writing, there seemed only three career paths that were legitimate: I could become a priest, a teacher, or a writer.

As I moved through my student years, then into my householding years, I found myself progressively barred from each of these paths. In puberty I discovered girls and ruled out a life of celibacy. I married, started a family, and embarked on making a living. I couldn’t do it as a writer; my gift was perhaps too small, my dedication too tepid, or the demands on my time too many. So I became a teacher.

We were standing at the edge of the playground with the high fortress-like wall behind us. To be heard over the noise of the playing children, I had raised my voice. Tamping his hand down, my colleague cautioned me. He nodded imperceptibly, and I followed the direction of his nod to where an old hag of a nun was watching us from an opened second-story window.

—The principal will hear you.

—And well she should. I’ll tell her what I think of how this place is run. Do you know what I’m doing these days… after I wander the hallways for an hour or two looking for my class? I come out and work in the garden, just to have something productive to do. No, let her come talk to me. In fact, I want to see the Registrar.

I finished a master’s degree in creative writing and, in the fall of 1967, took my first job teaching English at Xavier University, a Black university in New Orleans. I was returning to the city of my birth after an absence of 16 years—returning at a strident and tumultuous moment in our history which, in my own life and the lives of my students, seemed to call into question the value of teaching and learning. Martin Luther King was shot during the spring of 1968, and Richard Nixon was elected the following fall.

I left Xavier the following year. Though I’d intended to pursue a doctorate at Notre Dame, where I’d been an undergraduate, I found immediately I couldn’t afford that and instead ended up teaching part-time at several colleges near South Bend. I left teaching altogether three years later, after a final year at a prep school.

Though I pursued other career paths in my life—got a master’s degree in Library Science and worked as a public librarian, got a doctorate in Educational Administration and worked as a university administrator—all these endeavors somehow seemed to come up short, to lack legitimacy, measured against the standards ingrained in childhood.

The texts I have been inserting are the episodes from a dream—one of a number of powerful dreams I had the year I turned fifty. It came as a blessing and a dispensation that what had seemed like no path was indeed a genuine path:

I was using a hoe to weed the garden plot tucked into a corner where two high walls intersected, when I caught sight of him striding toward me across the wide lawn. He was a behemoth of a man, dressed in a clerical black suit that shimmered as the sun danced over it. He stopped when he drew close.

—You asked to see the Registrar? Well, I am the Registrar.

I minced no words telling him how poorly I thought the school was run. —I am a teacher, I said, and there are students here who need me.

He ignored my diatribe as he surveyed my work. Then, looking at me, he said, —So these are the magnificent gardens everyone is talking about!

I looked about me and saw the garden—lush and fragrant with flowering plants—as if for the first time. As we strolled the grounds together, he admiring the many landscaped areas we came across, I realized I had somehow managed to create all these beautiful inviting spaces, as it were, in my spare time. When we stopped at the end of our circuit, he looked at me.

—You know, at our cloister in Montreal, I was a gardener too.

//

The dreams of my fiftieth year presaged tectonic shifts in my life. For the second time in five years, I was dealing with prolonged unemployment. My five children were raised, and the youngest would leave for college in the fall. My marriage of 28 years was dissolving. With hindsight I see that a demarcation line, between a first and second half of life, was being drawn. Within a fortnight of my “garden dream” I had moved out of our home in Greensboro, where I’d been living for 14 years, and taken a position at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington.

In the dissolution of the partnership with Pugh in early 1862, [Darden] kept ownership of the St. Bernard [plantation which] with 600 argents, had had only forty-one slaves (all listed by family), six cabins, a smaller sugarhouse valued at $4,500, a dwelling worth $1,500 and several lesser such structures.

Wilmington had had a troubled racial history, and the grant project I was hired to manage had as its focus race relations. I remember following the news coverage during the 70s of the Wilmington Ten, a group of civil rights activists who spent nearly a decade in jail for arson and conspiracy before the questionable verdict was overturned in 1980.

The 1971 incident could be thought of, however, as an aftershock of a much more gruesome secret buried in Wilmington’s past. Wilmington near the turn of the last century had been the most populous city in the state and a magnet for aspiring Blacks who found opportunity in the city’s building and shipping trades. Blacks made up 60 percent of the population and held elected office on the City Council. On November 10, 1898, a white vigilante mob gathered before the offices of the state’s only Black daily newspaper, the Wilmington Daily Record, to protest an editorial which the engaged white citizenry thought had defamed Southern womanhood. After burning down the building, then posing proudly for their photograph, the mob marched downtown; deposed the existing council and installed a rump one in its place; and issued a manifesto, its “Declaration of White Independence.” For three days following, Republicans and Black entrepreneurs were put on trains leaving the city and told not to return. Estimates of the number of Black citizens who died in the violence go as high as 300. President William McKinley was kept fully informed of the events in this, the only instance of the illegal overthrow of a municipal government in U.S. history. He turned a blind eye.

When I arrived in Wilmington, the centennial anniversary of these tumultuous events was approaching. It took minimal investigative skills to see that dangerous memories1 of the 1898 insurrection were poisoning race relations and needed to be exorcised in a way that only their solemn commemoration could accomplish. It was, however, an initiative that the university would not lead, sensitive as it had to be to political pressure; in a quirk of history, three key leaders of the 1898 conspiracy had living grandsons who bore their exact names and were prominent citizens in the community as well as current or former members of the university’s Board of Trustees. In the end, I helped spearhead the creation of an independent Foundation and served as its director as we planned, then implemented, a year-long reconciliation effort.

There seemed to me a great deal of chance about my role in all of this. Hadn’t I taken the temporary assignment in Wilmington simply as a last resort—the only available opening that offered the remotest chance of salvaging my battered resumé and maintaining some semblance of a career path that could lead to future employment? Hadn’t I had simply fallen into a leadership role—not so much an outside as an accidental agitator? Looking back now, however, a pattern is discernible. A passion for racial justice runs through my biography—a vein of purpose—from my first job teaching at a Black college to my work in Wilmington. I cannot trace its roots to conscious experiences: though I grew up in the segregated South, we left New Orleans, where racial tensions simmered just below the surface, when I was six; and I grew up in Houston, insulated by my minority Catholic experience, from racism’s rawest cultural expressions. If I could be said to have chosen this work, the part of me that did the choosing was deeper than ego and consciousness—some sort of bedrock self that knew exactly what it needed to do.

I’d been in Wilmington two years and was deeply involved with the centennial commemoration when I received an unexpected parcel from my mother. The pamphlet it contained—the early history of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Thibodeaux, LA, written by the first pastor—gives brief biographies of the founding members of the vestry, including my great great grandfather, Richardson Gray Darden. The brief excerpt inserted earlier that describes the size of his plantation and the number of slaves he owned is taken from its text, as is the one below, which, when I first read it, sent quivers through me:

Richardson Gray Darden was born on August 27, 1809, at Wilmington, North Carolina, one of 13 children of Reddick Darden and Catherine Thomas. [He and two of his brothers] joined the swelling migration of many citizens of that state to … Deep South regions [including Louisiana, where he became] an overseer on sugar cane plantations.

//

There is a passage from the novel A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone where the revolutionary priest, Godoy, is described this way:

He fights for the peasants and the Indians because whether he knows it or not, he deeply desires the just rule of the Lord. Probably, he will never realize this… But I think unconsciously it is the kingdom of God he fights for.2

I have a visceral memory of a realization that happened within the past year or two. I don’t remember its context—where I was, what I was doing, what specific matter was the occasion for the realization. I remember praying silently that some aspect of my work with Second Journey would contribute in some small way to the “coming of the Kingdom,” the words we use in the Lord’s Prayer. Then, as a postscript, I remember qualifying the sentiment: May I do this good thing. AND may I do it for the RIGHT REASONS. Not because I enjoy the work… which I did, immensely. Not because it taps my creativity… which it did, immensely. But because it will leave the world a better place.

Catholic theology, distinguishing between ethics and morality, holds that the merit of an action depends on the intention of the actor:

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that you’re giving may be in secret. Then you’re Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.3

In the incident in question I remember the two thoughts—May I do this good thing. AND may I do it for the RIGHT REASONS. Then I remember a NEW thought, that came fast on the heels of the second thought and that signaled a cataclysmic psychic realignment: “Oh, the hell with that, let me just do it!”

When we act from a place deeper than ego, from the place of our deepest joy, we come into alignment with the divine spark in us and are absolved from asking further questions.

//

Notes

1 “And if a community is completely honest, it will remember stories not only of suffering received but of suffering inflicted—dangerous memories for they call the community to alter ancient evils” (Habits of the Heart. New York: Harper and Row, 1985, p. 153). Information about the 1898 Centennial Commemoration and the work of the 1898 Foundation can be found at this link, which contains further links to other resources.

2 Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 208.

2 Matt 6:2-4.

Wake up, Show up, Lighten Up: The Three Ups to Aging Well by Trish Herbert

Society imprints us with negative expectations about late life. Our culture has not historically expected much from the older population. Older people have not been challenged to grow and become more. The expectation has been to decline, to fade, and become less. If this is our expectation, our chances of doing precisely that increase. We must consciously program our minds toward health, continued growth, and meaning.

We are so acculturated to swallow what our society has put into our minds about aging that we have no idea what percentage of how we behave is based on how we think we are supposed to behave. If we believe that old age is about declining and becoming less, what percent of our decline is due to this belief? Some studies verify this fear. In one study, researcher Ellen Langer (Mindfulness, pp. 102–113) effectively reversed the biological age of a group of elderly men over 75 years old by systematically taking them back to a time when they saw themselves as young and vital… asking them to talk, act, dress, and behave as they did in their mid-fifties. They went to a country retreat for a week to participate in activities similar to what they would have experienced at that age. Music from that era was piped in. Impartial observers judged the men to look and behave more like 55-year-olds than 75-year-olds after that week. Objective physiological measures taken before and after the retreat verified that they had “de-aged.” Their posture became more erect, stiff joints loosened, they walked with longer strides, IQ scores improved, and fingers straightened… all because they imagined themselves young again.

Ageism is alive and well in our society. Ageism is the term used to describe a societal pattern of widely held devaluative attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes based on chronological age. Any -ism is the need of one group to feel superior over another. Ageism is really the only –ism that is still on top of the table, not under it. It is not “cool” to be sexist or racist, but ageism is encouraged. The media and advertisers make it hard to feel good about how you look when the continual emphasis is on avoiding wrinkles, baldness, white hair, and so on. Older people, like any oppressed group, are asked to accept societal standards and assimilate

Is looking your age getting to be taboo? Multitudes of products and services are trying to forestall or reverse aging. Our society appears to let market interests define how we should look. The anti-aging industry reinforces the notion that old age is repugnant, that how you look in old age is to be avoided at all cost—and cost it does. Nora Efron in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts about being a Woman acknowledges, “What I know is that I spend a huge amount of time with my finger in the dike fending off aging.”

Thought for the day: There is more money being spent on breast implants and Viagra today than on Alzheimer’s research. This means that by 2040, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge erections and absolutely no recollection of what to do with them.

Be proud of the age you are. Gloria Steinem, in response to the meant-to-be flattering statement many of us have received, “You certainly don’t look like you’re 40,” said “This is what 40 looks like.” This response is good for any age. Some people retain amazingly youthful looks into old age. It doesn’t mean they are better people. It simply means they are examples of the great variety of ways people can age. Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers, when introduced by President Gerald Ford as a “young lady,” responded, “Mr. President, I am not a young lady. I’ve lived a long time. I’m proud to be an old lady.”

Wake up. The stereotypes are changing. We are part of the generation of pattern breakers. We are modeling the many ways 60-, 70-, 80-, and 90+ year-olds can look and act. When I was 60 I still liked to do adventurous white water canoe trips. I learned not to feel complimented if people let me know that I was different from other 60-year-olds. Of course I’m different. We are all different, and that is what is important to see. This is the way one 60-year-old is. If we want to be an exception and not join forces with other people in our age group, how will our age group reflect the spirit of people like us? My message is don’t even try to stereotype this huge age group. To accept the compliment I would be feeding the tokenism. I am not an exception. We are simply all different. Acknowledge, Gloria Steinem style, that this is the way one woman acts at this age and, in the big picture, she is one of many women.

In order to find life meaningful, it is important to believe that our later years are as valuable as our earlier ones. It is a time of continued growth and can be a time of great deepening. It is important to affirm this later stage of life and encourage the accompanying ways of thinking and being that promote self-appreciation. A major hindrance to positive aging is continuing to equate only paid work with self-worth, thus diminishing the value of worthy avocations such as reading, traveling, volunteering, and caregiving, or the small but mighty deeds like being kind to your next-door neighbor. Life is likely to become meaningless and empty for those who can’t expand their thinking about what constitutes basic self-worth. It is important to attribute new, positive meaning to getting older and to question and stop tolerating the deeply ingrained societal adoration of youth and negativity toward age. All stages of life have merit and problems.

The emergence of an awake and aware, wise, and meaning-filled older generation is modeling a rebirth of gentler values, of caring and appreciating, that can reestablish equilibrium and psychological health to our society. Instead of the downhill slide attributed to aging, we begin to see an upward arc.

Small p- purpose vs. Large P-Purpose

How do I know what is meaningful to me? Ask yourself these questions:

If you were asked by a child to tell about the most important thing you have learned in your life, what would you say?

What was the best period of your life? Why? What do you think was the best thing you ever did for someone else? When you think of your parents or grandparents, what do you wish that you had asked them? What projects have given you the most pleasure? What can you do for a three-hour stint and enjoy so much that you don’t even notice time? At what have you worked hardest (social causes, career, friendships, marriage, parenting)? What are you proudest of?

Think of a person whom you greatly admire? A person of great integrity? Give an example of how you saw this person demonstrate this way of being?

Reflect on your answers. Continually ask yourself, What is truly important to me, and how can I get more of it? What can I do to be the person I want to be?

Most people’s souls are hungry for purpose, for meaning, for knowing that somehow they have made and are making a difference to someone or something. Vitality depends, in part, on the supply of meaning in your life. A sense of purpose does not mean you have to save the world or think in lofty terms about meaningfulness. Being kind and caring to one other person is purpose. Realize that it takes many people doing small things to make up a much greater force of caring. You don’t have to think in terms of a capital P-Purpose… small little purposes do just fine.

It’s important to know that you have a reason for being here, a reason to get up in the morning. People who have a goal, a project, or exude purposefulness know they are living their lives fully. Those of us who continue to grow and learn about subjects that interest us, appreciate art or music, tend our gardens, care for our cat or dog, help out our bodies by diligently caring for them, attend to someone who could use our help, or even give a kind glance to a person who just might be in need of it, are also exhibiting having a reason for being here. What we do and who we are matters.

