Tag: Eldering

So Many Gifts

“Across the wisdom traditions – from Jung to Erikson, from ancient Hindu sages to modern developmental theorists like Rohr, Plotkin, and Fowler – there emerges a shared understanding of life’s autumn-time that speaks in many tongues but carries a single breath…

These cartographers of the soul’s journey, though separated by centuries and cultures, all gesture toward a mysterious transformation in the later seasons of life. It arrives not like a sudden storm but like the gradual turning of leaves – this elder-wisdom that ancient peoples knew and modern frameworks rediscover.

The common ground these frameworks share is holy ground. They speak of a time when doing softens into being, when achievement yields to presence, when the gathering of things gives way to the gathering of meaning. This is the territory where personal ambition composts into collective wisdom, where the urgent whispers of ego quiet themselves before the deeper songs of soul.

These many maps of human becoming tell us that there comes a time when our task shifts from building to blessing, from acquiring to dispensing, from seeking to seeing. It’s a time when the soul’s gaze begins to extend beyond the horizon of a single lifetime – backward into ancestral waters, forward into futures yet unborn.

Perhaps what all these frameworks are really describing is not an achievement but an invitation – to let our lives be claimed by something larger than our plans, something older than our fears, something truer than our certainties. For in the end, these various mappings of life’s latter seasons all point to a similar truth: that there comes a time when our task is no longer to add to ourselves but to become empty enough to receive and transmit what the world needs next – like hollow bones through which the wind of spirit plays its necessary music….”

David Tensen

Tomorrow, I cross the threshold into my 8th decade. For that is what turning 70 means. Staggering, and I’ve been preparing for months in unobvious ways that remind me, “Yes, sweetheart, you are about to turn 70.” The end of a cycle in a yogic way of thinking.

And despite the mental preparation, I’ve had some ambivalence about how I acknowledge this milestone. A few months ago, I thought I’d host a tea party with girlfriends at a lovely local coffee and pastry shop. But after weighing several factors, I had to abandon the idea. Instead I’ll keep it simple. Brunch next weekend with my long-time yoga friends at their home in the country where our conversation always nourishes. Tomorrow, Sig and I will go for a late lunch at our favourite “happy hour” cafe where great wine is $1 an ounce and the burger and fries are terrific. Later, I’ll go to a poetry workshop. The following night, we’ll dine with two Camino couples at another favourite restaurant, its cuisine evoking our past and their upcoming Portuguese Coastal walks. A video call with my east coast and west coast friends, and who knows what further unfoldings in the weeks and months to come.

For me, this birthday emphasizes what’s embedded in the above lengthy quote: “the empyting to receive and transmit what the world needs next.” And that I’m supported in doing so by trusting in my intuition to keep it simple and attend to the fallow feelings of late, and applying Harrison Owen’s elegant principles for hosting Open Space, aka “living one’s life”:

Whoever comes is the right one.
Whatever happens is the only thing that can happen.
When it starts, it starts.
When it’s over, it’s over.

There’s another “birthday” quote I especially love. Attributed to Hafiz, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, it always brings me joy and is one I regularly “gift” to friends:

“There are so many gifts
still unopened from your birthday,
there are so many hand-crafted presents
that have been sent to you by God…

O, there are so many hand-crafted
presents that have been sent to your life
from God.” 

a decade ago…a birthday dinner hosted by our friends

Oh, so many gifts…thank you.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Composting Hope

…sometimes hope looks like compost, slow, surprising, quietly transforming what was into what could be.
So, maybe the best we can do is let ourselves be changed by love, by grief, by dirt under our fingernails, and by small, ordinary acts of grace.
So, wherever you are today, may you remember that your smallness is not insignificance, that love really is fundamentally expressed in potato chips and text messages and a place at the table. It is all still love. And that belonging is not something we earn, it’s something we practice over and over and over again…

~ Kate Bowler, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler, April 2, 2025 ~



Not a poem, but certainly akin to what I often post here on Fridays.

Several years ago, a dear friend grieving the passing of her daughter, told me about Kate Bowler. Admittedly slow on the uptake, to both Kate’s writing and podcasts, I recently subscribed to her weekly Lenten email, The Hardest Part. This week’s description of her recent podcast with long-time friend, Jeff Chu, struck a chord:

We talked about what it means to feel stuck in a life that doesn’t quite fit. About the grief of loving people who may never love us the way we wish. About small, ordinary acts of care—texts, meals, potato chips—that remind us we belong to each other. If you’re in the messy middle, tending what’s dying, planting without guarantees, or quietly rebuilding your hope, this conversation is for you.

