Profile

Stan White, is a retired Brantford Ontario photographer, who has written articles for photography journals all his life and has a special interest in the history of photography. In his 50′s, he began writing poetry, and short stories, and has published this work regularly in literary magazines and anthologies over the last 30 years. He has four books of poetry: Quaere, Three Dimensional Press 2003; About Time, Moments from a Dead World, Craigleigh Press 2003; Four Solitudes, Serengeti Press, 2008; Portals, Craigleigh Press, 2009. He is currently preparing Quern, an anthology of eight Southern Ontario Poets, to be published by Serengeti Press.

When sending me his biography and a selection of poems for this profile, White added this message for you readers:

You know, being a poet is an extraordinary way of exercising the mind.
The experts tell us to find ways of giving our minds new and different interests
in order to slow down the lethargy that is always a potential of the aged.

Writing poetry, or even reading poetry, is a packaged way of doing this.

Writing a poem is essentially problem solving since every poem constantly demands finding solutions to new and different complexities.

Stan White is especially skillful in the use of humour. The following aging poems exemplify his humourous approach to serious issues. ‘Dear God is one of my favourite poems in Celebrating Poets over 70.

Dear God

WhiteStan-Sonnet to Age

WhiteStan-Do I Dare to Eat a Peach

WhiteStan-Sex Dotage Style

White-Worry Wort

White-Mind the Exit

Aging and Humour in the News

Desmond O’Neill: Humour at one hundred

Laugh Your Way to Better Living

Humor & Aging – Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor

Community Engagement Tip for Older Writers

Writing essays for newsletters and blogs can serve as an effective way to encourage people to read for their lives.  Personal stories about how reading about a fictional character’s experiences helped one understand their own memories, feelings, and quandaries can lead others to read fiction for  information, points of view, words for their own emotions, and possible lessons.  One of the features of reflecting on experience with perspective is humour – the ability to laugh at (or about or over) our own difficult circumstances takes a person outside of the victim stance to which we so often clutch.

Writing Exercise – Memoir plus Creativity

Consider your life between the approximate ages of 7 to 17. Describe a person who influenced you during this period – physical characteristics, setting(s) where you were together, specific anecdotes, how this person communicated and how you communicated back, and lessons learned.

After reading this over, you might create a story about an encounter you might have with this person at your current age.  In keeping with the theme of humour, you can imagine some unusual features to this encounter which elicit smiles or laughter.

Quotations

Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator,
but among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
~ W. H. Auden

I’m an old man and have known a great many troubles,
but most of them never happened.
~ Mark Twain

People who read imagine the lives of others.
Literature makes other people more real to us.
It invites us to notice differences
but, even more so, points toward commonality.
~ Mark Doty

Click here for Events and Calls for Submission

With this shadow photo, I bid you adieu,

Ellen

 PROFILE

Ruth Harriet Jacobs, octogenarian, is a gerontologist, sociologist, playwright, educator, poet. Senior scholar at Wellesley College’s Center for Women, she has authored nine books including Be an Outrageous Older Woman and ABC’s for Seniors: Successful Aging Wisdom from an Outrageous Gerontologist. Jacobs is a founding member of the Red Hat Society.

I have often used Jacobs’ poem Don’t Call Me a Young Woman in my gerontology lectures for undergraduates who can learn from her that age is a badge of honour as in this excerpt:

Now I am somebody magnificent, new,
a seer, wise woman, old proud crone,
an example and mentor to the young
who need to learn old women wisdom.

Jacobs and Ryan on Libraries

My Love Affair with Libraries, by Ruth Harriet Jacobs

I Long to Linger on Library Ladders, by Ellen Ryan

Reading Haiku, by Ellen Ryan

Re-Reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – 50 years Later

I first encountered this magic book at the age of 16.  I read this mountain of a book within a marathon month during which our English teacher had challenged us to read as many books as we could.  Years later I can still feel the glow of reading 30 library books  in 30 days, and a heightened pride that this total included The Magic Mountain – more than 700 densely printed pages with long excerpts in French. My vague recollection over the years focused on the extravagance of an elegant Swiss Alps sanitorium inhabited by the wealthy from across Europe conversing in German, French, Russian, Italian and occasionally English.

Fifty years later, I lingered through much of last month listening to an audio presentation of this classic novel.  With more experience of history, life, and language, I enjoyed the philosophical conversations contrasting the dominant points of view in pre-World War I Europe and Mann’s poetic descriptions of the alpine setting. Now I am more appreciative of the initiation story as a passage through serious illness into maturity and the careful depiction of the insidious process of medical institutionalization.

Reader Commentary on Old Age Fiction – from Diane P

Some classic older protagonists come to mind: Shakespeare’s King Lear, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Hemingway’s Old Man (and the Sea).