Show up for life. Reflect on some peak moments in your life. Life can be transformed, changed completely, in a moment—a moment that forces you to view things differently. Did someone ever say something to you that was transformative? Your peak moments may be those precious times when you know that “life doesn’t get any better than this,” when you stand in awe of nature or a work of art, when you know that you’ve truly connected with another person, when you have achieved a personal victory, or when you have completed a job “well done.” Some of these moments just happen. You increase the chances of having more of these moments by putting yourself in situations where they more easily occur. “Follow your bliss,” says Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth. Follow your bliss speaks to taking action versus simply appreciating little bursts of grace that just happen. Following your bliss requires you to pursue actively those things that give you great pleasure. Once you recognize what it is that makes you feel vibrantly alive, you can use this awareness as a source of guidance in your life. Perhaps you need to seek out more time in nature. Maybe it is when you give love that does not require reciprocity, or become aware of a mysterious sense of knowing that you are much more than just yourself and are connected somehow to everyone, everything… a cosmic awareness. Such moments may be sustained or fleeting but they allow you to witness what bliss is for you, to understand yourself a little better. They can help you direct your journey. What do you need to do more of to feel this aliveness?

Appreciate the ordinary. Developmentally, we appear to move from the simple awe and curiosity of a child to not even having the time to appreciate the ordinary as a middle-aged “fast track” person. Thankfully, we seem to return to this appreciation of simplicity again. This late life appreciation is much more sophisticated and hopeful than a child’s. We now choose to attribute meaning to the simple things with a deeper perception of their enormous value.

Gentler values like being kind and caring beyond ourselves equates with basic healthy well-being. We know that doing good things for others makes us feel good. Now research is backing this up. I liked the direct response of one 86-year-old woman contemplating what gives her life meaning. She said, “I try to take care of myself, keep myself alive, and tend to the little flock of people I care about.” On further inquiry I found she did just that. She exercised, took meals to a cousin, drove different friends to the doctor and to the store, checked up on some friends by phone… kept herself busy tending to her flock. She thanked me several times after the workshop, saying she always felt that the mere question, “What gives your life meaning?” was a little intimidating. Now she appreciated figuring out a response that meant something to her.

It is therapeutic to come up with an answer for yourself, for those other times when you wonder. We can do our little bit every day to move beyond focusing on ourselves and become part of the gentle but forceful critical mass tipping the scale towards enduring good.

Think baby-steps—little p, not giant P –Purpose.

//

Trish Herbert arrived in Minnesota in 1955 to attend Carleton College, and she never left the state. She lives in the Minneapolis area with her husband, raised four children, and now has ten grandchildren. She became a licensed psychologist, receiving her PhD in her mid-fifties with a specialization in gerontology. She continues to be fascinated with people’s stories, the many twists and turns that life brings, and how well we manage to muddle through our respective journeys. As a psychologist she worked with older adults and their families, facilitated caregiver, grief, and support groups, and now, semi-retired, does some volunteering, teaching, and counseling. The excerpt below is from her new book, Journeywell: A Guide to Quality Aging. Visit her website at TrishHerbert.com.

The Indian Bard and the Beloved: Tagore—Poet, Mystic, and Reformer by Linda George

When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, almost no one beyond the shores of India had ever heard of him. When he arrived in Sweden to accept the prize, the long, full beard framing his dark face, his floor-length white robes, and his piercing eyes caused people to turn and stare. Within a few years, his reputation worldwide equaled that of his dear friend Mohandas Gandhi.

Throughout his life, his huge extended family called him Rabi (pronounced Robby). Gandhi nicknamed him “The Great Sentinel” because of his penetrating insights into the future of India and her relationship with the rest of the world. When he died in 1941, at the age of 80, accolades and expressions of sympathy and grief poured into India like the monsoon rains. And yet, many Americans of non-Indian heritage have never heard of Rabindranath Tagore.

The passions that fueled Tagore’s whole life intertwined around each other like overgrown vines: love of God and love of humankind. Much to the dismay of many of his Brahmin peers, Tagore insisted that all people, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, spiritual heritage, gender, or class reflect God’s presence, and thus, deserve education, respect, and dignity.

From the multitude of devotional poems Tagore composed, this prayer summarizes his life-ethic:

Here is Thy footstool and there rest Thy feet where live the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

When I try to bow to Thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depth where Thy feet rest among the poorest, lowliest, and lost.

Pride can never approach to where Thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.

My heart can never find its way to where Thou keepest company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost. (1)

Rabi’s love of humankind developed from a growing awareness of the world around him. Though his upbringing afforded Rabi many tangible luxuries, as well as the privilege of ignorance about the suffering masses, Tagore’s father, Dwarkanath, determined that his talented and sensitive son should learn firsthand about life beyond the gates of the family mansion.

At the threshold of the twentieth century, the typical education progression for a bright young Brahmin male prescribed a career as a London-trained lawyer. Rabi briefly flirted with the ivy-covered halls of law school; however, as he had previously done many times, he fled traditional schooling. And so his father decided it was time for the youngest son to earn his keep. Dwarkanath sent Rabi a hundred miles away— a significant distance at the time—to manage the expansive family estates in the rural area of east Bengal.

Routine tasks included checking on the crops, the livestock, and the ramshackle buildings; counting money from sales; distributing salaries to the low-class workers; and mediating disputes among the workers and the impoverished villagers nearby. Initially Tagore thought he had been consigned to hell. His sparse living conditions, his inaccessibility to foods he craved, the meager number of servants, and the chores and interpersonal interactions which seemed beneath his station in life struck him like a furnace blast of Indian summer heat.

Years earlier, the only adults supervising and punishing the young Rabi were frequently the family servants. The active and precocious child spent many hours imprisoned within a chalk circle drawn around his chair, staring longingly out the window. After the adult Rabi spent some time in the rural estates, living an uncomplicated life, he realized his father had granted him the greatest gift of his life. No longer imprisoned by the chalk circle of his high caste status, and finally free to interact with whomever he chose, Tagore grew into the poet, storyteller, and visionary the stars had whispered he would become.

Years later, Rabi’s son wrote this of his father’s interactions with the villagers:

[T]he most interesting function for him was to meet the tenants, hear their complaints and settle disputes. He did not treat them in the traditional manner [of a landholder]. He talked with them freely and they too felt so much at ease with him that they would tell him about their land, their families, and their personal affairs. Father had made known that any tenant who wanted to see him could go straight to him . . . Thus was established a bond of love and respect between the landlord and the tenants, a tradition that lasted in our estates till the end. (2)

Tagore’s years of living and working in these rural settings transformed the poet into a pragmatist. He learned firsthand about the villagers, both Hindu and Muslim, whose daily lives teetered on the edge of extinction because of hunger, disease, filth-infested waters, and general apathy on the part of most metropolitan Indians. Tagore’s response of solidarity with the impoverished, illiterate denizens of his motherland was truly remarkable.

It was a great event of my life when I first dwelt among my own people [the tenants] here, for thus I came into contact with the reality of life. For in them you feel the barest touch of humanity. Your attention is not diverted . . . one has to be a helper to be a real man; for then you share your life with your fellow-beings and not merely your ideas. (3)

The other fact that cried out for Tagore’s attentions was the fragile relationship between the Hindus and Muslims, all of them with an ancient heritage in India.

The greatest harm of all would be for Hindus to become inimical to the Mussulman [Muslim] community . . . our relationship with the Mussulmans has been difficult on both sides, for lack of proper contact . . . the Mussulmans are our close relations . . . I love [my Muslim tenants] from my heart, because they deserve it . . . by fighting each other we only increase the inflammation. To remain calm and try for a fundamental cure is the only solution. We must take that path without delay . . . When relatives fight each other, both victories and defeats are equally fatal. (4)

The compassionate landlord with the soul of a poet began to formulate a dream that would propel him and haunt him for the rest of his life: a school where children from all backgrounds and castes would live and learn together; a rural setting where the fields and streams and forests taught their lessons as surely as the faculty; a school where singing, poetry, storytelling, and drama shared the podium with mathematics, science, and history; and a place that would welcome guest lecturers representing varied cultural and spiritual backgrounds.

In previous generations, the Tagore name implied wealth, but by the time Rabi attained adulthood, little was left of the family fortune. To start the school, Tagore had to sell almost everything he owned. In 1901, a couple of buildings on some rural land his father bequeathed him became a school for boys. Initially, the school had five teachers, three of whom were Christian, and five boys, one of whom was Tagore’s own son.

Despite unceasing financial challenges, Tagore refused to charge tuition for several years, consonant with his ideal that all children deserved an education. The school became known as Santiniketan, which translates “Abode of Peace.” Tagore loved the children and his faculty members, but keeping the school solvent and trying to assuage his many detractors who disapproved of his unorthodox methods took a tremendous toll on the poet. The British government even issued secret circulars warning parents against sending their children to Santiniketan.

Tagore explained why he would not abandon this dream. “The growth of this school was the growth of my life and not that of a mere carrying out of any doctrine.” (5)

His Nobel prize, his knighthood (which he later repudiated), (6) and his worldwide fame grew increasingly burdensome to the man who constantly sought peace in his relationships with God and with all humankind. Santiniketan offered Tagore a place of solace, where kindness and friendliness embraced everyone.

“From Santiniketan, the boys go out to the villages, to run night-schools for the laboring classes and the lower castes. In this way, caste exclusiveness is broken down in early years.” (7)

To 21st-century Americans, the concept of caste may seem foreign, but in reality we also promote similar class divisions. Bigotry in multiple disguises continues to parade across our nation. Racism, homophobia, and immigrant discrimination top a long list of ways in which we cast people aside and label their castes.

In the early years of Santiniketan, many of Tagore’s students came from aristocratic backgrounds. When they ventured into the neighboring rural villages to teach reading and writing, to share song and drama, and to learn skills of rural life, those interactions exemplified what Tagore ultimately sought to teach the whole world: God loves all people equally, and God prays for us to do the same.

By the 1920s, the school had expanded to include a college with centers for Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese cultures. Especially after his worldwide travels, enabled by Tagore’s Nobel Prize in 1913, he became more convinced than ever that the hope of the world rested in communication and dialogue between Eastern and Western cultures. He saw firsthand the destruction of World War I, and he pleaded with leaders of his own country and other countries around the world, including the United States, for a spirit of cooperation and trust, rather than isolationism and fear. Tagore named his expanded school Visva-Bharati, from a Sanskrit text, meaning “where the world makes its home in a single nest.”

In addition to the academic and cultural presence of Visva-Bharati, Tagore facilitated another radical innovation. He had understood for years that the impoverished villagers surrounding Santiniketan needed more than the “three R’s.” They needed to know how to build their own water wells, how to recycle human and animal waste, and how to take better care of their lands so the crops would continue to grow. They also needed some basic healthcare. He also wanted to restore, at least to a couple of villages, traditions of music and epic readings from the ancient Indian history.

I endeavored all the time I was in the country to get to know it down to the smallest detail. . . I was filled with eagerness to understand the villagers’ daily routine and the varied pageant of their lives. I, the town-bred, had been received into the lap of rural loveliness and I began joyfully to satisfy my curiosity. Gradually the sorrow and poverty of the villagers became clear to me, and I began to grow restless to do something about it. (8)

Thus began Tagore’s institute of rural reconstruction called Sriniketan. Economists, agriculturalists, social workers, healthcare workers, and other industry and education specialists brainstormed the problems plaguing the villagers. For the duration of Tagore’s life, and into the 21st century, thousands of India’s little villages still suffer incomprehensible poverty.

Tagore never abandoned his lifelong passions of loving God and loving humankind. He never quit praying to see God in “the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.” (9) In 1938, when he was 77 years old and in very poor health, Tagore told a group of writers:

… [T]ake yourself to any village and give education to them with whom nobody has ever spoken; bring them happiness, hope, serve them, and let them know that there is a dignity in them as human beings, that they do not deserve the contempt of the universe. (10)

In January 2009, I spent three weeks on a spiritual pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, reputedly the poorest part of India. I saw homeless lepers who had lost their appendages and their dignity. I saw widows whose families had disowned them. I saw a gypsy camp, where every girl over the age of 12 seemed to be a mother. I saw entire families bathing themselves and their cows in the same river waters from which they collected their drinking water.

One Friday night, I saw thousands of Indians dressed to the nines, worshiping at an ancient Hindu temple. Despite the crushing poverty of that part of India, our little group of American pilgrims was embraced by a spirit of hospitality and generosity everywhere we went.

I know that I can easily become immune to the sufferings and hardships of so many of the world’s outcasts. And I certainly did not have to travel all the way to India to find persons whom society has marginalized.

I am inspired by Tagore’s lifelong passion of trying to reflect God’s love in his treatment of others. Many of us seek helpful ways to empower and encourage those who feel as though the contempt of the universe has been dumped upon them. I have counseled many discouraged and distraught individuals, and I know that frequently it only takes one person to plant enough hope to restore life to another.

What are you doing, Dear Readers, to help make a difference? How can you, like Tagore, transform your passions, whatever they may be, into a healing balm for another?

Let Your love play upon my voice and rest on my silence.
Let it pass through my heart into all my movements.
Let Your love, like stars, shine in the darkness of my sleep and dawn in my awakening.
Let it burn in the flame of my desires and flow in all currents of my own love.
Let me carry Your love in my life as a harp does its music,
And give it back to You at last with my life. (11)

//

Notes

1 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali: A Collection of Prose Translations Made By the Author From the Original Bengali (NY: Scribner Poetry, 1997), p. 26.

2 Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1958), p. 28.

3 Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend: Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters to C.F. Andrews (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2002), pp. 42–43.

4 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, eds., Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Daryaganj, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 405.

5 Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 25.

6 Tagore denounced his knighthood after British troops killed hundreds of Indians in Amritsar during a peaceful demonstration against British rule.

7 Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 190.

8 Ibid., p. 33.

9  Tagore, Gitanjali, p. 26.

10 Gupta, 38.

11 Herbert F. Vetter, ed., The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1997), p. 44.

//

Linda George served in full-time pastoral ministry for almost 30 years, 21 of which were as an active duty Army chaplain, endorsed by The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Since the fall of 2006, she has focused most of her energies on writing, research, teaching, and singing as a professional vocal soloist. She is working on a PhD dissertation on Rabindranath Tagore, whose lifelong passion was taking music, dance, drama, and poetry to the poorest illiterate villagers to break the caste system and increase self-esteem.

Summer’s Fullness by John G. Sullivan

When we were children, summer lasted forever. The days stretched out. The light lengthened. The world was playful, carefree, dream-like, endless. We were alive—with playmates real and imagined. And, at moments, we felt we could talk to the trees and the birds and all the other creatures above and below and around us. All were our kin. And this included all the elements: Wind in trees and in the tall grass. Waters of creek or stream, river or ocean. Rocks in gardens or on cliffs. The fiery sun. The languid clouds. The night sky too. Everything companioned us in a time out of time, where the heart ruled.

From this summer lyric, let us pick three images to dwell with: the sun, the heart, and relational life.

First, the sun with its light and warmth. Shining on all of us. Suggesting, in summer, fullness, fulfillment, completion. Nothing left out.

Second, the heart, calling us to care for the community from friendships to family to larger communities. Wholeheartedly, to invite each of those communions to be heart whole.

A morning poem (gatha) from the community of Thich Nhat Hanh says:

Waking up this morning, I smile
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.1

The first line sounds the note of the heart—“waking up . . . I smile.” Wakefulness and joy. The last line reminds us that the heart is in service of our life with others. In fact, the heart promises partnership— whether in the midst of joys or sorrows.

