I’m slowly reading Joan Chittister’s bookThe Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.
And, of course, this can apply to any of us at any age. There’s always someone to mentor.
Chittister:
Now, too, we have a responsibility to mentor the generations after us in the values and ideals that built a society based on equality, respect for others, and pluralism. More than that, we have the spiritual responsibility to see life as a moral force rather than simply a private enterprise.
We need to come to understand to the center of our souls that age is not a disease. It is a new experience in how to live life, how to milk it dry of goodness, of energy, of gratitude, of calm and quiet creativity.
The burden of a lack of commitment to accomplishment means that we have moved into a period of suspended animation, that aging is nothing more than deterioration. The truth is that aging means aging. Nothing more, nothing less. It is just us grown ripe.
The blessing of a commitment to accomplishment is that, as we continue to bring out considerable skills, experience, and insight to bear on the present needs of humankind, we will certainly become wiser, definitely spiritually stronger, and more than ever a blessing to the rest of society.
Emily Dickinson wrote: We turn not older with years, but newer every day.
This is my week to celebrate turning and being 75 years old. A friend reminds me that we read the book The Second Half of Life by Angeles Arrien when we turned 50. My friend is re-visiting the book, and so now am I. Its meaning is both different and the same as 25 years ago. We are a process after all. We are verbs, not nouns. And as the body says “I am a fiesta,” I feel more clearly the unifying fiesta of body, mind, and spirit. How glorious it is to be alive and aware of each moment as precious, and a gift.
Eduardo Galeano – in Walking Words
The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.
Mermaid skeleton – who knows what evolvesAutumn AbundanceUp and down Tide coming into the marshFragrance
Sunday morning, we rose early to a moist wrap of fog and flotilla after flotilla of pelicans flying by our deck by the bay. We counted fifty pelicans in some of the groups, and there were also individuals, couples, and smaller gatherings of flight.
We didn’t know if it was a wider circle than we saw coming from the sunrise and heading west so we were seeing the same ones more than once, or whether each one was unique to us, but I was reminded of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring where she pointed out that DDT was destroying our wildlife. Rachel’s book saved the pelicans, osprey, and other creatures and birds, and now we watched groups of as many as fifty birds swoop by, some high and some low just skimming the water. It was as exhilarating as a fireworks display, and quieter though we did hear the swoosh of wings.
One seal bobbed in front of our deck, also entranced.
It’s a different rhythm in Sausalito than West Marin and yet again there’s the rhythm, motion, and comfort of the waves and changing tides. We took this week to reflect back on over fifty years of knowing each other and what that means. We honored how we each contain both young and old. As Steve’s doctor reminds him, we’re not in the “young sapling stage of life”, and yet, there is a resilience, a reception as of the waves reaching and changing the shore.
It’s been a beautiful week as the planet shifts now in its reception of light. I feel refreshed and invigorated, calm and motivated, both young and old, as my individual wave connects with other waves and this whole planet we share.
A friend proposes we give ourselves time with photos and texts of and about Black people, note what comes up and how we feel. How do we embody the experience of another? How do we cultivate presence in ourselves while we take in and empathize with the experience of another? How do we reap kindness and root?
The fog is in this Monday morning where I live, and I’m grateful for the wrap as I give my heart space to open and feel a little more of the gift of each breath and the gratitude that nourishes each life as we pause to open and receive. I believe I need to give myself time for reception and absorption, and so I do.
These are complex times as we navigate opening to lives other than our own. May we be kind.
Saturday morning sunrise over San Francisco Bay Saturday morningBirds of Paradise facing the rising sun Ivy finds a spot to root and grow
And then I stopped taking photos, and seeped in simplicity absorbing what’s written and taking place in and on my inner and outer walls. Gratitude and grace – two pillars anchoring unity and diversity in ourselves as shown in rocks.
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