The role of older adults in fiction seems to fall into categories:

those looking back, trying to make sense of a lifetime – Dunny in Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, the butler in Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler;

happy endings, the reward of life – Good-bye Mr. Chips by James Hilton, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill;

the confused older person – Still Alice by Lisa Genova, The House I Loved by Tatian de Rosnay, As We Are Now by May Sarton, The Scream by Rohinton Minstry;

the books which relate an entire lifetime, ending with the main character as elderly – A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsyth Hailey, Stone Diaries  by Carol Shields, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck;

disappointment and regret in old age - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCuller, Thirty Acres by Ringuet (pseudonym of Philippe Panneton);

the really fine admirable old person – Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

Civic Engagement Tip for Older Writers

Book lovers can offer rides to the library. and join the local library visiting program to take books to people who are housebound.  They can also offer to speak at the local library  or bookstore on writing, or a favourite author or book. Writing book reviews for newsletters or blogs can lead a wider audience to the enjoyment of reading.

Writing Exercises

1. Reminisce about your first library experiences, contrast these with current library experiences.

2. Favourite Book

Make these lists for a favourite book: setting (10 descriptive words), character (10 qualities of main characters), plot (10 verbs, including movement of time/place), and your response (10 feelings or metaphors).

Then write a book review using many of these words.

Quotations

Every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.
The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument
which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without his book,
he would, perhaps, never have perceived for himself.
~ Marcel Proust

The wise man reads both books and life itself.
~ Lin Yutang

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
~ E. P. Whipple

To live all the days of our lives means to keep our minds alive,
to be open to new ideas, to entertain challenging doubts,
nurture a lively curiosity and strive constantly to keep learning.
~ Rabbi Bernard Baskin

Click here for Events and Calls for Submission

With this shadow photo, I bid you adieu,

Ellen

Desmond Tutu, age 81, is Anglican Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.  He is known the world over as a remarkable role model for activism seeking peace and justice through nonviolence, reconciliation, and interfaith dialogue.  In his prolific writings, he offers a vision of a world transformed by hope and compassion. His recent books include:

No Future Without Forgiveness (2000)

God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time (2004)

Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference (2010) (with D. M. Tutu)

Tutu Authorized (2011) (by A. Sparks and M. Tutu).

Desmond and the Very Mean Word (2013)  (a children’s book with D. C. Abrams)

The power of his writings can be felt in these quotations:

There can be no future without forgiveness.

What faith you belong to is very largely an accident of birth and geography . . . It is not the faith that comes first, it is the fact of being human together. The revolutionary truth being that we are all equally loved by God.

Africans believe in something that is difficult to render in English. We call it ubuntu, botho. It means the essence of being human. You know when it is there and when it is absent. It speaks about humaneness, gentleness, hospitality, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable. It embraces compassion and toughness. It recognizes that my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

Civic Engagement Tips for Older Writers

Older writers might team up with friends to teach writing classes (memoir, writing exercises, journaling, travel writing, essays) in a Senior Centre or a Community Centre or they might choose to lead a new writing group for elders, for youth, or all generations.

Writing Exercise

Select a poem you admire and enjoy rereading. Print it out double-spaced. Write your lines in between. You can either respond to each line at a time or link your responses across lines stanza by stanza.  Afterwards, type out your responses only. You might just have the kernel of your own poem.

Second Journey Visioning Councils

“Exploring Community and Interdependence in Later Life”

This intensive three-day experience will be an inspiring exploration of the role of community in the second half of life. Discussion will move from our personal needs for community to how we support each other as we strive to live more expansive lives and create supportive, caring models of community responsive to the needs of later life.

April 11-14, Chapel Hill NC

Oct. 31-Nov 3, San Francisco area (Burlingame, CA)

Book Review

AGING IN COMMUNITY

Janice M. Blanchard, Editor;
Bolton Anthony, General Editor     Chapel Hill NC: Second Journey Publications, 2013

As a member of the Second Journey board, I am especially proud of this commissioned book on Aging in Community. Many of the articles are accessible on the Internet in the special issue of Itineraries (Fall, 2012), the e-newsmagazine of secondjourney.org.

Aging with spirit can be an exciting journey if we broaden our vision to seek innovative ways to foster aging in community.  It is time for us to embrace our interdependence – to move past the North American focus on independence.

The dreams of older adults for a good old age call out for change beyond the two modern established paths: old age in an institution or aging in place (often isolated, without support). Austerity budgets everywhere and humankind’s threatened relationship with the earth add to the emerging cry for new alternatives. Charting a third way, this Aging in Community collection of 40 brief essays, poems and paintings offers an excellent resource to promote reflection, group conversation, and action.

TO READ MORE>> Blanchard13-AginginCommunityReviewbyRyan

Click here for Events and Calls for Submission

With this shadow photo from my recent visit to a nature park in South Carolina, I bid you adieu,

Ellen

Older people with illness or impairments such as hearing loss or memory changes often report communication predicaments where they are ignored or patronized- often by service workers but sometimes by family members as well.  The most common concern is when a younger companion is addressed rather than the older person himself, sometimes leading to an extended conversation about him in his presence.  Like being ignored, the use of a baby talk tone of voice (high pitch, exaggerated intonation) conveys disrespect and implies incompetence.

With colleagues, I have researched these communication predicaments and examined selective assertive approaches to overcoming them. Selective assertiveness involves choosing when to take a stand, using politeness markers appropriate for the importance of the request or complaint and the level of authority (e.g., hospital vs community), and expressing oneself calmly, confidently, and directly.  For more information, see  Ryan (2010) Overcoming Communication Predicaments; Ryan and Bannister (2009) Ability Speaks: Talking with a Person with Disability.