Third, our relational life extends the resonances of the sun and the heart. We might say, “In the beginning is relationship.” We enter the world in the care of others and we learn to become, in our turn, caregivers. Again and again, we are reminded of how intertwined with others we are. We occupy a unique place in the great web of all life. Unique, yes. In the great web, yes. Holding both aspects simultaneously. As an ancient text expresses it:

Heaven is my father and earth is my mother and even such a small creature as I find an intimate place in its midst.

All people are my brothers and sisters
And all things are my companions.2

So it was in the days of summer when we were children. Might it not be so again?

In this essay, I wish to explore three themes: (a) summer sun with its sense of fulfillment, (b) the heart with its care for the community and (c) the primacy of relationship throughout. I wish to explore them as they are manifest in all the stages of our lives, but especially in the later years. So let us return to the four stages of life as articulated in ancient India: Student, Householder, Forest Dweller, and Sage.

• What might fulfillment mean for the Student-in-us?
• What might fulfillment mean for the Householder-in-us?
• What might fulfillment mean for the Forest Dweller-in-us?
• What might fulfillment mean for the Sage-in-us?

Put differently, what is maturity or completion at each stage? What is the quality of heart at each stage? What is the quality of relational understanding and love at each stage?

As prelude, notice that our life can be seen in two arcs: the Arc of Ascent and the Arc of Descent. In a calendar year, spring and summer mark ascending or rising energy; autumn and winter signal descending or falling energy. We are more familiar with thinking of fulfillment in the rising energy of a life (stages of Student and Householder); we are less practiced at understanding fulfillment in the falling energy of life (stages of Forest Dweller and Sage).

//

The Arc of Ascent — when life energy is rising

Part I: Summer Fulfillment for the Student-in-us

When I taught university students I held out the ideal of a lifelong love of learning. Of course, both the love and the learning must be present, and this implies that the type of study must be such that it touches and enlarges the heart. I am pointing toward the “feeling intellect” or the “educated heart.”3 Dante speaks of an “intellectual light, light filled with love, love of true good, love filled with joy, joy surpassing every sweetness.”4

Rumi also speaks of this type of knowing when he writes:

There is a kind of Knowing that is a love.
Not a scholarly knowing. That minutiae-collecting
Doesn’t open you.
It inflates you, like a beard or a fancy turban.
It announces you, saying,

There are certain plusses and minuses
which we must carefully consider.

This other Knowing-Love is a rising light,
a happiness in both worlds.5

Perhaps we could say that this love of learning is also a learning to love. Such study has a long history. In the monastic tradition, it was called lectio divina—a reflective and heart-felt tasting of the text for the sake of expanding and deepening our loves. So we begin with a type of reading—a type of study—that can nourish our soul and renew our spirit. Call it spiritual reading, yet the reality is much more. What we read must refresh the spirit and hence will usually come from the wisdom traditions. Here we are keeping company with the true, the good, and the beautiful in thought and art. And keeping company with the great-souled ones among us. How we read is equally important. The monastics spoke of tasting the words as if walking in the vineyard of the text.6 Sapere = to taste. Sapientia = wisdom. All this echoes Psalm 34:8: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” When we read in this fashion, it becomes a spiritual practice. Thus, this sort of learning to love is complete with every enlargement of our capacity to receive our life. Fulfilled and complete in each moment, ever-open to increase our longing.

Part I: Summer Fulfillment for the Householder-in-us

Summer shows up most intensely in the Householder. In other words, the sun, the heart, and life-in-relationship are at full strength in the Householder. Think first of the sun with its light and warmth. In one sense, the student comes to completion in the householder.7 The student takes his or her place in the world, learns to care for a circle larger than him or herself. This is most often seen as a couple expands their love to include children. The space of family. The sense of intergenerational time. I come to see myself in the midst of generations —my parents and their parents and their parents, my children and their children and their children. The kingdom or “kindom”8 spreads out in space and time.

Freud defined maturity as the ability to love and the ability to work. Such maturity is seen in the image of the householder who takes on the care of a community and is aware of doing so. We can also imagine the householder whose household is an institution—perhaps a college or corporation. We can imagine taking on responsibility in varying ways for still larger units—one’s nation or one’s planet. Indeed the word “ecology” derives from the Greek: “the study (logos) of one’s oikos or home.”

What is the fulfillment of the householder? In one sense, the householder is fulfilled in the children leaving home and taking on their own lives. In another sense, the family has simply changed form. As the shape of family shifts, new habits of heart and mind are called for to care for the whole and attend to its unique participants.

To have children, someone has said, is to live with your heart outside your body. Perhaps better, to live with our collective, familial heart outside our personal bodies. We have a new body and a new heart. Think of a garden where two apple trees grow. The garden is well-placed to take advantage of sun and water. The other plants are well chosen to complement the two central trees. Insects and birds, animals and people visit the garden. Gardeners care for the whole. They know when the context of the whole garden is healthy. They know when the individual members of the garden are flourishing. Robert Irwin placed this inscription on the garden he designed for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles:

Ever changing, never less than whole
Every present, never twice the same.

So it is with the garden of a friendship or a family or a college or corporation. The sun brings light and warmth. We who tend these gardens bring qualities of understanding and loving kindness, wisdom and compassion. The family then becomes a school of love inviting us to cultivate ways of coming to life more fully in all our relationships as they form and reform in kaleidoscope-like ways.

//

The Arc of Descent — when life energy is falling

Part I: Summer Fulfillment for the Forest Dweller-in-us

Consider the autumn phase of life—after retirement, let us say. The children are grown and one form of tending is over. Perhaps parents move over to become grandparents. They have entered the arc of descent; they experience falling energy. Shall we regard it as positive descent or negative decline? How shall we be with this phase? Is there fulfillment in letting go and letting be? How might we think about that?

For most of our lives, we have thought of fulfillment in terms of achievement, success, fame, and fortune. Upward and onward. Our culture reinforces this pattern. Is there fulfillment in simplifying? In returning to nature and to elemental things? Can one have less and less of certain things and more and more of other things?

A famous Zen story tells of a Western professor coming to Japan to study Zen. He meets with a Zen master and the master pours tea. And continues to pour the tea. As the cup overflows and runs over the table, the professor exclaims: “Stop. Can’t you see it’s full?” The Zen master smiles. “That’s how you are,” he responds. “So full of your own beliefs and opinions. How can I teach you Zen?”

With autumn comes acknowledging and letting go. Acknowledging life exactly as it is in its surface and depth. Acknowledging fundamental worth allows us to let go of what no longer serves. Opinions and beliefs. Ideas and identities. Roles and self-concepts. Acknowledging deep value, we can let go of what is not essential to us after all. In letting go and letting be, there is stillness and a space to see. As the song from Godspell has it: “to see Thee more clearly, to love Thee more dearly, to follow Thee more nearly — day by day.”9

“My barn having burned, I can now see the moon.” So the Zen tradition puts it. Perhaps I realize I am more than my costumes. I come to see myself as a unique reflection of the great Mystery. Then I can become nothing—nothing special. And at the same time, everything. For I identify with all beings and rest in peace. Between nothing and everything, I am again something—one jewel in the great web of Indra reflecting the whole from a particular, unrepeatable perspective.

Part I: Summer Fulfillment for the Sage-in-us

I want to introduce the sage through a story:

For several weeks strange sounds had drifted over the mountains from the neighboring valley. There was much talk in the village about what these noises could be, but no one could make sense of them. Even the village elders had never heard anything like them. Finally one of the young men of the village was chosen to cross the mountains and see what was going on.

After two days of hiking he reached the mountaintop and saw in the valley far below a hive of activity with dozens of people working. As he drew closer, he saw a line of people, each with a huge stone in front of them that they were hammering and chiseling.

When he finally reached the valley floor he approached a young man at one end of the line and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Huh!” grunted the young man. “I’m killing time until I get off work.”

Puzzled, the hiker turned to the second person in the line, a young woman, and asked, “Excuse me, but what are you doing?”

“I’m earning a living to support my family,” she responded.

Scratching his head, the hiker moved on to the third person and asked again, “What are you doing?”

“I’m creating a beautiful statue,” came the reply. Turning to the next person, the hiker repeated his question.

“I’m helping to build a cathedral,” came the answer.

“Ah!” said the hiker. “I think I’m beginning to understand.” Approaching the woman who was next in line he asked, “And what are you doing?

“I am helping the people in this town and generations that follow them, by helping to build this cathedral.”

“Wonderful,” exclaimed the hiker. “And you, sir? He called to the man beside her.

“I am helping to build this cathedral in order to serve all those who use it and to awaken myself in the process. I am seeking my salvation through service to others.”

Finally the hiker turned to the last stone worker, an old, lively person whose eyes twinkled and whose mouth formed a perpetual smile. “And what are you doing?” he inquired.

“Me?” smiled the elder. “Doing?” The elder roared with laughter. “This ego dissolved into God many years ago. There is no ‘I’ left to ‘do’ anything. God works through this body to help and awaken all people and draw them to Him.”10

The elder in this story holds the key to fulfillment in the stage of becoming a sage. What has happened is that the illusions of earlier years—the quest to be somebody and to live in the eyes of others—drops away. Always you were loved. Always I was loved. Always we were at one with the source. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Or alternately somewhere to go and something to do, yet not under illusion.11 Seeing clearly. Acting joyfully. In alignment with the Great Work and the Great Love. So we might say: “I do not do the work for myself. I do not do the work by myself. I do not do the work with my own powers alone.”

A Jew, thinking of our true size, might recall the teaching of Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa: “Everyone should have two pockets, each containing a slip of paper. On one should be written: ‘I am but dust and ashes,’ and on the other: ‘For me, the world was created.’ From time to time we must reach into one pocket, or the other. The secret of living comes from knowing when to reach into each.”12

A Christian might say: “I live, now not I, but the Christ lives in me.”13 Or think of Jesus’ daunting words to the rich young man: “Sell all you have. Give to the poor. . . . Come and follow me.”14 Indeed there is something terrifying in truly practicing the presence of God. And something paradoxical as well. How crazy. We have everything and keep looking for more!

A Muslim might remember Abu Sa’id saying: “A true saint is one who walks amongst the people and eats and dwells with them and buys and sells in the market and marries and socializes yet never forgets God for a single moment.”15

A Zen man or woman might say with Seng Ts’an: “When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.”

Eckhart Tolle, in speaking of surrender and finding God, puts all our themes together in these beautiful words: “Suddenly, a great stillness arises within you, an unfathomable sense of peace. And within that peace, there is great joy. And within that joy, there is love. And at the innermost core, there is the sacred, the immeasurable, That which cannot be named.”16

A Taoist might smile or, with the sage of the cathedral builders, laugh out loud.

So the sages listen deeply to what is occurring within and around them. Not taking things personally, they are ready to act from a center beyond themselves, willing to reinforce movement where it is flowing well. Where is fulfillment here? It is paradoxically, Nowhere and Now Here.17 And there is a further paradox as well. On the arc of descent, there is no one to take credit, so all moves effortlessly. The sage can wear any costume and even play the fool.

//

Coda: Summer’s Lessons

We began with three signs of summer—the sun with its fulfillment. The heart caring for the whole. And everywhere seeing life as relationship, interconnection, interbeing.

First, we found that fulfillment was far from a once-for-all phenomenon. No fulfillment is the last word. We are:

• never finished with learning.
• never finished with caring for our sectors of the Great Web of Life.
• never finished with letting go and letting be, simplifying and returning to nature.
• never finished with practicing the presence of God or, alternatively, getting out of our own way so that the greater light and love may shine through.

Second, each season has a fulfillment on its own terms.

• The “heart learning” of the student issues again and again in insight. As insight expands, so likewise does compassion. Each act of insight–compassion is cause for celebration.
• The caring of the householder issues in the well-being of the unit and those within its enveloping field. Think of the task of parenting. Think of the marker events of achievements as the children grow in understanding and love and the parents grow as well. Each act of caring that reaches a fulfillment—however temporary—is cause for celebration.
• The acknowledgement and letting go of the Forest Dweller also has its fulfillment. Suppose that the Forest Dweller practices acknowledging and letting go of the three poisons: clinging, condemning, and identifying (with beliefs and roles, ideas, and identities). Suppose we notice we are clinging to a particular “story”—a particular way of seeing and speaking—one that causes unnecessary suffering to ourselves and others. We let it go. Each act of such “letting go” brings clarity and freedom and is cause for celebration.18
• The sage practices the art of disappearing, in a paradoxical way. As more of my agenda falls away, there is more space for That Which Matters to show itself. Each moment of openness to the mystery is an instance of grace and a cause for celebration. Paradoxically, I become more of what I truly am in thus opening to the universe.

Third, I can get better at each stage through practice. And there is a sequence here.

• The student drops a certain amount of egocentricity to allow the learning to be itself.
• The householder drops a certain amount of egocentricity to allow, say, the family to be itself and flourish.
• The Forest Dweller drops a certain amount of egocentricity by gaining skill in simplification and hence the natural world becomes more itself.
• The sage becomes more skillful at a deeper allowing—allowing and listening. And “all that is” flashes forth in glory.

“Me?” smiled the elder. “Doing?” The elder roared with laughter. “This ego dissolved into God many years ago. There is no ‘I’ left to ‘do’ anything. God works through this body to help and awaken all people and draw them to Him.”

In such a summer day, all is complete at every moment. And laughter rings out in celebration.

//

Notes

1 See Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment: Mindfulness Verses for Daily Living (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2006), p. 7.

2 Part of what is called the West Wall Inscription. It is from the office of Chang Tsai, an 11th century administrator in China.

3 The phrase “the feeling intellect” I take from Wordsworth; the phrase “the educated heart” I take from Robert Bly.

4 See Dante’s Divine Comedy,theParadiso, Canto 30, lines 40-42 describing the Empyrean. The lines are especially beautiful in the original: luce intellectual, piena d’amore; amor di vero ben, pien di letizia; letizia che trascende ogne dolzore.

5 See Coleman Barks, Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi (Athens, GA: Maypop Books, 1990), pp 25-26.

6 Historian and social critic, Ivan Illich, speaks of this in his In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The book, as a commentary on Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, traces the culture of reading and the book from the twelfth century to the present.

7 In another sense, the student never stops learning—yet perhaps dies to one sort of learning to be reborn into another.

8 I came across the term “kindom” in reading colleague Rebecca Todd Peters’ book,In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization (New York: Continuum, 2004). Professor Peters writes: “I embrace Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz’s transformation of the concept of ‘kingdom’ and its patriarchal, hierarchical connotations to the concept of ‘kindom,’ which represents the ‘kinship’ of all creation and the promise of a just future. See Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 103 n8.” The comments occur in Peters’ book on p. 33, endnote 16 to chapter 2.

9 The song takes up a prayer by St. Richard of Chichester who prayed on his deathbed: “Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ. For all the benefits Thou hast given me. For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me. O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother. May I know Thee more clearly, Love Thee more dearly, Follow Thee more nearly.

10 Roger Walsh, Essential Spirituality(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999), pp. 60-61.

11 I am echoing here a song of the Community of Thich Nhat Hanh, which I learned at a retreat with Thây at Stonehill College in Easton, MA, August 12-17, 2007.