And it was. Right on point. A bit of balm for its honesty, vulnerability, and invitation, as I’d been shaming and shunning myself for letting small and petty resentments and disappointments, and bigger betrayals eat away at me.

Their conversation reminded me – as I, we, navigate these bone-jarring and often dispiriting days – that I’m in another “messy middle”… of the Lenten season… of winter giving over to spring… of where I find myself in my own lifespan, soon to cross into the next decade. “May you live in interesting times.” Wasn’t that the greeting? Ahhh, well...

In case you’d like to listen, here’s the link.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Regardless of My Age

“baby, it’s cold outside”

It’s been mighty cold here in Alberta, and across Canada. A much-needed, honest-to-goodness winter with a snowpack forecasters say will lessen the impact of spring and summer forest fires. Temperatures well below zero, made colder with wind, killing off viruses and vermin. A restoration of balance that, while I appreciate, as I said to Sig as we layered to go out, I wish I wasn’t in. It’s been less than a month since celebrating his birthday in Huatulco, Mexico, but it feels like ages with this profound contrast.

And Walker, despite inheriting Annie’s insulated coat, and boots that he reluctantly wears, has found his first winter too cold to do much more outside than his business. And even that’s done fast, carefully perched on three legs, alternately the fourth to keep it from freezing. Last week, both of us bundled to play in the backyard, not a minute later and he was at the door. That night, he didn’t eat his dinner and slept all evening instead of his usual watching TV (I kid you not!) or playing with us. I sensed he was depressed and reflected to Sig we needed to move someplace more temperate, as both Walker and I need to walk…outside…in Nature…without freezing.

I’m going on about this because I’ve noticed with every passing year, I’m less inclined to brave winter’s elements and that troubles me. I used to ice skate…cross country and downhill ski…I haven’t walked with my Camino group since Christmas. Dog walking has become episodic. Reading my friend, Gretchen’s post this morning got me to thinking more about my own aging and how it’s showing up.

“Ageism is the last bastion of political incorrectness, and no one is going to fight it with us or for us. No one else cares, until they arrive there themselves…”

Gretchen Staebler, “You’re Doing Great…For Your Age”

I met Gretchen at a writing retreat years ago on Whidbey Island. Then, she was working on her – now published and highly recommended – moving, tender, and funny memoir, Motherlode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver. (For local readers, it’s available to borrow from my public library.) I love Gretchen’s fresh and candid take on life, and too, her big heart from which she responds to my recent posts about the harrowing state of our world. From her post which inspired my writing today:

“What do you see when you look in a mirror? Go ahead, look. Do you only see wrinkles and sagging skin? Yes, they are there, it’s a fact of the third act, it’s what the body does. And what else? What is reflected in your eyes, your smile?”

In this “third act,” what I’ve been calling “the eldering landscape,” my body is having its say, and I’m having to become more adept at listening. In this year, crossing the threshold into my eighth decade (mind-blowing what becoming seventy actually means!!!) I don’t know how I’ll celebrate. I do know I’ll continue to be enthralled, amazed, bewildered, curious, vulnerable, astonished, uncertain, afraid, grateful, courageous – the whole enchilada of words describing me being in love with the gift that is my life. Regardless of my age.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
I’m so happy to welcome you, my newest subscribers, and grateful to you who have been reading me regularly.

Silent Braveries

the ridged terraces below Trevi, Umbria – a classic Italian hilltop town
la Via di Francesco, September 27, 2023

SILENT BRAVERIES
Sometimes it takes
looking at your struggles
to recognize the depth
of your courage.
To be in awe
of what it takes
to face real fears,
break old patterns,
and climb the steep ridges
of your own private mountain.
Even the silent braveries
carried out over time
cover the ground
all around you.

– Susan Frybort –
Look to the Clearing

From my filed and saved poems, this is one in keeping with my current writing, both here and in recent poetry. The threshold crossed into a new terrain, one I’ve coined “an eldering landscape,” where facing real, albeit old and ancient fears; identifying, breaking and grieving old patterns; challenging roles and rules; initiating courageous conversations; climbing my private steep mountains and traversing barren landscapes – all various way markers to a destination unknown.

Truly my camino, caminho, cammino – the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian ways.
Truly ones that each of us walk, in this and the various stages of our lives.
Walks wherein we call upon, become, and cover the ground with our respective silent braveries, revealing the way for each other.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Rocking Pendulum

Maybe a short post.
More from a promise kept to me. To write.
Though of late, I feel wrung out of words and too full of others’.