Poems on Communication Predicaments from Celebrating Poets over 70:

Old Women by Frieda Feldman

They Say I Say by Joyce Harries

Gracious Lady by Barbara Rexford White

I Don’t Do Old by Sterling Haynes

Second Journey Visioning Councils

“Exploring Community and Interdependence in Later Life”

This intensive three-day experience will be an inspiring exploration of the role of community in the second half of life. Discussion will move from our personal needs for community to how we support each other as we strive to live more expansive lives and create supportive, caring models of community responsive to the needs of later life.

 April 11-14, Chapel Hill NC

Oct. 31-Nov 3, San Francisco area (Burlingame, CA)

WRITING in the NEWS

Loss Of Large Print Book Format – Oliver Sacks

Noted author Oliver Sacks, neurologist and anthropologist of the brain, laments the loss of large print book format as he deals with his own impaired vision.

Practice: Revive the Lost Art of Letter Writing

This blog outlines how to deepen the spirituality of writing personal letters, a waning art in which we writers of a certain age can wisely engage.

Finding Poetry in Cancer

Feelings experienced while living with cancer can flow into poetry, which can be healing.

Civic Engagement for Writers

Friendly visitors volunteer to speak with individuals in need of care – to engage them in a meaningful way and often provide respite to caregivers.  As writers, we can attune ourselves to the particular communication needs of different individuals – variations due to background, personality, and education as well as current illness and living situation. We can attend to non-linguistic cues such as tone of voice, eye contact, posture, and facial expressions for feedback about how well we are handling the conversation.  We can experiment with pauses and silence.

Writing Exercise

Write a dialogue between you and someone in your life with illness or impairment. Write about your appreciation for your relationship and the uncertainty you experience about how to talk with them – whether you come across as uncaring or intrusive, whether you can speak frankly or should protect them, how sometimes you find yourself speaking for them and about them in their presence,  why you don’t visit as often as you’d like or why you think you need to distance yourself, etc.   This could be a dialogue with a loved one no longer living.

Book Review

The Etiquette of Illness: What to Say When You Can’t Find the Words

Susan P. Halpern;   New York NY: Bloomsbury, 2004.

‘Wounded healer’ Susan Halpern offers wisdom concerning what to say in a wide range of illness situations.  She speaks from her experience as a social worker and psychotherapist counselling people with serious illness and as a person with repeated bouts of cancer.

This informative guide outlines concrete ways for both conversational partners to improve communication –the friend, family member, or even professional and the ill person herself. More importantly, the many anecdotes from both perspectives create an open attitude toward reaching out to those who are ill – trying to understand their feelings and doing kind deeds – rather than hiding in our uncertainty.  TO READ MORE>> RyanReview-Halpern-Etiquette of illness

Click here for Events and Calls for Submission

With this photo… I bid you adieu,

 Ellen

Writing and rewriting are a constant search
for what one is saying.
~ John Updike

Profile

Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most highly regarded and award-winning writers. Publishing regularly for half a century, she writes novels, poetry, short stories, and literary essays. The author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction, she is best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000.

She is also a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada’s writing community.  As an entrepreneur, she introduced the Long Pen, a device for signing books (and other documents) from a distance over the Internet.

Poems

Some of Margaret Atwood’s poems address aging, such as Five Poems for Grandmothers, Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day, and Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony.

The Signer

This favourite poem addresses the person in black who stands behind her at book or poetry readings to sign for the deaf. This poem is her entry in a book, mostly prose, on Canadian writers talking about reading. Here is an excerpt:

Unable to see her, I speak
in a kind of blindness, not knowing
what dance is being made of me.

You Begin

Variation on the Word Sleep

 Atwood Writing Resources

 Atwood on the writing life

Resources for Writers

Reflections on Atwood’s Moral Disorder (2006) – Flora Spencer

Margaret Atwood’s collection of short stories, Moral Disorder (2006), is a loosely connected series of episodes in a woman’s life. They form an elliptical narrative beginning in her old age,  with a depiction of the uncertainties and disorder inherent  in aging,  followed by glimpses back through her life, touching down in childhood, adolescence, an unconventional marriage, a Quixotic rural domestic life and ending with her parents physical and mental decline.   The narrator, of course, cannot tell what it is like to experience the end of life, she can only give an observer’s understanding of her parents at the end of their lives.  She leaves the readers with the understanding  that she must add her own embellishments to the “facts” to make up an ending that she can accept, because she realizes that she simply cannot know.   She surrenders to poetic romance — to the art of narrative.

In practising writing, many of us search for understanding of our own condition and find ourselves testing the accuracy and validity of our memories and perceptions — sometimes stumbling on the realization that form and art are part of constructing even a personal narrative and that a little fiction puts breath into the tale.

Aging in Literature — Reminder

I continue throughout this new year of 2013 to seek reader recommendations about Aging in Literature – novels, short stories, memoir, poems.