“Happiness is here and now. I have dropped my worries.
Nowhere to go, nothing to do. No longer in a hurry.”

And the second stanza:

“Happiness is here and now. I have dropped my worries.
Somewhere to go, something to do. But I don’t need to hurry.”

12 The core story can be found in Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1948; 1974), pp.249-250. Buber refers to him as Simha Bunam of Pzhysha.

13 Gal. 2:20.

14 The story appears in all three of the synoptic gospels. See Mk 10:17-22, Mt 19:16-22 and Lk 18:18-23.

15 See Mohammad Ali Jamnia and Mojdeh Bayat, Under the Sufi’s Cloak: Stories of Abu Sa’id and His Mystical Teachings (Beltsville, MD: Writers’ Inc. International, 1995), p. 95

16 See Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999), p. 187

17 I first came across this word play “Nowhere and Now Here” through my mentor Frederick Franck. See Frederick Franck, Pilgrimage to Now / Here (Maryland, NY: Orbis Books, 1974). This work becomes part of a larger work in Frederick Franck’s Fingers Pointing toward the Sacred: A Twentieth Century Pilgrimage on the Eastern and Western Way (Junction City, OR: Beacon Point Press, 1994).

18 The three poisons of Buddhism appear as the second of the Four Noble Truths, after the first truth that there is suffering. I would distinguish necessary and unnecessary suffering. The three poisons are, in my way of phrasing things, the causes of unnecessary suffering. As we diminish them, we diminish unnecessary suffering. This is the third noble truth. The Eight-fold Path — the fourth noble truth — is the set of practices that keep us on the way of well-being. For more on these themes, see my book, Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality (Laurel, MD: Tai Sophia Institute, 2004), especially chapter Eleven.

Books of Interest: For Happiness in Old Age—Discover and Live Your Purpose by Barbara Kammerlohr

Most religious and spiritual traditions speak of an essence at the center of ourselves. It is what most call God and some call the Higher Power, the Soul, the Divine, the Sacred, the Spirit or the Essence, and it represents who we are at the core. People who know how to live and work on purpose know how to express this essence consistently.” (Leider, p.21)

For over ten years, books about finding and living one’s purpose have topped the best-seller lists as the number of such books on the market continues to grow. Increasingly, young people choose careers and jobs based on an understanding of their own unique purpose. Colleges, universities, and secondary schools require service learning to help students identify purpose and understand how it can be put to use for the good of society. This tendency has clearly inalterably changed the work force; but what about those of us who have ended our careers and retired from the nine-to-five routine? In this edition of Itineraries we explore four books on the subject, focusing on: definitions of purpose, new research about the need to know one’s purpose, how to discover that purpose, and the part played by purpose in conscious aging.

These books being reviewed were written by a life coach, a Christian minister, and two psychologists from different schools of thought. Given their disparate perspectives, it is surprising they all say basically the same thing.

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What is purpose?

“Purpose is your reason for being, your reason for getting up in the morning” (Leider, p.1). It is “the reason you were placed on this planet” (Warren, p. 17).

“Purpose is that deepest dimension within us — our central core or essence — where we have a profound sense of who we are, where we came from and where we’re going. Purpose is the quality we choose to shape our lives around…Purpose defines our contribution to life” (Leider, p.1).

Generally speaking, purpose is one’s own unique mission of service to God, a higher power, a compelling cause, or a specific service to others. It arises from our talents, our inclinations, our life experiences, and our sense of what we want to commit to as the purpose of our life.

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The need for purpose

Purpose is inextricably linked to meaning, and the quest to understand the meaning of life is hardly new. “Why am I on this earth?” has been THE question humans have asked since time began. And even though the world’s most renowned philosophers and major spiritual traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have all proposed the answer, those of us living in this 21st century continue to ask, “Why am I here?”

It is commitment to something larger than ourselves that gives our lives meaning. In identifying that greater force to which we will commit our energies and actions, we also identify our purpose. Until we identify this purpose, our lives are not whole or satisfied. Deep satisfaction with life eludes us until we begin the quest for purpose and live in accordance with that purpose.

Richard Leider, in The Power of Purpose, expressed it most succinctly by quoting Victor Frankl:

“For too long, we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if you just improve the socio-economic status of people, everything will be okay—people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged, survival for what. Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for” (p. 34).

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Discovering your purpose

Although those who write about purpose approach the task from their own unique world view and use vocabulary suited to their own philosophies, they outline the same steps we all must take in the search for purpose:

1. An attitude of surrender to a power or cause greater than one’s self is prerequisite to finding purpose. Without this attitude, fear, greed, anger, or other negative emotions masquerade as true purpose. Purpose is related to providing a service to something that transcends one’s self, not to alleviating one’s own negative feelings.
2. Do a self-assessment. Learn about your talents, abilities, and inclinations. What do you find joy in doing? The ways to accomplish this task vary—prayer, introspection, meditation, standardized tests—but learning about talent and the activities that bring joy is at the core of discovering purpose. If it does not make use of our talents and is not something we enjoy doing, it is not our life’s purpose.
3. Spend time in solitude and integrate what you have discovered about your talents, inclinations, and joy into a purpose statement—a statement of what you can do for the world. Warren called this identifying your ministry.
4. State what you think is your mission to the world. Pick something.
   Consider everything in steps one, two, and three. Then, do your best. Your answer may not be perfect—or even accurate—but you must begin the search somewhere. This is the place, and your best answer is all you have.
5. Act on your purpose statement. Do something. Waiting to act until you are sure will not be helpful. When we act with intention, the Universe (or God) responds by opening doors that lead to the next step. Most authors call this synchronicity, and it leads to amazing places and events.
6. Know that the search for purpose is a continuous process. Purpose is different at different stages of life. This struggle for self-knowledge will continue throughout life, because, as long as we live, there is a purpose in our lives.

//

Purpose and Conscious Aging

Most who have thought about the longevity revolution and the extra years our generation enjoys claim that there must be a purpose for those extra years. While this flies in the face of the promise of leisure in old age that most of us came to view as our right, research into what makes us happy confirms that, as long as we have talents and life, we are subject to the law that says a life without meaning is no life at all. We must not only embrace a life of purpose, the evidence concludes, but the “golden years” may require a more sustained and unique approach to purpose than the earlier stages of life.

Dychtwald and Kadlec (in With Purpose: Going From Success to Significance in Work and Life ) pondered the issue enough to feel that the extra years signal another stage of development in man’s evolution. They refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and point out that the hierarchy is no longer sufficient to encompass man’s psychological needs. At this point in history, it is time to add another level. They label the level “legacy” and advocated their position with the following words:

“Maslow’s model did not go far enough. Longevity has changed the game. More is demanded of us if we are going to live into our nineties.

“I’ve come to believe there are elements of psychological development where you go beyond self-awareness and are primed and driven to leave a legacy by sharing your skills, wisdom and resources with those who are less fortunate. Seen from this perspective, interdependence might be a higher level of aspiration than independence. So I would add a sixth rung to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy and call it legacy. At this level, rather than retreat and retire, you go beyond self-actualization to a state of rich engagement where you take the best of who you are and the best of what you’ve cultivated over your life, and bring some meaningful involvement in activities and pursuits that light the sky for others—as well as for yourself. It’s about being involved with people and situations where you can make a difference and reap the satisfactions that derive from those kinds of self transcendent connections” (p. 53).

Most of the information about living a life of purpose and meaning comes from the following books which readers may find helpful.

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Books about Purpose

The Purpose of Your Life: Finding Your Place in the World Using Synchronicity, Intuition and Common Sense by Carol Adrienne (New York: Eagle Brook, 1998).

Adrienne’s philosophy is that our own intuition and circumstances teach us about purpose. “Sometimes,” she says, “circumstances force us into taking a stand and that can affect the rest of our life. Circumstances may clarify who we are and what is important for this life and how we are going to live with integrity.” The book is full of inspiring stories and statements of her principles. She reports that her goal is to help the reader clarify his or her own purpose by using the right side of the brain to respond to the stories and suggestions of the book. It is this focus on use of the right (intuitive) side of the brain to discover meaning that sets this book apart from others that use logical steps and the brain’s left side.

With Purpose: Going From Success to Significance in Work and Life by Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D. and Daniel J. Kadlec (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

More than the other three, With Purpose addresses purpose in later life. Dychtwald himself is close to his second journey and shares his thoughts on aging. He writes from the point of view of a psychologist and includes research from the relatively new field of positive psychology. His message is that old age is not the time to retire or retreat. It is the time to rediscover the purpose of life and to begin living that purpose. Furthermore, longevity may have given humans a new stage of development that requires more engagement, not less, as we age.

The Power of Purpose: Creating Meaning in Your Life and Work by Richard Leider (San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004).

This is a “how to” book for anyone wanting to create meaning in their life and work. Regular readers of this column will recognize Leider as the author of Claiming Your Place at the Fire. Leider is known internationally as an expert in helping individuals, leaders, and teams discover the power of purpose in their lives. The Power of Purpose is written for everyone—not just elders; the short book (147 pages) has just about all the information you need to live a life of purpose.

The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For by Rick Warren (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2002).

The Purpose Driven Life was a best seller several years ago and is probably the most familiar of the titles we discuss in this issue. It too tells you everything you need to know to live a life of purpose. The advice is straightforward, practical, and comprehensive. Many of the principles are the same as in other publications about living a life of purpose. Warren’s premise, however, is slightly different. As pastor and founder of Saddleback Church in California, one of the nation’s mega churches, he is firm in his assertion that purpose is given by God. While others counsel looking within to discover purpose, Warren believes that God reveals His purpose to those who seek to understand it in their lives. The practical steps he suggests, however, seem to be the same as the steps recommended by other authors.

Poems on Purpose collected by Jack Clarke

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

//

Silence — Summer

by John Clarke

Winter would seem to have a lock on silence —
the snow quieting the fields across the countryside,
muffling even big city sounds and rounding off rough edges.

But silence is big enough to hold all seasons,
and has a special place for summer —
ocean, waterfall, and subway tunnel, yes,
and not only on top of whatever barns remain
on prairies or in mountain valleys —
but deep in the city, up on the tar beach rooftops
of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx —
maybe even Staten Island.

Where a kid goes to hear the stars,
their voices need no words, as if
he or she were Rexroth in the Sierras.

Where far below, the patriot parade or riot or wired
world of nonstop ambient sound for one or all is piped
in everywhere. Yet these can’t touch … what?
… deep soul calling without a word
to each one and all together always.

Palpable presence just behind your ear, beside
your shoulder. You can’t make out a face — you
just know someone is with you, where you must be.

//

The Streaker

by Bolton Anthony

He lit out across the wide lawn,
naked, high stepping, arms flailing,
his pudgy trunk in constant search
for equilibrium. Sister

darted after him, his guardian angel
not seven years his senior, sailing
behind him, the sash of her white
linen shift floating in her wake.

Then catching up with him, she matched
his pace, letting him barrel on
giddily, in his riotous play,
just out of reach and rescue.

Then she turned him and steered him back.
And at the edge from which he’d launched,
scooped him up and — enfolding him —
whirled his giggling body round.

Who — knowing it would be such joy
to collapse into His cunning
Love — would not, like St. Francis — then
and there — strip and light out running?

//

The Envelope

by Maxine Kumin

It is true, Martin Heidegger, as you have written,
I fear to cease, even knowing that at the hour
of my death my daughters will absorb me, even
knowing they will carry me about forever
inside them, an arrested fetus, even as I carry
the ghost of my mother under my navel, a nervy
little androgynous person, a miracle
folded in lotus position.

Like those old pear-shaped Russian dolls that open
at the middle to reveal another and another, down
to the pea-sized, irreducible minim,
may we carry our mothers forth in our bellies.
May we, borne onward by our daughters, ride
in the Envelope of Almost-Infinity,
that chain letter good for the next twenty-five
thousand days of their lives.

//

Untitled

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me,
there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

//

Summer Solstice, New York City

by Sharon Olds

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children’s father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when its found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

//

from What to Remember When Waking

by David Whyte

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest world
where everything
began
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

From the Guest Editor…

This issue contains two related themes, the fall with its bounty and the wisdom that the autumn of life brings.

My article called “Elder Wisdom” uses a 101-year-old woman as an exemplar of this kind of wisdom. I describe what wisdom is and how people get to be wise, something that elders, because of our age and experience, have a running start on over youngers. But be warned. As I point out, just because you’re old doesn’t mean you’re wise.

Drew Leder’s “Tao of Longevity” with its lovely illustrations explores the concept of longevity using the Tao Te Ching for guidance on living wisely and well.

The article “Bird Wisdom” by Margaret Thorpe will make you laugh when she describes dealing unwisely with former husbands and how wisdom is about patterns and relationships. Along these lines, be sure to move your cursor over the fancy colored question mark and the bare gray landscape for a surprise.

Robert Atchley’s article “Serving from Spirit” speaks tenderly about spirituality and manifesting wisdom and compassion, sometimes simply by tending to things or people that need tending. This could mean picking up a piece of trash, helping a pregnant woman carry her groceries to her car, or teaching adults to read.

In “The Yellow Brick Road of Not Knowing” Jane Gilgun explains how not-knowing and wisdom go together if we can dare to be open and available to others. She talks about horses, lovers, the violence in her own heart, and celebrating uncertainty.

John Sullivan in “Autumn’s Way: Releasing and Simplifying” tells us how the arc of descent in the second half of life calls for different things in us than the arc of ascent. You will enjoy the wide range of people, stories, poems, and quotes that he brings to us.

Finally, Barbara Kammerlohr reviews How to Live by Henry Alford. Only in his mid-40’s, he has explored the concept of wisdom and the part that aging plays in its acquisition.

-Caroline Bassett

Elder Wisdom by Caroline Bassett

Caroline Bassett, PhD. is founder and director of The Wisdom Institute which helps people move more intentionally toward wisdom in their organizations, communities, and lives — through research, conversation, writing, and giving talks and seminars. She also teaches at two distance learning universities and is a certified Master Gardener and avid tango dancer. You can view the website of TWI at www.wisdominst.org.

Recently, on a trip east from my home in Minnesota, my sister and I visited a 101-year-old friend of the family, an exemplar of elder wisdom, who lives in rural Massachusetts. Aunt Jane, as we called her (not her real name and some details have been changed to protect her privacy, but she really is 101 years old) ruefully acknowledged that she has to use a walker now and a hearing aid that she hates. She lives alone, drives, uses e-mail, and when we saw her, she was writing an article for the local newspaper. My sister Katherine and I asked a lot of questions — pumped Aunt Jane — about family friends from the old days of 30, 40, and even 50 years ago — and about herself. As I told her, when you’re a kid, the grown-ups are just there, like a kitchen table, with no intrinsic interest of their own. It’s only when you are older yourself that you see the growns as individuals and become curious about them.

Aunt Jane has an astonishing memory, remembering the facts of what happened and keeping the thread of the story strong and clear, avoiding side-tracking herself with other tidbits of interest. She remembered that the son of friends had been exempt from the service in World War II because he did spectroscopic analyses of cargo. And she remembered the names of the three wives of this man’s brother, the last of whom was a “long-faced doleful lady and the love of his life.”