I need to empty.
To make space.
To listen to what might want to be, needs to be heard.

Maybe it’s the belated onset of “Blue Monday,” but I’ve had little energy for much beyond the thrice weekly pool visits for deep water aquafitness and an occasional walk. Despite a ridiculous run of beyond glorious weather, confusing birds and buds and deeply concerning to all of us regarding forest fires and cumulative droughts, I’ve been in a slump, the likes of which I haven’t felt for almost two decades. Then, upon the advice of my GP, I made a card to myself called “Trust,” addressed to me, “to be opened in the dark days to remember”…that the light will and does always return.

I notice that now, again, every day, especially at dinner time, how dark is giving way to sunset. I notice beautiful sunrises as I dress for the pool.

As I read the words I wrote in spring of 2005, there in black and white is the recurrent theme of generational loss and its genetic vestiges that have weighed me down. This time amplified by my mother’s recent health crisis, harrowing for all of us.

Maybe “slump” is too hard a word. “Fallow” comes to mind, as in how I felt and named myself during those first months of covid when I had suddenly lost my career, never to be found in the same way again. Underground and uncertain. Bereft and lost. Yes, there’s that. Again. Still. As it must be. Walking this week, I met a neighbor I hadn’t seen for months. When she asked about Annie, and I said she’d died in June, it became a very tearful walk. A stop on the quiet fairway, held by a tree until my sadness subsided.

I especially love the phrase gifted to me by a dear friend in the card she made and sent to me last week: “The rocking pendulum of January…” a bit lullaby, a bit raucous…

Given that here is where I’ve named my fresh territory of living – an eldering landscape – I’ll defer to the words of John O’Donohue who speaks with a wise and knowing eloquence about the interior state of threshold:

“At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it?
A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold, a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual.
It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.”

To Bless the Space Between Us

So, with little energy to spare, I’m taking my time…feeling as I can, the bigness, muchness, fullness of it all, attempting to listen inward with as much attention as I can summon.

Enough words.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Hallucinations of the Soul

HALLUCINATIONS OF THE SOUL
The longing for things that you could not have,
the yearning for places you were not destined to arrive.
Wistful memories of what was not ever meant to be.
Regret for not being who you thought you would become.
These hallucinations of the soul are agonizing prisoners
that must be pardoned and released.

Clear the room.
Open the door and let them leave.
And in this space, you’ll paint a glorious existence
of being here with presence and contentment
for what truly is a relevant and meaningful life.

– Susan Frybort, Open Passages –

Still in the first month, Frybort’s poem speaks to me of a tender way of approaching the new year. Not bound by resolution making, or even fixed on a word for the year (though comfort, grace and gratitude continue to accompany my focused breaths), the imagery of pardon and release, of allowing discontent an open door from which to leave, invite a softening and deepening into possibility. Evoked too for me, is a favourite from Rumi, The Guest House, as rendered by Coleman Barks.

It’s been a challenging month. I’m happy to be home to days that are ever so slightly growing longer, especially in the late afternoon, and to temperatures rising to comfortable from last week’s frigid depths. My family and I are relieved that my mother is home, regaining her strength.

Discerning “guides from beyond” from “agonizing prisoners,” balancing hospitable welcome with unabashed leave taking, giving gratitude its due, we all make our way.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Small Kindnesses

from Facebook, December 22, 2023

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

– Danusha Laméris –

I’m anticipating, weather permitting, that my mother will be discharged from hospital to home today. Like a cat with nine lives, she has made a remarkable recovery from her doctor’s sobering announcement two weeks ago that we prepare for the worst. Relief is mingled with realistic concern that she may not yet be out of the woods, as the crisis – impacted bowel, diverticulitis, pancreatitis, and a pancreatic cyst which is diminishing – the consequence of three years on Ozempic has lingering, if not long-lasting implications. Has she now entered her 9th and final life, having used the rest? Will her bowel and pancreas recover? Is she able to tolerate a gain in weight to return to health? What are the consequences for my father’s well-being? These are pressing, significant questions.

One day during a hospital visit, upon the recommendation of a patient recovering from leg reconstruction after a harrowing motorcycle accident last fall, we walked down the hall to the little tuck shop for homemade egg salad sandwiches on toast with sides of bread and butter pickles. That patient wheeled himself down for a coffee, saying he preferred it to Canada’s caffeine mainstay, Tim Horton’s, stopping regularly for one and to visit staff before his own admission. With a kind word for everyone, a twinkle in his eye, freshly showered, shaved, and dressed, admittedly bored and itching to be released, I sensed and said how he must bring a much-welcomed kindness to the overworked nurses with his amiable nature. Just one of the kindnesses that abound in hospitals, those “true dwellings of the holy.”