Civic Engagement for Writers – Organize Book Clubs

Although many people organize their own book clubs, some individuals can benefit from assistance with setting up the group and/or with facilitation.  Older adults who enjoy reading and writing can find great satisfaction in facilitating a book club for a group within a local area (e.g., through the library. a retirees’ group, or even a church) or for vulnerable individuals (e.g., longterm care residents, individuals with low literacy or English as a second language, high risk teens). Finally, as noted in the book review below, a book club can be organized for just two people who need something meaningful to discuss as they meet on a regular basis.

Writing Exercise

Group exercises are valuable to pull the individuals of a writing group together.  Here is an idea you might try.  Each person begins with a piece of paper to pass along by writing down a question for which they would like answers. The question can be broad and open (e.g., How can we choose joy each day?) or concrete (e.g., How will I manage to converse with my difficult cousin during this weekend’s visit?).  Then the paper is folded to hide the question and passed along to the person on the right. Participants each then write a descriptive sentence (using the senses) which could be the answer to a question. They fold over the paper and pass it along to the right again.  Again participants write an answer to an unknown question.  Finally, the papers are returned to the author of the question.

Members of the group then take turns reading their 4-line ‘poem’: their question followed by the first answer, their question repeated, followed by the second answer.

NEWS – Authors Writing into Old Age

Roth retires but Wolfe, Wouk among authors past 80

Book Review

The End of Your Life Book Club

Will Schwalbe    Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2012

Imagine that you have a devastating cancer diagnosis in late life and that your adult son accompanies you to chemotherapy sessions – where you discuss the book selected for each such meeting of your two-person book club.   What mixed emotions would arise? – fear, sorrow, and determination, yes; but also love, gratitude, pride, intellectual excitement, and anticipation.

Active as a publisher and journalist, Will Schwalbe narrates his story of creating a book club with his mother to guide their discussions during treatment sessions and other visits after her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.  During the last two years of her life, mother and son shared their lifelong love of books while looking back on her life, planning meaningful events, and dealing with medical and end-of-life issues.        READ MORE >> Ryan-SchwalbeBookReview

Writing, Aging and Spirit EVENTS 

Nearby and National/International

With this shadow photo, I bid you adieu

Ellen

          ~ Amy Tan

PROFILE

Ione Grover of St. Mary’s, Ontario is a former Social Worker and United Church minister.  She recently celebrated her 80^th birthday by publishing her first book of poetry, Blessence, as a fundraiser for the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.  She dances with words while reflecting on the mystery of nature, friendship, love, old age, death and life itself.

The Word Choreographer

I yearn to be
a choreographer of words
that whirl and twirl like dervishes
across the page,
with dazzling elegance and power,
forming duets and trios, quartets and more.      >> COMPLETE POEM from Celebrating Poets over 70

­­Novels on Aging – Reader Recommendations

Please continue to send in your recommendations for novels on aging, as well as other genres such as nonfiction (memoir and biography) and short stories.

The aging novels which have made the biggest impression upon me as I started reading them in young adulthood  include The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence for making me fall in love with my first nonagenarian, The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi for alerting me to women in the sandwich generation in Japan, and Old Friends by Tracy Kidder for highlighting the richness of new and intergenerational friendships for the very frail.

From time to time, I will be sharing reader recommendations.  Here are three selections.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

Wonderful Canadian novel about aging (and dying) with dignity and grace: the 90-year-old protagonist tells the story of her life while relating events in the present, and is able to reflect on her pride, which has been her strength and her weakness, and on the people she loves.  Once you meet Hagar you will never forget her. Written when the author was in her late ’30′s — amazing! [Ellen J]

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Told from the point of view of an elderly Congregationalist minister in a small town in Iowa who knows he will be leaving behind a young second wife and a child. He wants to pass on to the child what he knows of the conflicting lives and values of his forbears and of his own history. It’s very reflective and written with much tenderness. [Eve K]

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

It won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The book consists of 13 short stories, related by Olive, a retired math teacher who deplores the changes in her little corner of Maine. She is at times patient, stern, perceptive or in denial. We learn we need to try to understand people even if we can’t stand them!

Olive comes to an understanding of herself and her life—sometimes painfully, but honestly. The book offers insights into the conflicts, joys and endurance that life demands of us.

It is worth reading to experience through this character the challenges when the world around us changes as we age….. and how we respond to that.  Also, the experience of the many things that seemed to stay the same that we wished would change, and how we were changed when they did.   [Christine W & Donna P ]

Library Love Affair

The poet Ruth Harriet Jacobs writes of a lifelong love affair with libraries, as have I:

My Love Affair with Libraries

I Long to Linger [on library ladders]

Reflections on Aging: A Reading Circle, by Trudy Medcalf

Trudy Medcalf and Wendy Robbins, in the company of ten older adult members of the Ottawa Public Library system, have completed their first reading circle program. Meeting weekly for six weeks, they explored older adulthood – indeed their own elderhood – through the discussion of a range of published writing, including selections from novels, poetry, short stories and non-fiction.

The theme for Week Three, for example, was spirituality and included a discussion of a chapter from Joan Barfoot’s novel, Exit Lines. The novel about a group of friends in a nursing home took the group many places, posing essential questions about compassion, trust and the nature of goodness. At the same time, it raised questions about our expectations around friendships and the challenge of engaging friends in difficult conversations.