What makes her so remarkable a specimen? It was not only that she has her health, that she never complained or even mentioned her aches and pains and resentments, that she lacked self-pity, that she talked frankly, openly, and uncritically about the people we asked after. It was that she was demonstrating what wisdom looks like.

//

My definition of wisdom

Let me put here my definition of wisdom so that we can work from it as we look at Aunt Jane and her life. Wisdom is having sufficient awareness in a context or situation to behave in a manner most likely to produce outcomes that are satisfactory for all involved, including the biosphere. I’ll talk about each of the three key elements of the definition separately: sufficient awareness, certain behaviors, and satisfactory outcomes.

First, in her stories Aunt Jane simply recounted the facts as she recalled them, without denigrating anyone so that she would look better. She knows that it (“it” being the world) is not about her. If she has any, old anger and resentments did not appear (although I wanted to ask if there is anyone she could not forgive, but I didn’t get the chance).

Besides the factual recounting, it was clear that she had deeply cared about these people. Caring about others is a central component of wisdom, along with — paradoxically, it may seem — detachment and the ability to see clearly and unemotionally what’s going on.

Second, the behaviors that can lead to the desirable outcomes for her include her emotional resiliency and coping with adversity, two qualities where elders have an edge on youngers. For example, she has survived an alcoholic husband (since he was 19!) and two brothers and three sisters, all younger, one of whom had tuberculosis and had to have a lung removed. Her parents did not speak to each other for 20 years because of an argument they had. Other behaviors include not holding grudges or feeling superior.

And these lead to the third part of the definition, satisfactory outcomes. Yes, as a Quaker, she has done some work for peace, but I am talking about something else, something smaller and more intimate. In this town a whole group of people has coalesced around her. Instead of being invisible as a lot of older people are in this culture, it is clear that the town cherishes her. She has created community. A year ago when she turned 100, several birthday parties were held for her, one of which was a surprise that took place at a local winery with a maximum capacity of 40–50. Seventy people showed up. Each Labor Day for the last five years she has been holding a picnic on the farm that has been in her family for 298 years. (Yes, this number is accurate. The family “acquired” the land after King Philip’s War.) Thirty or forty people attend these picnics, and I am planning to attend next year.

Her wisdom, though she would not acknowledge it, is, I believe, to create a gentle community. No, she doesn’t “create” it intentionally. It happens around her, and she honors and sustains it. Community is people being together, knowing and supporting each other.

The story of Aunt Jane is to give you an example of wisdom on a homey scale, the kind that you and I are likely to be part of or create. Wisdom doesn’t have to be WISDOM, a huge earth-changing thing. It can be small, local, and quiet.

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The wisdom of elders

Just because you are an elder doesn’t mean you’re wise. Just because you are smart doesn’t mean you are wise either. We all know people who are really intelligent, but they just aren’t wise, either in the sense of prudence (not running a red light) or in the sense of insight, that is, having an idea of what’s a Good Thing Now and In The Long Term. We also know senior citizens who are just as stubborn or ignorant as they always were.

So, what does make you wise? But first, what is wise, anyway? Again, here’s my definition: Wisdom is having sufficient awareness of the context or situation to behave in a manner most likely to produce satisfactory outcomes for all involved. The satisfactory outcomes are considered the common good, on a large or small scale. If I tell people I will invest their money so that they will receive a brilliant yield and I do so for a while, but my name is Bernard Madoff and I was really doing it for my own gain without any benefit in mind to you at all, then this is not the common good. If, however, we raise money to get new books for a library, this activity has something for everybody. Narrow self-interest is not the common good, but neither is saintly self-sacrifice. The common good serves the commons.

How do people get to be wise?

How do people get to be able to have this kind of awareness to know how and when to act to get the desirable results? One main way is to be older. Elders have more life experience and have seen things come up and go down. We have seen the consequences of certain actions and know that some choices usually end up better than others. We know that certain things simply work better than others. Maybe you can get away with running stop signs a few times, but sooner or later (probably) you’ll get caught or be in a wreck or hurt someone else. It’s just not a good idea to be a scofflaw in some things. Having seen some friends of my parents die of lung cancer from smoking, I can say that not smoking works better than smoking.

Besides life experience and seeing consequences of actions, being able to regulate emotions can lead to wisdom. I described Aunt Jane’s emotional resiliency and generosity of spirit. A lot of elders have decided to forgive transgressions and move on. My friend’s husband had affairs and she finally divorced him, even though they had three young children, after much anger and trauma. Some time went by, and the poison that had infused her body from those years of emotional neglect and abuse seemed to drain out of her. She could talk about and meet her former husband and his girlfriend with equanimity. She told me that she had just decided to let it all go. But it took a while. I wouldn’t say that she forgave him, but she wasn’t infected any more. Even better is going to the next step and actually forgiving someone who has injured you. This is something that some elders seem able to do, when I, from where I stand, don’t see how it is possible. I hope to someday, as I move into elder wisdom.

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Four kinds of wisdom

I have given several examples of wisdom and wise behavior, but they may seem all mixed together to you, minor things with major ones, small deals and big deals and really big deals. There is a difference in kinds of wisdom. In my research on wisdom, I have found four different kinds or levels of it, the difference arising with the complexity and/or the scope of the situation.

• Pearls Before Swine, or prudence. Wisdom of this sort includes everyday common sense and the aphorisms and truisms that apply to it. These memorable short phrases help you through life and are usually small in scale or complexity. By that I mean that they are most often about preventing you from getting into a difficult situation, or at least an undesirable one. Here are some examples: “Don’t throw pearls before swine.” “If you see the teeth of a lion, do not think that it is smiling at you.” But this wisdom needn’t only come in previously concocted statements. It can as easily be found by simply noticing that it looks like rain today and you think you’ll take your umbrella. This is a wise thing to do because it is prudent.|

  As you can see, the Pearls Before Swine kind of wisdom works mostly on a personal or small-scale level and is related to being cautious so that you save your own skin. There’s another kind with which we can use our life experience and look ahead to various possible outcomes.

• Ever After, or predicting consequences. This kind of wisdom derives from life experience and seeing how things play out. Elders are good at this because we have more data than youngers to go on from having seen plenty of events occur or decisions made, followed by the aftermath, for better or for worse. For example, in college I was planning on majoring in biology but my father counseled me not to for two reasons. One, I am not good at numbers, and two, I like to read novels. So I chose a French major instead, which turned out to serve me handily as I used the language in the Peace Corps in Morocco and then in travels in francophone countries. Or, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune of August 26, 2009, the CEO of Sun Country Airlines “publicly apologized and wisely offered the unfortunate passengers a refund” for six hours stuck on board waiting for a flight from New York City to take off to Minneapolis. That was thinking about consequences. If he hadn’t apologized and offered the refund, the passengers would be angry and choose another airline in the future. I expect that you can recall at least several situations where you had an idea of what the consequences might be.

  On a broader level than predicting what the results of this or that action might be comes yet another kind of wisdom, the Good Thing. This kind of wisdom applies to situations with greater complexity.

• A Good Thing Now and in the Future. This is wisdom on a wider scale than the other two, with more complexity involved. It is a good idea, a thing that is good to do right now and is good going into the future too. Here’s an example: eating locally. A fairly new idea, the concept of consciously eating locally makes sense because we support farmers near us, our neighbors perhaps, and because we spend less money on trucking the fruits and vegetables from far away, thus making a dent in saving the environment. Also, it just plain tastes better. It is an obvious thing to do but someone had to name it and once named, now we can use it. Another example is literacy for all. In the modern world, if you can’t read, you can’t do much or go much of anywhere. If you can read, you can get a driver’s license, and you can buy the kind of soup that you want and know if you should dilute it with a half cup of cream or three cups. It makes a difference! What kinds of Good Things can you think of?

  There’s still one more kind of wisdom, the one with the greatest complexity and the widest range. I’m calling it Standing on the Mountain, or long-term perspective. Again, this is a kind of wisdom that we elder can have an edge on over youngers because we have been there, done that — and seen the whole of it.

• Standing on the Mountain, or perspective. This means being able to see the whole of a thing and not merely the parts so that you can understand more about what is going on. You can see not only consequences but also patterns. You might be familiar with the Nazca Lines in Peru. On the ground they look like shallow designs made by rocks on the ground, lines that go here and there, with no discernable rhyme or reason. But if you go up the mountain (or nowadays, in a airplane) and look down, you will see figures of spiders, birds, and monkeys. So, from the distance you can see the pattern but close up it looks like random lines.

  I would suggest that some of our greatest leaders have seen the Nazca Lines, so to speak. They have seen a very big pattern and have striven to create or maintain it. For Abraham Lincoln it was his fight to save the Union. That was important to him because in the mid-19th century, a representative democracy was still a relatively new experiment in methods of government. Before, there had been tribes, feudal states, and monarchies. An elected government where the minority had a strong say in what went on was new on the planet, as was a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and Lincoln was dedicated to preserving it. Another example closer to home is Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw that the current discrimination against Blacks served neither them nor the Whites nor the country, and he worked against it.

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The wisdom from Aunt Jane’s Life

However, the contributions that most of us will make to satisfactory outcomes are likely to be on a smaller scale than Abraham Lincoln’s. I’m wondering about the wisdom that we can learn from Aunt Jane’s life. What I have found are these, and I would like to know what conclusions you would draw.

1. Pay attention to what’s going on around you. See the whole picture as best you can.
2. Connect and care. Care about other people. Don’t hold grudges, and forgive if you can. Accept people as they are. For the ones that bother you, think about what story you would tell about them when you are 101.
3. What outcomes are you involved in that are really worthwhile? Remember, they can be small, quiet, local, and gentle. A homey scale is just fine. It makes a difference to those who take part in it.

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Aunt Jane’s Parting Words

After I told Aunt Jane that I am looking forward to seeing her at the picnic next year, she said that Katherine and I should let our hair grow. I guess I’ll be doing that. Who is to gainsay a 102 year old?

The Tao of Longevity by Drew Leder

Drew Leder, MD, PhD. is a professor of Eastern and Western Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He is a nationally known speaker and author of five books, including Sparks of the Divine, on the sacred lessons contained within everyday things, and Spiritual Passages, his book on the spirituality of aging.

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Knowing others is intelligence,
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force,
Mastering the self is true strength.

She who is contented is wealthy.
She who perseveres succeeds.
She who stays in the center endures.
She who dies, but does not die,
Has attained true longevity (shou).

— Tao Te Ching, verse 33

What is it to attain true longevity? This question rings a bit foreign to our Western ears. We speak instead of getting old, and view this not so much as an attainment but a fate to be denied, delayed, and despised. Who wants to get old? Better to be young and vital, new and fresh.

Each addition to our yearly total can thus feel like a subtraction. How did I get to be ___?! (You fill in the number.) We may approach our birthdays a bit like the dieter who reluctantly steps on the scale, accused by an ever-expanding number. In a Western context, aging can feel vaguely shameful, associated as it is with the loss of power, energy, and sexual attractiveness, and the ever-nearer approach of death. Getting older — feeling older — looking older…what was I thinking of!? How did this happen? Why did I let myself go?

Yet in the context of ancient Chinese Taoism, and traditional Chinese culture in general, longevity is an accomplishment of which one should be proud. To have grown long of years is to have done something right. It speaks to qualities of endurance, perseverance, flexibility, and harmony that have preserved one among the living.

We find this notion hidden in the very word we most dread — “old.” It derives from the Indo–European base-word “al,” meaning “to grow, nourish.” From thence comes the Greek aldaino, “make grow, strengthen,” and althein or althainein, “to get well,” along with the Latin alere, “to feed, nourish, increase.” To be old is not that which has lost its vitality, become weak, sick, and diminished. The etymology implies the opposite. The “old” is that which has flourished and sustained itself. It has proven strong enough to endure, healthy and vital enough to survive. We grow old. With each birthday our life increases. We need not feel ourselves a shrinking, slinking thing.

Many traditional cultures respect the accomplishment of longevity. Elders are seen as worthy individuals, exhibiting fortitude and good fortune, perhaps blessed by the gods, and possessors of invaluable life experience and wisdom. Not so in our society. We tend to prefer the productivity, technological savvy, and sexual prowess associated with youth. The 19-year-old girl, not the 90-year-old woman, is plastered on posters, our aspirational figure.

A useful corrective is found in Taoism, the spiritual–philosophical system that flourished in ancient China and, with Confucianism, has done much to shape its culture. The Tao Te Ching venerates the sage. In one sense, the sage is ageless. He/she is neither young nor old, neither this nor that, but is identified with the broader cycles of the Tao that include heat and cold, day and night, youth and old age, life and death. The Taoist sage has no preferences or fixed identity. He/she embraces the process of change.

However, the sage in Chinese tradition is often imaged as an elder. We are familiar with the stereotypes — the wizened and wise karate teacher, the old crone-healer, the master of herbs, the white-bearded meditator living in a cave by a waterfall.

Stereotypes often embody some lasting truth: Long life experience can yield deep insight, and insight, in turn, can lead to long life.

More than most traditions, Taoism has developed a spiritual science concerned with the prolongation of life. In distorted form this led to a quest for elixirs of immortality, or meditational and life-style practices that would literally conquer death. Such is not the way of the philosophical Tao Te Ching. Death is a part of the life cycle and, when the time is right, should be embraced rather than resisted. However, the Tao Te Ching does have much to say explicitly and implicitly about the attainment of longevity. The spiritual energies of the Tao manifest in this world, not in some heaven to which the soul longs to flee. The sage dwells in this world, and in such a way that her life energies are sustained rather than prematurely terminated.

So what can we in the West learn from this tradition? First, to venerate longevity, rather than to scorn growing old. Second, the techniques and attitudes that are conducive to long life and vital spirit. To this we now turn to the Tao Te Ching for guidance, albeit in a brief and suggestive fashion:

People are born soft and gentle.
When dead they are hard and stiff.
Plants are born tender and supple.
When dead they are brittle and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unyielding are disciples of death.
The soft and yielding are disciples of life.

The unyielding army cannot win.
The unbending tree will snap.
The hard and stiff will meet a fall.
The soft and supple will prevail.

— Tao Te Ching, verse 76

This verse, through a series of images drawn from social and natural settings — people, plants, armies, trees — presents a recurring theme: That which is soft and yielding will outlast that which is brittle and stiff.

By contrast, our western images of strength often emphasize hardness. The superhero is a “man of steel.” Our soldiers advance into battle, defended by body armor and long-distance missiles. A life setback? Tough it out, keep a stiff upper lip.

The Taoist verse emphasizes that continued vitality is more about suppleness and “going with the flow.” A river doesn’t try to force its way through a mountain. It is soft enough, yielding enough, to find the contours of the land, seek the low places, stream around the obstacles until it reaches the sea. Thus it endures. So, too, the Tao Te Ching implies, does the sage endure. He/she is flexible in the face of life’s obstacles, capable of avoiding the stress that arises when we battle other people and circumstances. Stress, we know, is a killer. It can manifest in the form of heart disease, strokes, destructive habits such as smoking and overeating, and a proneness to accidents or even suicide. “The unbending tree will snap…the hard and stiff will meet a fall.” That which goes against the Tao ends up in premature demise.

