Aging does not need to be hidden or denied,
but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth
by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.
~ Henri Nouwen
Communication/Advocacy
For Hamilton Aging in Community I wrote a short piece on Advocating for Self and Others. My friend Sarah Ayerst wrote two personal pieces exemplifying the need for advocacy skills: Stick-Handling through a Health Crisis One and Two
Creative Aging
Create Til You Drop
Writing Exercise
What lessons about living and loving have learned from very old loved ones as they approached death? How might you share some of those lessons so that we can all live a good life as we prepare for a good death? Specific stories and illustrative metaphors can focus your reader’s attention?
Book Review
On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old.
Parker J. Palmer; Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018.
Beloved spiritual author, Parker Palmer compiled this inspiring book of essays and poems written just prior to his 80th birthday. As we proceed farther into old age, gravity pulls us toward the ground and toward our death – the brink of everything. Palmer prays for and show us grace in this approach, incorporating gratitude for the many years at every step.
As a Quaker seeking wisdom from all the major faiths, Palmer calmly looks toward his inevitable future. Palmer likens the end of the walk toward death to the breathless climbs in the mountains of the southwest “when it was /all I could do to climb, to breathe, then stop)—/ marveling at the view, wondering what’s up top. “
Palmer’s later years are bolstered by creative relationships with young people. This dance of generations is articulated in an essay on the music of mentoring, an affirming letter to a young Courtney who asks big questions especially about how to support friends and gender inequality, and a commencement address.
Freeing oneself from illusions and finding one’s real self is a key goal of later years. Using the title of Florida Scott-Maxwell’s old age memoir, Palmer says:
I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, as best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.
With regard to work and vocation, Palmer demonstrates in his own life as a writer and contemplative by catastrophe how he has managed many turns in his working life and how writing has been both difficult and rewarding – definitely his calling.
When I’m asked for the ‘elevator speech’ that sums up my work, I always respond, ‘I always take the stairs, so I don’t have an elevator speech. If you’d like to walk with me awhile, I’d love to talk.’ I don’t know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite.
The later years involve reaching out to stay engaged with the world – with young and old, with those near and those far.
As shriveled leaves return to earth
to nourish roots of leaves unsprung,
so dry words fall back to the heart
to decompose into their parts
and feed the roots of worlds unsung.
Excerpt from The World Once Green Again
So too, later life increasingly calls us to reach inwards, to deepen engagement with our souls by citing authors such as Rumi, Mary Oliver, Gandhi, Rilke. Palmer points out that patience becomes part of our calling as we accept changes in our bodies and minds – we come to accept and practice the slow way. Developing a supple heart – one that breaks open with compassion – continues to be our goal as we consider the difficulties we and others face in this world.
The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around -everything- we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am -all- of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are–embrace it with transformative love–we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and be unable to engage creatively with the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.
Finally, how shall we live and die?
… This is how
I want to live, my failings and
as they are under this sun—
released in their triviality,
resurrected as new life—
en route to dying with
thanks and praise and no
mind-begotten regrets.
With this shadow photo,
I bid you adieu,
Ellen