Wendy and Trudy have between them a background in library consulting, gerontological research, and group facilitation, as well as a strong interest in reading and in the power of literature to trigger discussions both sweeping and intimate. They are presently planning for their second reading circle, to begin in January.

Book Review by Kathleen Banchoff

Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story

Christina Baldwin         Novato Cal: New World Library, 2007

There is an art to finding, writing and telling great stories. For readers interested in strengthening their own story-telling skills, Christina Balwin’s book STORYCATCHER is engrossing.

Baldwin defines personal storytelling as the practice of the art of connection: listening to a well-told tale, we travel our own memories and gain new insights from someone else’s way with words.

She uses the structures and rhythms of myths, fairy tales and legends to create a “deliberate story” out of life events and reflections on personal experience.

In Baldwin’s world, “story” is the narrative thread of our experience, not what literally happens, but what we make out of what happens, what we choose to remember and what we tell each other. “Story catching” is a powerful form of listening attentively to others in ways that create and hold a space for each of us to tell a hero’s story, or a survivor’s tale, where we are the main protagonist. A most intriguing notion is the spiral of experience, a mnemonic device she uses to explain how reflecting on an event or incident in your life can help you find the “the nugget of meaning, humor, heartbreak, insight” inside it.  >> TO READ MORE: 12-12-BaldwinStoryCatcherReview

RESOURCES

Website

Literature, Arts & Medicine Database

Aging Literature

Cole, T. R., & Winkler, M. G. (Eds). (1994). The Oxford Book of Aging: Reflections on the Journey of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Waxman, B. F. (1997).  To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging. Charlottesville: Univ Press of Virginia.

Weinstein, A. (2011). Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books.  Random House.

Wyatt-Brown, A., & Rossen, J. (Eds). (1993). Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. University Press of Virginia.

Yahnke, R. E., & Eastman, R. M. (1995).  Literature & Gerontology: A Research Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Bibliotherapy

Gold, J. (1990). Read for your Life. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

Nyemaster, W. (2008). Unleash the Poem Within : How Reading and Writing Poetry Can Liberate Your Creative Spirit. Naperville:  Sourcebooks, Inc.

Rae, A. P. (1997). Everybody’s Favourites: Canadians Talk about Books that Changed their Lives. Toronto: Penguin Books.

Schaub, D. (2006). Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors’ Reflections. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

 With this photograph, I bid you adieu,

Ellen

PROFILE

Wendell Berry (b.1934) is a recognized master of many literary genres: poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. As a lifelong farmer, he affirms that humans must learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. Berry further believes that traditional values, such as Sabbath time and strong community ties, are essential for the survival of humankind.

One of the first books of poetry to draw me into writing with spirit was Berry’s A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems, especially the poem Whatever is Foreseen in Joy.  These poems emerged from Berry’s Sunday practice of walking his farm lands with grateful attention.  They take the reader into the quiet where the small glories of the earth and the blessing of all life become evident.

Some Wendell Berry quotations:

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…
live your approval to all you cannot understand…
Ask the questions that have no answers. …
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts….

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet,
and learn to be at home.

CELEBRATING POETS OVER 70 – Sabbath Poems

Joy, Barbara Mercer

Sugaring,  Helen Vanier

The Shepherd & His Goat, Royal Craig

Winter’s Gift, Valerie Nielsen

Thoughts of Afterlife: Immortality, Barbara Feehrer

Thoughts in a Garden, Ursula Forrestal

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT – TIPS FOR WRITERS

Older writers can seek out opportunities to provide career guidance and mentoring for high school and university students.  Working with small writing groups of young people can help them carve out quiet time in their lives for reflecting on who they are and who they wish to become.  With regular writing outside of school assignments with a supportive group, adolescents and emerging adults can sometimes find their voice as well as uncover special talents for prose or poetry.

Writing Exercises

Ray McGinnis outlines many exercises in his 2005 book, Writing the Sacred: A Psalm-Inspired Path to Appreciating and Writing Sacred Poetry. 

For example, to write a psalm of wisdom we might begin with a list of 25 wise actions and 25 unwise actions and then complete sentences such as:”The first thing I notice about my wisdom list is…”, “The wisdom I practice in my life includes…”, and “I lose my way on the path to God when…”. Finally, we might consider opening a draft psalm with one of these lines: “Do not strive…”, “Unless…”, “Happy are you…”, “How good it is…”, or “With all my heart…”.

Similarly, McGinnis demonstrates how to write a psalm of creation, thanksgiving, praise, trust, and lament.

BOOK REVIEW by Marianne Vespry

Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir

Elizabeth J. Andrew     Boston: Skinner House books, 2005

A spiritual memoir “deals with the bedrock of human existence – why we are here, where we are going, and how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the way. . . [it] is a genre in which one’s life is written with particular attention paid to its mysteries. . . Spiritual memoirists write because writing brings them closer to the ineffable essence of life.” – from the Introduction.