One secret to longevity is thus this attitude of “easy does it.” Many of us know such a person who embodies this principle. It’s not that he/she is simply passive, a weakling. On the contrary, their fires may burn bright. But the sage isn’t wasting energy complaining about what cannot be changed or fighting aggressively against “enemies.” The sage works with the life situation, not against it, and thereby remains a “disciple of life.”

In Verse 55 of the Tao Te Ching, this sage is equated with a newborn child:

His bones are soft, muscles weak,
Yet his grip is powerful.
He does not know about the union of man and woman,
Yet his penis stands erect.
He screams all day without getting hoarse.

This is true harmony.
To know harmony is to endure.
To endure is to be enlightened.

This may seem like startling imagery, especially when connected to the aging sage. Yet it reminds us of the etymology of “old” — to “grow, strengthen, increase.” That which endures, attains longevity, has within it a principle of generativity.

Again, we may know someone who embodies this, or find it within ourselves in our better moments. The sage has an innocence, a spontaneity of response, a creativity reminiscent of a young child. In a natural setting, listening to a piece of music, or immersed in conversation with a friend — he/she is fully present, like a baby gazing raptly at her toes with the one-pointedness of a Zen master. Such activity is not “exhausting.” Rather it generates energy in oneself and others. It is life self-renewing.

According to legend, the Tao Te Ching was written by a sage named Lao Tsu who, traveling by buffalo to uncharted territories, paused to set down his wisdom for a border guard. “Lao Tsu” is not a proper name but an honorific title that can mean “old master,” or, alternatively “old child.” This strange oxymoron may by now make sense. As a wintry tree puts forth new shoots, so too the long-lived elder is generative and re-generative. These “shoots” may come in the form of new grandchildren, new relationships, new activities, new awarenesses, or just being alive to whatever this moment brings. As Florida Scott-Maxwell writes in The Measure of My Days, “My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.”

New life comes not only from energetic engagement, but something quieter. Verse 16 of the Tao Te Ching counsels:

Empty yourself of everything.
Keep deeply still.
Watch everything arise and return.
Each thing grows and flourishes
Then returns to its root.
Returning to the root is stillness,
The way of nature.
This is what endures.
This is what enlightens.

Not knowing what endures
Brings disaster.
Knowing what endures,
The mind is open,
The heart is open.
One acts nobly,
In accord with the way of Heaven,
The way of the Tao.

This is the source of long life
Without exhaustion.

How do we return to the “root” from which life springs? The Tao Te Ching advises a generous supply of stillness and emptiness. As I grow older I value quiet more than I used to. Meanders in an open park, dog by my side. A summer evening, slowly cooling. I keep broader margins on a day than once I did. My to-do list is briefer. I pray and meditate (though not as much as I could), watch baseball games (probably more than I should) that take forever to unfold and find that is part of their pleasure. So, too, Russian novels, and doing Tai Chi forms. The sage — not me, surely, but we all have a piece of the sage within — does not exhaust his life forces, but husbands them by returning to the root, the home of stillness, the place from which the world arises, and into which it dissolves each night and finally at death.

We will fear the silence of death less the more we make our home there. We may also find this silence lies at the heart of life and its ever self-renewal. It is the root, and the route. It is generativity and longevity.

She who stays in the center endures.
She who dies, but does not die,
Has attained true longevity (shou).

— Tao Te Ching, verse 33

Bird Wisdom by Margaret Owen Thorpe

Margaret Owen Thorpe is a remarkable mind who weaves information into original, and often surprising, pictures and patterns. Yet she is no pedant. Rather, she comes from people who were “colorful characters” . . . always ready to spin a yarn. Her writing includes original commentary, feature stories about people and businesses, history, and practical guides. She has been a developer, manager, and executive in state and county government. She then went to the private sector to work in health care, doing market development for a start-up company now ranked in the Fortune 500. She is now an independent advisor, working with the University of St. Thomas Small Business Development Center in Minneapolis. She remains the historian she was educated to be, hunting ancestors and their antics. She also volunteers with Feline Rescue, Inc., in St. Paul.

A few summers ago, I was working in my back yard. I’d taken the phone outside so I wouldn’t have to rush back in, all muddy and wet, should it ring. I had a bird feeder hanging from a tall pole near the deck. I took the feeder down to refill it, carried it into the garage, spilling some seed on the path as I went. No sooner had I set the feeder down to fill it than the phone rang. I left the feeder in the garage and went to answer the phone.

The caller was someone with whom I often had long discussions about “the weighty issues of the world.” So I sat down on the deck steps and settled into conversation. Pretty soon, winging in at full speed from the trees, came a lady grackle. She landed on top of the feeder pole, ready for lunch. She looked. No feeder. No food. She cocked her head and looked at me. “Where’s lunch?” She waited less than a minute. She gave me another look. “Not gonna feed me, huh?” And she flew from the pole straight to the small pile of seed I’d spilled on the path – and proceeded to have her lunch.

Ms. Grackle displayed a direct wisdom that we humans too seldom have. She didn’t lose sight of the results she wanted – lunch. She didn’t organize a task force to investigate reasons for the feeder’s disappearance. She didn’t send a memo to other grackles – and, possibly, blue jays – advising them that the food was missing and action was required. She didn’t even hire a consultant to facilitate a retreat – “Who Moved My Feeder?” She just adapted and proceeded directly toward her goal.

So what’s wrong with us? Does becoming older really make us wiser? If it does, what do we know at 60 that we did not know at 30? Anything? And what’s wisdom, anyway?

When our parents said, “You’re old enough to know better,” they were suggesting that we’d gained sufficient experience at whatever age we were to know not to do whatever it was we’d done. They were saying that being alive delivers experience – and that we should learn from those experiences to do better. OK – but what’s “better”? And is it wiser? What our parents really meant was, “You’ve been around long enough that you ought to know that we don’t approve of that.” Might have something to do with wisdom – might not. Depends on how wise your parents were, right?

Perhaps a more objective view of wisdom from experience is that we’ve learned, by trial and error, what works – and what doesn’t. Of course, knowing whether or not something worked means knowing what we were trying to accomplish in the first place. Ms. Grackle knew. She was hungry. She wanted to accomplish food in her beak and belly. We humans don’t do so well at keeping our eye on the prize.

It took me two spouses, two incidents, and fifteen years to learn that, if I was seeking to persuade a spouse that I was right and he was wrong, I was not likely to get that result by flinging a bowl of food at him. Of course it felt really good at the precise moment when I tossed the bowl of plums at the first guy – and just as good at the moment when I heaved green beans at the second one – but neither fellow changed his views one bit. And it didn’t feel good at all when I, all by myself, had to scrub the purple plum stain off the wall and pick the beans out of a 1970s shag rug. So I now know that sailing food across a room doesn’t work to persuade. Am I now a wiser person – or just a less messy one?

If wisdom comes only from experience, then we’re going to make an awful lot of mistakes trying to discern what works and what doesn’t. Many of them will be nastier and messier than plums and beans, too. A person might be 86 years old, with lots of life, and still be quite unwise. There’s more to this wisdom thing than just experience and time, isn’t there?

Try thinking about people you consider to be pretty wise – not just the legends – Solomon, Sophia, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, the Dalai Lama. Think about living, walking, talking folks you think wise – your teacher, preacher, rabbi, bartender, neighbor, hair stylist, uncle Fred, aunt Jean. Why do you see them as wise? Not just smart or knowledgeable or trustworthy or honest – wise. Why do you draw upon that special word – wisdom?

The people with wisdom whom we know don’t exactly fit the stereotype, do they? They seldom spout eternal truths. They don’t sit serenely in mountain paradises dispensing pithy summaries of life’s meaning. They probably don’t write profound prose and poetry of Biblical or Aristotelian or Confucian stature. They probably don’t even live above Boulder, spinning “theories of everything” and “integral visions for business, politics, science and spirituality.” They do go through life getting done what they want to get done without a lot of fuss, muss, bother, and shedding of feathers. Rather like Ms. Grackle, in other words.

The wise people we know aren’t self-effacing or compliant. We likely consider them leaders, and we go to them for insights when we have difficulties. Yet they don’t create whirlwinds most of the time. Often they say very little. But when something needs to be said, when a line needs to be drawn, they say it and draw it – firmly, clearly, and without hesitation. Everyone stops beating their wings and puts their feathers back down. How do the wise ones do it?

Let’s continue with birds. What do we mean when we say “a bird’s eye view”? We mean wide perspective as seen from up in the air. We imply that birds see the whole picture, not just individual items. We suggest that their view is clearer and more revealing than ours at ground-level. We know that, as people, we can see some things only from height. When I was in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, I saw only scrub and salt brush, bush by bush, typical of the desert that the canyon is. But, when I stood on the road above the canyon, I could still see, 1,000 years later, where the pre-Columbian canyon residents had grown their crops – squash, corn, and beans – much as the Pueblo nations do today.

How? Today’s scrub is smaller in the sections where earlier people grew food. They irrigated with rain water collected above the canyon and brought down through and over the mesa rock. Over time, salts and other minerals leached into the water and were deposited in the agricultural locations. The soil remains saltier and more alkaline than is ideal for plant growth. We could, of course, test the soil and discover this condition – but we can see it for ourselves. Sight is more memorable than data, isn’t it?

Carrie Bassett, in her article in this issue of Itineraries, mentions the Nazca lines in Peru. It provides a much more dramatic illustration of what a bird’s eye view does. As she notes, if you walk or ride on the plain, what you will see is rock, rock, and more rock. All rock. Everywhere. Just rocks. But, if you’re brave enough to get in a small plane, high on the west slope of the Andes where the wind currents are truly alive, you will see that the rocks are not just rocks; they are arranged to show a hummingbird, a spider, a monkey, and more – from above.

What our feathered friends, then, are seeing in a bird’s eye view – and what we, people, see when we, so to speak, rise above – are patterns.

I propose that patterns – and the ability to see them – are the keys to wisdom – to practical wisdom that handles difficult situations for us and among us. Practical wisdom from patterns hands us tacit guidelines for how things work. Patterns give us a world view that lets us know what matters – and what doesn’t. We don’t have to spell out the contents of the view bush by bush, rock by rock. In fact, we shouldn’t because it destroys the meaning of the pattern. There is knowledge in the pattern – in the whole – that ceases to exist when we dissect the whole into its pieces. Here is a list of pieces:

Drafthood, reducer ring, baffle assembly, heat trap, cold water dip tube, anode rod, temperature and pressure relief valve, drain valve, thermostat, manifold, orifice, main burner, pilot assembly, pilot tube, thermocouple, screw 10-32 x .312 PH RD MACH, pilot shield, inner door, outer door, palnut, air shutter.

If we do not see patterns, whatever wisdom we have comes only from tedious trial and error.

Wisdom comes from paying attention to the relationships that form patterns – among objects, in human situations, in complex systems. When we collect all the information but cannot discern what matters and what does not, decisions to act or not act,. and how, become difficult – and often incorrect.

A wise person actually can see the forest for the trees. She knows what information pertains to her goal, purpose, intended result – and what information does not. The irrelevant information fades out of the picture; the relevant information comes into sharp focus. The sharpened focus becomes knowledge. Knowledge becomes understanding. Understanding tells her what to do – or to not do.

Does age have anything to do, then, with wisdom? Probably, even if it’s only the trial and error sort of wisdom. My discovery that flinging food at spouses did not persuade them to my point of view eventually led to a probably wiser conclusion – that the particular disagreements were not significant – but that my frustrations and dissatisfactions went far beyond the topics at hand – and that I needed to address the fundamental issue – the relationships. So I did.

We say “older and wiser” as if it’s a given. A September headline in the Wall Street Journal suggests there’s more to it: “Older, Wiser, Slower — After 50, Avid Athletes Find That to Stay Healthy, They Must Let Go of the Need to Win.” We have less energy to spend, whether we like it or not. If we don’t slow down and focus clearly on what really matters, we may not make it too far past 50. Slowing down brings wisdom from seeing less detritus and more substance.

So the visiting grackle with her bird’s eye view knew that what mattered was where food was – not where food wasn’t – even if food was no longer where it had once been. Where it went – or why it went – did not matter.

People we deem wise appear calm and in charge because they do not need to frantically scratch in piles of data to find the pony. They aren’t fretting about corporate colleagues wearing white socks with dress shoes or too-short skirts or whether or not the receptionist will remember to water the plants. They focus instead on understanding what needs to be done – and how – to create a new product that people will really want to buy. Wise faculty members focus upon new molecular biology insights and upon successful ways to communicate with students, not upon who was sitting with whom at the last faculty senate meeting. Wise people pay attention to what matters. The bird knew that very well; let her teach.

Serving from Spirit by Robert C. Atchley

Robert C. Atchley is a distinguished professor of gerontology emeritus at Miami University, OH, where he also served as the director of the Scripps Gerontology Center. Atchley was previously a professor and chair of the Department of Gerontology at the Naropa University, in Boulder, CO, and is the author of Social Forces and Aging (published by Wadsworth) and of Continuity and Adaptation in Aging and Spirituality and Aging, both published by Johns Hopkins.

Among elders, service is very often a spiritual experience. For many, service is a source of much joy and satisfaction. Uplifting is a word often used to describe experiences of service. Much of this service happens in the context of friendship and family networks, but elders are also mainstays of service in many community organizations.

The serving-from-spirit concept is based on the idea that effective service in the community is rooted in two things: 1) a cultivated connection with the experiential spirituality that lies within each human being, and 2) knowledge and skills needed to be effective in whatever arena of service one chooses. Serving from spirit is a stance from which to be of service and a model of how one can grow spiritually and at the same time become more effective in service to the community.

In their book How Can I Help? authors Ram Dass and Paul Gorman assert that service stems from the human impulse to care. We can see this especially clearly in how communities respond to disasters such as floods or tornados. At such times, the impulse to care for one another is overwhelming. The impulse to care is a noble inclination, but it tells us little about how to care or what will be effective. Service over the long run requires that we build on the impulse to care.

The serving-from-spirit model begins with the goal of being spiritually grounded while serving. As people grow spiritually, they develop levels of consciousness and awareness that alert them to the obstacles thrown in their paths by self-centeredness. Ego-based service is first and foremost about the ego’s needs. A reflective process of examining personal motives for serving can help identify ego-based motives. Enlightened service rises above the ego to more clearly see what is needed. To move toward enlightened service requires skill in remaining spiritually centered while doing the work of service.

Many well-intentioned people find their service less satisfying than they would like because they do not have essential information about the structure and operation of the field in which they wish to serve. Most areas of service have their own unique concepts and language about what they do and how they do it. “Paying your dues” involves getting the experience needed to ensure being sufficiently informed to serve effectively. This does not mean passively accepting other people’s definitions of what is good, true, or beautiful; it means making sure to understand the situation before weighing in with suggestions for change.

A person who is accomplished at serving from spirit is able to stay spiritually centered amid the ups and downs of working in an organizational environment, often in situations involving people who are in desperate need. Those serving from spirit are also very knowledgeable about how to work within the organizational context and/or with the types of people who are to be served.