If you are thinking of writing such a memoir, this book is for you. If you would like to write such a memoir, but know that it is beyond your skill, this book is for you. If “spiritual” doesn’t mean anything to you; if you got through life this far on a mixture of luck and pluck and cunning and help from friends or teacher or lovers, and you want to write about it so the grandkids will understand, this book is for you, too.   >>MORE

QUOTATIONS

Sabbath requires surrender.
If we only stop when we are finished with all our work,
we will never stop –
because our work is never completely done…
Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days,
because it liberates us from the need to be finished.
~ Wayne Muller

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.
~ Lao-Tzu

With my castle-shadow photo from the medieval city of Toledo, I will say adieu,

Ellen

 PROFILE

Mme. Pauline Vanier  (1898-1991) was the wife of Georges Vanier, Governor General of Canada in the 1960s.   As a widow in her mid-70s, Mme. Vanier made a surprising decision – to move to France to join the first L’Arche community founded by her distinguished son, Jean Vanier.  She spent her last two decades surrounded by 200 men and women with mental impairments and their volunteer personal assistants.  Sharing her hospitality and concern for all, she became beloved grandmother for the entire community.

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED RETIREMENT

Engagement Good for our Health

Positive aging makes the best of our mental, physical and social abilities, extending ourselves for our own sake as well as for the sake of others.  More than half a century ago, psychologist Erik Erikson identified Generativity as central to a later life well lived.  Generativity refers to engaging with life in family and community, especially investing in younger generations.  Indeed, research shows that older people who volunteer are both physically and mentally healthier than those who do not engage in the community.

Community Agencies Need to Create Diverse Opportunities for Engagement

Social profit agencies and community organizations such as schools and public health depend on volunteers to provide many of their services. New models of generative aging highlight the need for agencies to create more diverse roles which enable different elders to serve in meaningful ways.  As Dan Pink argues in his book Drive,  people thrive on work (including unpaid work) that offers the opportunity for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Creating Community for Seniors Who Serve

Let us broaden the dialogue about civic engagement  to address the need for supporting older volunteers.

Turnover among volunteers in retirement is often as much as 30% in a year – reflecting losses in enthusiasm and community engagement among retirees but also organizational losses of recruitment and training resources. Cutbacks often mean that the role of volunteer coordinator is assigned to an already busy member of the organization and that opportunities to gain a feeling of belonging and appreciation are limited.

In my regular community and organizational talks on aging, I have begun to emphasize volunteering – not only as a major opportunity for personal growth but also as a challenge for the community to provide support or for seniors to create their own supports for civic engagement.  Creating circles of trust for seniors involved in the community can meet a number of objectives – help seniors to discern the best match between their talents and community need, provide support when agencies fall short, help seniors to find their voice so they can contribute better in their volunteer roles, and foster discussion of civic engagement in the context of participants’ own aging.

The Ignatian Volunteer Corps exemplifies this approach. The organization recruits seniors to serve the urban poor while providing small groups, Internet connections, and periodic retreats to foster continual reflection which supports and inspires their service as well as their development as aging persons.

Circles for Seniors in Service could readily be set up within faith communities and senior centres  – where the diversity of community engagements would foster discussion of how different roles fit well (or less well) for different individuals at different stages along their post-retirement career.

Your Thoughts about Older Volunteers

What are your ideas for supporting senior volunteers? What resources and models can you tell us about?

COMMUNITY AND AGING – SECOND JOURNEY.COM

Second Journey promotes mindfulness, service and community in the second half of life.  Two stimulating special issues on Community and Aging have appeared in this year’s newsletters.

1. Community – Live it!, edited by Gayatri Erlandson. These articles provide a picture of what is needed — and what is possible — for older adults living in intentional communities.  Four  sections highlight the path from vision to celebration — Community: Envision It!, Community: Build It!, Community: Live It!, and Community: Celebrate It!    

2. Aging in Community, edited by Janice Blanchard. ‘Aging in community’ refers to communities created by small groups of people committed to helping elders stay in their homes and stay meaningfully connected to their communities. From essays that describe the vision of aging in community, to specific programs you can adapt to your neighborhood, these writings may inspire you to create ways to age at home while nurturing and deepening a meaningful connection to community.

NOVELS ABOUT AGING – CALL FOR NOMINATIONS (due Nov. 30^th)

We can learn so much about how aging affects men and women from varied backgrounds and in varied cultures by reading novels. Remember Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea or Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Nominate your favourite novels on aging by Nov. 30th for inclusion in my early December blog.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT SERIES — WRITERS’ TIP

Social profit and other community organizations often need writers to prepare articles based on interviews with clients, staff, and volunteers about their experiences.  Writers can also recruit and edit stories written by individuals living with specific diseases or disabilities.  For example, Liz Pearl of Toronto has edited stories written by stroke survivors, Brain Attack – The Journey Back  and also by people living with multiple sclerosis  MS—My Story – A Collection of Inspirational Voices.

WRITING EXERCISES – TIP for OCTOBER

Make a list of the ways you have volunteered or contributed to community (local and beyond) in the stages of your life: youth (perhaps including your parents’ activities), early adulthood, middle age (mid-career, children grown), and post retirement.

Then write about the high’s and low’s in your volunteer career.  What changes do you observe over the years? What activities and relationships have you found most satisfying?