Listening to One’s Entire Being

People find their way to spiritual paths and to community service in a large variety of ways. The mind, the ego, the heart, the body, and the soul can each lead us. But if people are only listening to one part of being, then they are not taking advantage of all their resources for being clear about what they are doing, or thinking about doing. Listening to one’s entire being involves cultivating sensitivity to each dimension of being. This possibility is greatly enhanced by contemplative practice—meditation, rumination, and inner stillness and quietude. In this sense, contemplative practice is an important companion on both the inner spiritual journey and the outer journey of service. Contemplative practice can put people in touch with higher levels of consciousness, from which it is possible to see clearly the workings of mind and ego, the shape of true compassion, actions that would truly be of service, and a pace that is healthy for the mind and body of the server.

Mindfulness and Transcendence

Mindfulness and transcendence are important qualities to bring to the spiritual journey and to bring to service. Mindfulness is being right here, right now. It is an intense awareness of the present moment. With mindfulness people are able to see more clearly what is before them. They are more likely to see what will actually be helpful in serving another human being or serving an organization. In this framework, it is not so much a matter of doing for others as “I” would like to be done for, but doing for others as they would like. It is a matter of doing service that is not self-centered.

To employ mindful service, we also need a vantage point that transcends our ordinary consciousness of self. Ordinary consciousness is ego-centered. We are the main character in the drama. But as soon as we begin to witness our ordinary self, we have transcended that self and can see it more clearly than we possibly could from the middle of our ego-agendas of desire or fear. To the witness, we are only one of the characters in the drama and not necessarily the most important one at a given moment. When we look into the eyes of another person and realize that we are looking at another being just like us, we can experience a unity level of consciousness. Witness and unity consciousness are both transcendent levels of awareness that make it more possible to grow spiritually and to serve effectively.

Becoming Wisdom and Compassion in Action

Being wise and having compassion are not all or nothing. They are qualities that exist in degrees. They are not something we have, they are capacities we can develop. They are qualities that we might be able to bring into being in a given situation. If we have cultivated wisdom and compassion, then we have a greater capacity to manifest those qualities, but this happens in the present moment. Whether we can manifest wisdom and compassion depends on how centered we can remain. When we are in a situation of service, we are usually called to be wise and to be compassionate. How well we can do this depends a great deal on how long we have been practicing wisdom and compassion. In practice, a circle of sages is always more effective than a single sage precisely because even sages cannot be all things to all people.

Often we think of service as something that involves volunteering or working within an organizational context. However, service is really an intention that we can take with us into a wide variety of situations we find ourselves in. What would happen if we went joyfully about our daily lives seeing every person as someone we could potentially serve, in however small a way? What would happen if we took every opportunity to tend our planet and our environment? Many times these are not big programs or long-term tasks but instead are things we can do moment, by moment, by moment. It only takes a few minutes to deeply listen to someone who needs a receptive ear; it only takes a few seconds to pick up a piece of trash. The feeling of service is something that happens in the present moment, whether we are doing it in an organizational context or purely on our own.

The Yellow Brick Road of Not Knowing by Jane F. Gilgun

Jane F. Gilgun, PhD, LCSW, is professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. She does research on the meanings of violence to perpetrators, how persons overcome adversities, and the development of violent behaviors. Her books and articles are widely available on the internet at Amazon Kindle, scribd.com, and lulu.com. She also has videos at www.youtube.com/jgilgun.

I’m at my wisest when I am in a state of not-knowing. At those times, I experience myself as open to experiences of various sorts, such as to nature, to my horses, and to other people. My experience is in soft focus and slow motion. What is happening has not happened before. What I have learned in the past and know intellectually is in suspension. Only when I reflect back on this state of not-knowing do I intellectualize my experience and gain knowledge. Perhaps knowledge is experience reflected upon and intellectualized.

Unfortunately, these states of not-knowing are rare. They require a sense of safety and trust, of relaxation and openness. If other people are involved, they have to be willing to engage themselves in the moment along with me and let go of rational thought and anxieties.

As I think about states of not-knowing, I realize there are various types. Some are a bit of nirvana, while others are thrilling and sensual, while still others are gripping and suspenseful. There probably are other types as well, but three is enough for now. Sometimes the nirvana-like situations envelop me without my consent. For example, while driving a coastal highway in the west of Ireland, my consciousness shifted on its own. I was alight in the puffy pink clouds that arose above the coast. Or the time I was doing yoga and everything stopped except for the rainbow-colored waterfall that flowed within what I later learned was the chakra between my eyes. I knew nothing but that waterfall. Or the day I walked Third Beach in Newport, RI, and experienced the unmediated joy that I was going to live after an operation for a tumor that could have been malignant. In each of these times, I was in what I would call heaven. I was wise during those moments. I was the unmediated me, with nothing between me and the experience of something I believe is mystical.

Being with my horses is zen. Nothing else exists but the rhythms between me and them — their huge eyes, soft breathing, and furry ears. Anxiety, the pressure of time, guilt based on actual or imaginary transgressions — these do not exist. Then I am wise.

I like the state of not-knowing when I’m with other people. This happens at times with friends. We talk, and we do things together, sometimes without talking. We are outside of our own concerns and anxieties, emotionally available to each other and out of the constraints of time.

I’ve also had this experience with lovers. The experience is like zen. During those times of not-knowing there’s a flow and a sense of being outside of time and of myself, soft and aloft. Even the sexual pull that arises between me and a lover is a form of wisdom. I give myself over to the experience which can be a highly emotional intense gratification, but wisdom all the same because these experiences have not happened before and they happen only in the moment. Reliving them is not the same as being in them.

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Another form of not-knowing arises when I’m in the more formal roles of professor and researcher. When I work with students on their projects, I have to put myself in a state of not-knowing in order to understand what they want to do with their projects. When I get a sense of what they want, I can make suggestions about which yellow brick roads can get them to the Emerald City. In other words, I have to start with not-knowing, get a sense of what they want, and then suggest how they can proceed, again not knowing if they will take me up on my suggestions. I am most unhelpful when I think I already know what they want. Role-based not-knowing has its own pleasures, but it is not the same as the transformative experiences of nirvana and zen that I have described.

A final state of not-knowing that is quite common in my life is the not-knowing I experience when I conduct research interviews. My research topic is violence and how persons cope with adversities. I also seek to identify and understand the belief systems that guide their thinking, emotions expressions, and actions. I know a lot in general about violence, human development, research methods, and myself. I know nothing about the person I am interviewing. Being in a state of not-knowing means I am listening and can hear them. The only way I know how to do this is to put myself in a state of not-knowing.

Knowledge, then, is a form of knowing. It is information that people have that can be put into words. People construct personal knowledge systems when they reflect back on their own experience. We construct more formal knowledge systems when we absorb what others teach us.

Wisdom, on the other hand, requires not knowing and being emotionally and psychologically open and available to others, who then feel safe enough to express their most sensitive experiences. We are wise when we respond with knowledge connected to experience and when we offer what we know as tentative, subject to revision.

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What I have written so far can be extended to mean that wise people can put up with anything, including disrespectful, abusive, and violent behaviors. Being in a state of not-knowing does mean that my defenses are down, but it does not mean that my senses are dead. Threats to my emotional and physical integrity prick me into another state of mind: high alertness and instant appraisal of the threat. I can stand up for myself and for what I believe is common decency. I can appease by being silent or not resisting. I can retreat. In no way does a wise person let others get away with behaving badly.

There are many strategies for responding to bad behaviors while maintaining not-knowing and emotional availability. My preferred approach is to understand those who are behaving badly. That is why I have spent more than 25 years interviewing persons who have committed violent acts. I have been in a state of not-knowing for decades in regard to violence. At times I feel stupid and embarrassed by my stupidity. I joke about being a slow learner. Yet, I am a slow learner. I continue to work ploddingly on a comprehensive theory of interpersonal violence — writing bits of it over many years: descriptions, explanations, and analyses, I continue to experience not-knowing. I believe that not knowing will be key to any theory that I finally construct.

One of the most surprising discoveries of this research is how little I knew about myself. In field notes about an interview with a man who had murdered and then raped a college student at a university where he also was a student, I wrote:

As he talked, an image of a bullet hole between his eyes came unbidden into my mind. I thought I had shot him, though I had not moved as he told his story. I was sick at heart. Later, I was enraged over what he had done. Anna [not her real name] was nothing to him, an object maybe, but not a human being, not a young woman at the brink of her adult life, with a future to look forward to.

In an article, I reflected upon the unmediated experience:

I remember feeling surprised at the image and then detached. I may have experienced a smudge of satisfaction that he was dead, that he deserved it, and that a bullet between his eyes had stopped his earnest narration of horror. These are themes that I have seen repeatedly in the narratives of the perpetrators I have interviewed.

Much of this writing is an account of unmediated experience. As I reflected upon the experiences, I believe I learned something important, something I call wisdom. I learned about the violence in my own heart. Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago wrote “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a part of his own heart?” I did not know about the violence in myself and how satisfying violence can be. I saw that I too have ideologies that justify violence. I did not know this until I put myself in a position of not-knowing. I certainly was not looking for this kind of self-knowledge, but there it was.

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Wisdom arises from reflecting on unmediated experience. Accepting what we learn from unmediated experience may be a yellow brick road that might get us to wisdom, however temporarily. Stupidity envelops us when we think we know something and we do not. Arrogance characterizes certainty that we know something when we do not. Wisdom arises when we are open to experience and emotionally available to others.

Not knowing can be difficult for young people especially. There is something about being young that seems to require certainty. A friend who recently celebrated her 62nd birthday said, “It used to be hard for me to admit that I am wrong. Now I can. I’m not perfect. I’m a flawed human being.” Wisdom is not only the province of elders, but it can take many years to know we don’t know and celebrate it.

Autumn’s Way: Releasing and Simplifying by John G. Sullivan

And I rose
in the rainy autumn
and walked abroad in a shower of all my days.1

A shower of leaves falling on a rainy autumn day. A glory and a grieving. An exaltation of color, then a rain of leaves. See them showering down, as a quiet rain. See them falling as spray lifting off a waterfall and descending, releasing and returning to earth — to the earth that is their home and ours.

In Autumn we sense a turning of the year. The rising currents of Spring and Summer have reached their peak. The falling energy of Autumn and Winter appears. Return to an earlier question: How shall we approach this side of the cycle? Shall we see it as decline and diminution or as something else? I suggest that we approach this arc of descent under a number of descriptions:

1. simplification and return to nature
2. letting go and letting be — becoming aware of thoughts and feelings
3. forgiving and being forgiven
4. letting go and letting be — returning to the Source

We shall explore each in turn. But first a reminder. I have been taking the four stages of life from ancient India and overlaying them on the four seasons. In this picture, the stage of Forest Dweller appears in the midst of the downward and inward energy of Autumn.

We might summarize in this way: The arc of ascent from Student to Householder is about accomplishment, about doing and striving and achieving one’s place in the world. The lure of fame and fortune urge us on. The arc of descent is about something else, a different energy, a different resting. We might think of it in this way:

• In the first half of life, we strive; in the second half we release from striving.
• In the first half of life, we seek to be somebody; in the second half we allow ourselves to be nobody (and perhaps — since we are less attached to one way of being and may understand others better — we may become, in a sense, everyman/everywoman as well).
• In the first half of life, we look to power, prestige, and possessions to define us; in the second half we release from identifying with power and prestige and possessions. We allow ourselves to stand in the mystery of who we are as a unique reflection of all that is, already having all we seek, already being more than we can imagine.

The Autumn dynamic is similar to how Michelangelo spoke about sculpture. He said that making a sculpture was easy. All one had to do was find a block of marble in which the figure already existed and cut away what did not belong. In our case, even the metaphor of “cutting away” is too active. Perhaps better to say that we allow to fall away whatever was never who we really were nor are.2

//

1. The Call to Simplify and Return to Nature

Imagine the arc of descent beginning when a man or woman retires. In ancient India when one’s work life is finished and the children leave home, a person was invited to move from Householder to Forest Dweller. The first invitation to the Forest Dweller is to reconnect with the natural world. This has always proved renewing. Think of contact with forest, with wilderness and wildness, with the great ocean, with the sky-seeking mountains, with the vast stillness of the desert. To leave the bustle of city life and retreat to the more primal setting of nature itself.

A first practice in simplifying is to open our senses and reawaken our delight in simple things. Become reacquainted with the four elements dear to our ancestors: the earth, the water, the fire, the air. Examine rocks and minerals. Touch the good earth with its plants and trees. Realize that we, human ones, are companioned by the creatures of sea and earth and sky. All our kin. Surely this sense of situating ourselves in the great web of life, in the great family of all creatures, has never been more timely.

Poet Wendell Berry speaks of the healing powers of the natural world in his poem “The Peace of Wild Things”:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.3

In the West, the gentle St. Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of the Sun, spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Water, Brother Fire and Mother Earth, and even Sister Death. His counterpart in the East, the beloved Japanese Zen monk, Ryōkan Taigu, loved playing with the children and delighted with all forms of life. His death poem was this: “showing their backs, then their fronts, falling maple leaves.”4

We do not have to retreat to forest or mountains or ocean to return to nature. We can awaken to the beauty of simple things around us and within us. Indeed, the call for elders who are earth elders has never been more pressing. Two monastics in our time sound similar notes. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of “interbeing,” and writes:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; without trees, we cannot make paper. . . . So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be.5

Thomas Berry, also a monastic, speaks of the need in our time to shift from seeing nature asa collection of objects to seeing nature as a communion of subjects.6 Thus, the Forest Dweller both returns to simple elemental things and sees these beings as fellow creatures, as part of one’s own Great Family, able to be encountered as having an interior as well as exterior life.

First, a simplification. A return to the present and the presence of mystery at each moment. As the poet e. e. cummings says, “Now the eyes of my eyes are open, now the ears of my ears awake.” Opening the senses in the present moment — this is one invitation to become Forest Dweller.

Second, a release that allows expansion. As we become less attached to roles and duties, ideologies and identities, the canvas of who we are can expand to include all our brothers and sisters and all our kin. This is a first paradox of releasing. The more I let go of specific definitions, the more freely and deeply I can participate with all beings. As we shed roles and identities to enter the zero point, we find we are already in a great communion or community. The Roman playwright Terence said: “I am a human being and nothing that is human is alien to me.” This is a beautiful embrace of the entire human family. The Forest Dweller can say more: “I am a unique participant in the web of all life and nothing in this circle is alien to me.” Willing to become nobody, I find I have become, in a certain sense, everybody.

//

2. Letting Go and Letting Be:
Becoming Aware of Thoughts and Feelings

Two Zen stories from among my favorites emphasize letting go.

A Western professor comes to visit a Japanese Zen master. The Zen master pours him tea. The tea begins to spill over the top of the cup and onto the table. Finally, the professor can stand it no longer. “Can’t you see it’s full?” he cries.

The Zen master pauses — and with the hint of a twinkle in his eye says: “That is the way you are. So full of your own opinions, beliefs, certainties. How can I teach you Zen?”