RESOURCES ON OLDER ADULT VOLUNTEERING

Marc Freedman has written four books exploring how individuals in the second half of life can help address some of society’s most pressing challenges through paid or unpaid civic engagement:

• Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life
  
• The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife
• Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Reinvent Retirement and Revolutionize America
• The Kindness of Strangers: Adult Mentors, Urban Youth, and the New Voluntarism

Corporation for National & Community Service. Keeping Baby Boomers Volunteering: A Research Brief on Volunteer Retention and Turnover.

HR Council for the Non Profit Sector. The Boomer Boon: Generating Ideas about Engaging Baby Boomers in the Non Profit Sector

Imagine Canada. Engaging Retired Leaders as Volunteers.

Imagine Canada. Giving, Volunteering & Participating.

Roszak, T. (2007). The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation. Chapel Hill NC: Second Journey.

Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College. Just Do It?… Maybe Not! Insights on Activity in Later Life from the Life & Times.

QUOTATIONS

Our society cries out for volunteers, interested not in personal achievement but in serving their fellow man. Such lives can never be without meaning or excitement. People who live this way will never be overwhelmed by a sense of uselessness or futility.
~ Rabbi Bernard Baskin

Wisdom is the most positive and acceptable trait of people who live long lives.
The challenge is to stimulate imaginations
to combine that wisdom with activity and social engagement
to make it meaningful in one’s life and in the world.
~ Mary Catherine Bateson

“Volunteering is the rent we pay” for a long life.
~ B. Groves

A vocation is something you feel compelled to do,
or at least something that fills you with a sense of meaning.
It is something you choose because of what it allows you to say with your life…
It is, above all else, something that lets you love.
~ Kent Nerburne

We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something
and to do it very, very well.
~ Bishop Oscar Romero

With this autumn photo, I bid you adieu,

Ellen

Writing to Deepen Our Travel Experiences

Stockholm in August, for me, involved generations together, learning history in castles (one with a royal theatre for intimate family evenings), and picnics in parks. In my shadow photo here, I am ‘reading’ medieval runes carved into stone more than 1000 years ago on behalf of a timeless mother asking all passersby to remember her son who died for his lord.

Home now, my spirit is busy sorting out the meanings of my summer travels.

Journaling about a trip – before, during and after – can contribute to the impact of travel upon your growing self.  Setting intentions (such as travel lightly, be open to the unexpected) can expand possibilities.  Then, jotting down brief images and impressions during travel can sharpen perception and enhance attention. Finally, savoring the meanings of diverse experiences and observations through reflective or creative writing afterwards can foster imagination, generate insights into your way of being in the world, uncover lessons learned, and raise questions for further exploration.

NEWS – Writing Down Our Years Website – Updated

The website has been updated, with more drop-down menus and an Events tab for announcing coming events.  On the right of the Home Page is a new Search box and a link to Blog Archives where you can view the monthly blogs by topic.  See also the new Quick Links at the bottom right.

Writing Exercises – Savour Travel Experiences

These exercises can be used to focus on your most recent trip, or a significant trip from long ago.

Describe your travel experiences in terms of colours — not only the greens of  forest and metal grey of  skyscrapers, but also the shades of your feelings.  For example:  pink cherry blossom feeling when you first saw your granddaughter;  burst of primary colours when you finally reached the top of the long climb; flaming flag in your mind’s eye when you realized the tourist agent made a key mistake; palest blue of the winter sky for the ache of saying goodbye.

List 20 action verbs to describe your trip. Then write 10 minutes, including as many as possible.

Select 10 photos from your trip, then write a story of your trip working in the people, places, and activities displayed in the photos.

Write a letter to grandchildren after joint travels or traveling to visit them.  These can be wonderful keepsakes for both young and old (and the generation in-between).

Finally, you can list surprises or lessons learned during your trip and write about one of them quickly in as much concrete, sensory and action detail as possible.

Civic Engagement – Tips for Writers

Writers can offer services to senior centres or senior travel agencies to help groups journal during their trip to deepen their experiences. Alternatively, we could lead a discussion session, “What did I do in my summer holiday or winter trip?”, with writing exercises like those above. Volunteer visitors to the ill and homebound can elicit conversation and stories to record by asking individuals to talk about special trips over the years.  These could be to exotic places or the regular trips to the cottage or to visit specific relatives.

BOOK REVIEW

The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Paul Theroux         Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011

Acclaimed travel writer, Paul Theroux, now age 71, has collected his favourite writings on travel to celebrate half a century of telling stories about his global wanderings.

Theroux has creatively organized best travel writings according to fascinating themes, beginning with his own favourite manner of travel: The Pleasures of the Railways. Some writers are given special sections for their travel wisdom include Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Sir Francis Galton, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Claude Levi-Strauss.  Other authors have excerpts scattered throughout the book. Names you will recognize include: Marco Polo, Basho, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain.

The table of contents meanders along the landscapes of travel to cover topics such as It is Solved by Walking, Murphy’s Rules of Travel, The Things They Carried, Classics of a Sense of Place, and Writers and the Places They Never Visited. 

Selections are organized creatively so as to provoke reflections on the meanings of travel – many good lines to start a morning’s journaling.

Theroux harvests his many travel books to offer his own long-lived perspective on the spirit of travel. Note the varying views of seeking home through travel.

Being invisible – the usual condition of the older traveler,
is much more useful than being obvious.