The invitation: Empty the cup. And the image here of emptiness is a central one to the Buddhist tradition. Let us explore it step by step. What needs emptying? The mind and heart. Emptying of what? From the mind: old ideas, beliefs, opinions, certainties, identities. From the heart: clinging, condemning, and identifying (identifying with our attachments and our aversions).

A second Zen story goes like this:

Once upon a time, two Zen monks were returning to their monastery after a long journey. As they came upon a swift running stream, a lovely young woman came toward them from a grove of trees where she had been waiting. “Noble sirs,” she said, “I am traveling to aid my mother who has fallen ill. She lives across the stream and to the south. But the stream is so swollen that I cannot cross for fear I shall be swept away. Will you help me cross, good sirs?”

The elder of the two monks nodded graciously, picked up the young woman and carried her across the raging stream. On the other side, he lowered her gently to the ground. The young woman expressed her thanks and continued on her way toward the south. The two monks wished her well and turned to the north to continue their journey home. Neither spoke for an hour. Then the younger of the two said to his companion: “I have been wondering: Do you think that it is right and proper for us who are monks to touch a young lady, especially one so beautiful as she?” The elder monk smiled and said: “I lifted her up and put her down an hour ago. You are still carrying her.”

In all inner work, we can distinguish between (1) what is happening and (2) how we are relating to what is happening. We relate to something in two main ways:

• through our intellectual meaning-making (how we understand, interpret, “language” life)
• through our emotional value-creating (our liking or disliking, our attachments or aversions, our desires and fears, greed and anger)

Then, alas, we lock in our meaning-making and our value-creating by telling ourselves, “That’s just the way I am (or he/she is, or they are, or the situation is).”

Yet, we can learn to observe our language and observe our emotional responses — how we name things and how we generate desire and fear, allure and anger. We are meaning-makers and value-creators. On each of these poles, we can become fixed and fixated.

Still, there is hope. If we create the conversations in which we live, we can alter those conversations. We can let go of small-minded conversations and replace them with larger-minded conversations. If we generate our emotional responses to people and situations, we can alter those emotional responses. We can let go of small-minded, suffering-causing responses and substitute larger-minded, more beneficial responses.

In the story of the two monks and the beautiful woman, the elder monk represents the larger-minded possibilities in us. The younger monk represents the smaller-minded possibilities in us. Constricted thought forms, larger thought forms. Ego-centered emotional projections or compassionate empathy. If we are awake and alert, we can choose. Opening the mind and opening the heart gives everyone more room to be.

//

3. Forgiving and Being Forgiven — With More Room to Be

Letting go — as the waterfall releases the water, allowing it to fall joyously — airborne now, and still on its way to the sea. In this movement, this current, I see the Forest Dwellers participating in Autumn. Having released old stories and let go of greedy, angry emotions, something ever ancient and ever new appears.

When I release from identifying with my thoughts, with my ideologies and identities, then what lies at the depth in you and in me has a chance to become manifest. I see the dancer and the dance. I see the inner light, and bliss enters quietly.

We return to what is. And that is perhaps the most challenging of statements. Who are we and what is going on within and around and among us? I think of each person and situation as having a surface and mid-point and a depth. “What is” must be a large enough context to acknowledge the surface difficulties and the mid-level observations and the mysterious depth that has many names and no name.

Let us apply the lessons of Autumn to our relations with our parents. All parents gift and wound their children — our parents gifted and wounded us, and we gifted and wounded our own children. Furthermore, our dialogue with our parents — living or dead, in spoken words or in our heads — is never finished. Throughout our lives, we are comparing and sorting out. As we get older, as we have children, we may return to our parents with a bit more compassion. How young they were when they had us. How much they dreamed of how it would be. Gifts and wounds. As we get older, as we have our own children, we begin to recognize that:

• some of what we once called” wounds” turned out to have been “gifts in disguise.”
• some of what we once called “gifts” turned out to be “wounds in disguise.”

So I propose that we seek to forgive our parents. As we forgive our parents, we will find that we are forgiving ourselves at the same time.

• Forgiving our parents for not being all they wished to be — for being often unskillful or confused.
• Forgiving our parents for not being all we wished them to be.
• Forgiving ourselves for asking the impossible of our parents and perhaps also of ourselves.

By forgiving parents I mean to recognize that they, like us, are limited human beings, often unskillful, not always able to bring about what they wished to do or be. When we let go of the impossible dream of perfection, when we drop our shifting — often conflicting — measuring rods, we may notice that in their very particularity, in their very struggle, our parents have a unique glory — one always there yet unnoticed by us except in moments. Perhaps we see anew the sacrifices they made and the persistence they showed.

To forgive in this context is to bow to parents exactly as they are at the surface and at the depth. It is to recognize in them all their surface disturbances, fears and uncertainties, hopes and dreams, weaknesses and avoidances. And it is to recognize their deep nature, their full unique beauty. It has been said that, for each of us, there is —in the other world —a stone with our true name on it. And we do not even know that name. To see our parents as God sees them is to see both their surface disturbances and their unique, unrepeatable beauty and inestimable worth. To see them as sacred and also imperfect.

No matter how often we see or remember our parents, we can always return anew. We can drop the old stories. We can come to them with a larger heart and more compassionate eyes. How do we enlarge our hearts or, to change the metaphor, how do we polish the mirror of the heart so that we may see more of what is there? One master said: “To polish the heart, smile and speak in kindly ways.”7 We can commit ourselves to doing that, right here and right now with regard to our parents — to smile and to speak in kindly ways. If our parents are with us still, we can do that in their presence. If they are no longer with us, we can do that in their absence.

//

4. Letting Go and Letting Be: Returning to the Source

Perhaps a “releasing moment” is joined with every “acting moment.” First, we practice acknowledging situations and people exactly as they are in surface and depth. The practice of releasing — of letting go —moves us to equanimity, to a state where we are able to be more attentive to our brothers and sisters and less blinded by our personal karmic formations. The Buddhist tradition speaks of the Four Immeasurable Abodes or Minds: love (or loving-kindness), compassion, joy (or sympathetic joy), and equanimity.8 All are interdependent. When we practice one deeply, the rest come along with it. Love deepens when it is sensitive to suffering and joy and finds a serenity in facing whatever comes. Compassion is enriched by love and joy and equanimity. And so for each. Yet in Autumn, I wish to speak especially of equanimity — a loving, compassionate, joyful equanimity.

Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century mystic, instructs us to think of equanimity as a hinge. The door swings back and forth but the hinge9 remains steady and constant and unmoved. Equanimity is both the practice and the fruit of letting go. It is to face whatever comes as containing a way through. Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” points the way:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.10

If we meet each with love, with compassion, with joy, then surely equanimity will arise. In equanimity, we shall touch all four abodes in the face of whatever arrives.

Yet there is a further movement — link it with letting be. This is a state wherein we rest at the source of all. Union, communion, unity, community, all are present. Or in a different narrative, God and humankind and all beings are experienced as a oneness and we are that.11 As the old Bedouin said to Lawrence of Arabia: “The love is from God and of God and towards God.”12 And we may enter the stream — where? There! Anywhere! At each moment and in each place. We can enter the stream and allow the deeper waters to bath us through and through.

In a first draft of releasement, we do the releasing and we create that which we release. In a deeper sense, we neither create the obstacles nor do we do the releasing. No “I.” No “Thou.” Nothing to release! Autumn is moving to the depth of Winter waters. And, in the waters, we catch a glimpse of the Sage-in-us.

The Zen Master Seng Ts’an offers a hint as he reminds us, “When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.”13

//

Notes

1 See Dylan Thomas, “Poem in October” in The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: 1934–1952 (New York: New Directions Books, 1957), p. 113

2 The challenge to those reared in a culture of doing is to stop seeing the tasks of Autumn as more striving — striving to let go! This confuses repression with releasement. The beliefs and roles that bind us are illusory to begin with. They never were the truth of things. Letting them go is waking up to that!

3 See Wendell Berry, Collected Poems: 1957–1982 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), p. 69.

4 For more on Ryokan, see John Stevens, trans., Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).

5 Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), p. 95.

6 Thomas Berry (1914–2009) was a Roman Catholic priest of the Passionist order who recontextualized religion, education, commerce, and government in a cosmological or cosmic context. See his The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), p. 16 and elsewhere, for the distinction between viewing the natural world as a collection of objects vs. viewing the natural world as a communion of subjects. See also his The Dream of the Universe (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988) and, with Brian Swimme, The Universe Story (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

7 I believe that this quote is from the Sufi teacher, Sheikh Muzaffer. “Sheikh Muzaffer used to say that every smile and every kind word softens the heart but every hurtful word or action hardens it.” See Robert Frager, Heart, Self & Soul (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1999), p. 62.

8 These Four Immeasurable Abodes (or Minds) — also known as the Brahma Viharas — are love or loving-kindness (maître), compassion (karuna), joy or sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upeksha). I am following the treatment of Thich Nhat Hanh here. See Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (New York: Broadway Books, 1992), pp. 169–175, as well as Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1998), pp. 1–9. See also Jack Kornfield, A Path with a Heart (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), pp. 190–191, where he notes that the near enemy of love is attachment; the near enemy of compassion is pity; the near enemy of sympathetic joy is comparison; and the near enemy of equanimity is indifference.

9 See the thirteenth-fourteenth-century German mystic, Meister Eckhart’s short treatise On Detachment (Middle High German abegescheidenheit — releasement or letting go) in Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn, editors and translators, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (Mawah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), pp. 285–294. The “hinge” metaphor is on page 291. On Eckhart, see also Reiner Schürmann, Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2001).

10 See Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson, The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 109.

11 As the Upanishads teach: Tat tvam asi [the One, the Ultimate] — thou art that.

12 See T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin and Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 364. The quote is a favorite of the Notre Dame theologian and spiritual writer John S. Dunne.

13 Quoted in Nancy Wilson Ross, The World of Zen (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1960), p. 271. See also Frederick Franck, Echoes from the Bottomless Well (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1985), p. 91.

Books of Interest: In Search of Wisdom, review by Barbara Kammerlohr

A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still On This Earth)

How to Live is the result of Henry Alford’s quest to better understand wisdom and the part aging plays in its acquisition. In his mid-forties, this award-winning humorist explores the nature of wisdom research, reflection, and interviews. The journey took him to libraries, Web sites, small cafes, restaurants, hotels, beaches, and, most fruitfully, into the minds of the septuagenarians he interviewed

How to Live is the first attempt at a comprehensive look at wisdom that I have seen. Though such publications probably exist in academic circles, I have seen none that appeal to a general readership.

Alford admits the task he set himself to is a daunting one: “The term wisdom has had roughly eight million definitions over the course of history. Every culture…has had its ideal of wisdom and has recorded it either orally or in writing.” Worse, no one has published a comprehensive history of wisdom literature. There is no Oxford Companion to Wisdom, nor even a Wisdom Literature for Dummies.

The book goes back and forth between the knowledge the author gleaned from his research in libraries, his insights into wisdom, and his character studies as he struggles to bring clarity to this little-understood human trait.

A string of fascinating character studies scattered throughout the book keeps it lively. The story of Alford’s own mother and her struggle to bring an end to a marriage of many years is especially moving. Ram Dass, spiritual guru for many baby boomers; is among those interviewed. Other names most will recognize include Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, and Edward Albee. There is also no shortage of “odd balls”: a pastor who thinks napping is a form of meditation; a retired aerospace engineer who eats food out of the garbage and urinates on the sidewalk.

A section on aphorisms contains the story of Ashleigh Brilliant, the world’s only “full-time professional published epigrammatist” whose goal in life is to have epigrams — those pithy sayings which “express an idea in a clever and amusing way” — recognized as a genre of literature.

Alford includes several aphorisms as examples of one type of wisdom, among them: “Trust in God, but tie your camel.” Other examples came from Brilliant’s Web site:

“I have abandoned my search for the truth and am now looking for a good fantasy.”

“When I find true wisdom, I will let you know (if letting you know still seems important)” (both from page 246).

I made a foray into Brilliant’s Web site myself and found these gems:

“Doing it wrong fast is at least better than doing it wrong slowly.”

“My sources are unreliable but their information is fascinating.”

//

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit, though I persevered to the last page with How to Live, I found it awkward reading in many places. The character studies — each about a unique individual determined to manifest that uniqueness — are well done and hold the interest of any reader. Some readers, however, myself included, would question whether, however fascinating Alford’s old people are, they can be called wise. Where is the wisdom in urinating on the sidewalk in broad daylight or sticking it out through decades with a marriage to a substance abuser?

I frequently tell myself (and anyone else who will listen) that I want to be a wise old woman — not a silly old woman. ReadingHow to Live, I had to confront the possibility that I probably don’t understand wisdom, much less how to become wise. The effect was much like an experience from the period of my life when I was studying Buddhism. I found myself in a room with several other seekers and a visiting Roshi from Japan. We were trying to understand koans and their purpose. The teacher gave us the example below and then seemed determined we should answer its the question:

“When you meet the Buddha on the road, greet him not with signs or sounds. How shall you greet him?”

It took me only a few seconds to recognize that this was not a question with a logical answer. It was therefore silly, and I hate silliness. My mind began looking for an exit strategy that would get me out of that room without calling attention to my hasty departure. At that precise moment the teacher demanded to know my thoughts on the koan. Irritated and embarrassed at being singled out, I shot back:

“This is a waste of time for me. Ask someone else. Frankly, I would not recognize the Buddha if he walked in the room right now!”

The teacher beamed as if he had found a star pupil. “Exactly! The first step in seeking Buddha nature is to realize what one does not know.”

So it is with wisdom and How to Live. The book takes the reader face to face with the realization that there is no simple definition of wisdom even if recognition of wisdom is a prerequisite to becoming wise. The process of realizing this can be irritating, and that irritation can easily be directed at the author who had the courage to go in search of something he did not know.

Poems: Collected by John Clarke

Fall Guise by John Clarke

Autumn, unlike wisdom, they say,
comes if you wait or if you don’t.
“Death? ….. That would be beauty’s mother …..,”
the insurance executive claimed.

Fall! — Oh felix culpa!
Happy, happy fault!
Fall-it! Hair’s width away from service ace.
Edenic coin rendered freely —
call it in the air as it turns.

Autumn’s dying slant of light
lends such color to the old
brick walls, the young
cheeks — those sunburnt
hands we used to hold.

As days dwindle down …..
oh precious, precious
few, oh few …..

Leaving us strewn
upon sidewalks, gutters
of spent desire, hope
mulches itself still.

Our aging — subtler than clockwork —
sputters, sprouts, and blossoms
from mere greeny splendor into
luminous luscious orange yell-
ow purpled brown reds! —
all seamed and stroked by
auras green beyond green.

Trees chuckle to see us —
we fallen mirrors who can’t see
our own autumnal radiance now.

Though perhaps that’s a mercy
to spare us the shock
when such beauty becomes
winter’s iced seeds awaiting
some all-changing spring
into love’s dark never-to-be-seen.
Again. Oh again.

//

On Prayer by Czeslaw Milosz
(Trans. by C. Milosz and Robert Hass)

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word “is”
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say “we”; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

//

Fall Song by Mary Oliver

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay — how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

//

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

//

Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

//

Assurance by William Stafford

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.