Travel is at its most rewarding
when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination
and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.

You go away for a long time and return a different person -
you never come all the way back.

Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember.

You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by the all the people who have been awful to you.
You have nightmares in strange beds.

You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years
and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine
you might have forgotten.

Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.

All travel is circular … After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for the idealized version of home – indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed.

QUOTATIONS FROM OTHERS, ON TRAVEL

All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself
and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
~ Pico Iyer

Travel to strange places can make us strangers to ourselves,
but it can also introduce us to all the exhilarating possibilities
of a new self in a new world.
~ Don George

Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was,
an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.
~ Claude Levi-Strauss

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
~ C. P. Cadafy

We shall not cease from exploring,
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~ T S Eliot

May you travel in an awakened way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you.
~ John O’Donohue

With these intriguing travel quotations, I say adieu until next time,

Ellen

NOVELS ABOUT AGING

At age 30, I had my first close encounter with a person over 90 years of age – in  a novel, not in real life.  Hagar Shipley, protagonist of Stone Angel [Canadian classic by Margaret Laurence] opened my eyes to the chasm that can exist between an elder’s inner life and outer appearances.

We readers learned to love this crusty ‘stiff-upper-lip’ ‘burden’ of a woman in a way made impossible for the family by a fearsome pride, life history on the prairies, culture, and prevailing ageist attitudes. We cheer her on as she comes to acceptance of her life lived, even as she reaches out from the constraints of aging to a stranger.

Ellen Jaffe and I have analyzed women’s writings about old age with a special focus on this novel.  We singled out this quotation in Hagar’s voice:

Some people will tell you that the old live in the past – that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all. But one dissembles, usually for the sake of such people as Marvin (her son), who is somehow comforted by the picture of old ladies feeding like docile rabbits on the lettuce leaves of other times, other manners. (Laurence, 1964, p. 5).

 To read more about Jaffe & Ryan,Click Here: The Stone Angel Speaks: Listening to Older Women’s Voices

INVITATION TO READERS

We can learn so much about how aging affects men and women from different backgrounds and in different cultures by reading novels.

I invite you readers to write to tell me which book with an aged protagonist you like best and why? Over time, I will compile a list of favourites for posting.

PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITIES FOR OLDER WRITERS

These e-journals seek stories, essays, and  poems from older writers.

Sage-ing with Creative Spirit, Grace & Gratitude  ||  A Journal of the Arts & Aging

Persimmon Tree

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT SERIES — Writer’s Tip

Summer time is a great time to connect outdoors with children (your grandchildren or someone else’s).  From working together in a community garden, to helping out at the Farmers’ Market to planning creative arts and games for children, older adults can help children get back into nature.  Richard Louv of the Children & Nature Network  argues that we would all be healthier in body, mind and spirit if we spent more time with Nature. Getting Vitamin N is all the more important for young people, as the culture immerses them in indoor technology.

As writers, we can emphasize creativity when we take children into the garden, hiking in the woods, swimming at the sea or lake, or to sit at a picnic table under the trees.  We can encourage them to write about their experiences and to accompany their words with photographs. drawings or collages.  Studies show that creativity is activated by being outdoors, so this might be a good time to get the children to tell and write stories.

WRITING EXERCISES – Tip for August

In the classic Writing the Natural Way, Gabriele Rico presented numerous methods for drawing on the creativity of right brain processes. Clustering is one useful technique to generate words for prose or poetry writing.

For example, one could begin with the core word OUTDOORS – writing it in the middle of a page and circling it.  Then one follows different paths of associations from the core word, circling each new word as you go.  For example, I first thought of “trees-breeze-shade-picnic.” Then, a second path from the core was ‘run-wild-adventure-treasure’; another ‘dirt-seeds-plant-weed-pick-busking corn-yum’; another ‘play-friends-hide&seek-count-find’.

Often after a few minutes of seemingly random work, a particular path strikes as the one to write about. This is called the trial-web shift.  My last path – such a shift – was ‘hike-Mt. Tom-scarlet maples-picnic-Mom’s molasses cookies’.  Write on the topic which emerges, using as many of the words from the other paths as possible.

RESOURCES on the Spirit of Nature

Books

Berry, Thomas. Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (edited by M. E. Tucker).  Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2006.

Berry, Wendell. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. Berkeley CA: Counterpoint Press, 1999.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.  New York: Mariner Books, 2002 (orig. 1962).

Lane, Beldan. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. Oxford UK: Oxford University, 2007.

Merton, Thomas. When the Trees Say Nothing (edited by K. Deignan). Notre Dame IN: Ave Maria Press, 2003.

Strand, Clark.  Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. Winnipeg MB: Hyperion, 1998.

Suzuki, David. Sacred Balance. Vancouver BC: Greystone Books, 2007.

Websites

National Senior Conservation Corps

Age-Friendly Communities (UN guidelines for easy access to nature for all)

Children & Nature Network

Earth Watch

 QUOTATIONS

The eye is the first circle; the horizon is the second and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we tug at a single thing in nature,
we find it attached to the rest of the world.
~ John Muir

The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.
~ John O’Donohue

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
~ Shakespeare

With this photo taken on the shores of Lake Superior, I bid you adieu,

Ellen