We’re home now, having arrived late Wednesday night to still frigid weather. But yesterday, enough warmth mixed with sunshine made that hour walk outside a healing balm. Too, sleeping in our bed. I’ve caught up on correspondence, letting friends know how my family and I are faring. Your small kindnesses – expressed here, on social media, in emails and messages – have most certainly created another “true dwelling of the holy,” for which I am beyond grateful.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

One Life

He said, “One life on this earth
is all we get, whether it is enough
or not enough, and the obvious conclusion
would seem to be, that at the very least
we are fools if we do not live it
as fully, and bravely, and beautifully
as we can.”

– Frederick Buechner –

This was a new one for me from author – theologian – minister, Frederick Buechner. I always appreciated his oft quoted definition of vocation – “the place where God calls you is the place where you deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Sitting at my mother’s desk, having arrived yesterday from the ridiculously frigid temperatures at home to the balmy “banana belt” of Niagara with its 30+ degree difference, I’m hours late posting today’s photo and poem feature. We made a quick trip to visit my mother in hospital last night and see that while weak, tired, and thin, she is rallying, with the original prognosis of preparing for the worst, modified. Tomorrow is the MRI and ultrasound, which will help us know what next. My father is relieved for this development, happy for our presence, and my sister can step back into her life.

With hours of waiting – at home, in the air, here – I’ve had plenty of time to think…about family patterns and dynamics, history and story, roles and rules. I smile to myself thinking that undergraduate degree in family studies and social work graduate degree specializing in individuals, families, and groups have served me well. Distance, too, has long been double-edged, giving me space, clarity, and perspective, all helpful in navigating liminal terrains such as this, an eldering landscape. I found Buechner’s quote earlier this week on Facebook, one of those “right place at the right time” sightings. It fits.

Thank you for the kind and thoughtful comments here and on social media which hold and support from afar me and my family.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends...

I Saw It Coming

In a week’s time my husband and I were to have been with my family celebrating my parents’ 70th anniversary. A staggering accomplishment given current divorce rates. Instead, after several back-and-forth conversations with my father and sister, wherein the “no choice” choice was made to cancel the family dinner, photographer, and flowers, we’ll stick to the flight plan and hold vigil, virtually and in person, for my mother, whose health and life have been seriously compromised by taking Ozempic. She is the second person in my close circle who has recently suffered a life-threatening bowel obstruction from this much touted, so-called weight loss miracle drug. Here as I type, she is with my sister in a hospital 30 minutes from home, the closest facility able to provide the CT scan needed to determine the impact to her bowels and life, while my father, bearing a week’s weight of worry for his wife, collapses with fatigue at home. (Another story, the sorry state of health care crippled across my country.) Thankfully, my sister is an RN, astute in her holistic perspective, clear and courageous in her advocacy, compassionate in her care.

In the last twenty-four hours I have learned of two friends losing their life partners. Before Christmas, another. And I wonder, will my father be losing his? For an hour today of personal respite, I attended a silent writing circle. After introductions, the host set a 45-minute timer wherein we muted ourselves, turned off our video cameras, and wrote. “January, the first month in a new year…its first days always bring an undercurrent of unease…for decades I’ve stepped across its threshold, yet this time feel days darker with melancholy…a bone deep sadness, its source clearer with each passing day.”

“Epiphanies,” I wrote. “Three wise men bearing gifts; the anniversary of our arrival 43 years ago to the prairie province we call home; the sudden death of my young, never-known grandmother, shrouded in secrecy, and leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life. And today, dawning stark cold and bright, like winter’s belated arrival, the realization of how intergenerational trauma has shaped and coloured my stepping into most every new year of my life, tarnishing it with inchoate anxiety and grief.”

I’m as OK with all of this as I can be. Intuitively, instinctively, even presciently, I’ve been naming and writing here about crossing the threshold into this hard next life chapter – the eldering landscape where death and illness, failing health and loss become its “leitmotif;” where unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of my love for my life and this world.

Sustained by those few near and dear kindred friends, my community of walkers, a monthly check-in with my therapist, my beloved and our quiet sanctuary of a home; and the ever-present beauty a step outside my door, I’m OK.

By the time this post drops, I may find we need to shuffle flights to arrive earlier, and I pray my prayers of comfort, grace and gratitude carry me and us through. Too, being held by forces seen and unseen – the angels, ancients, and ancestors.

I’ll borrow a poem from Mary Oliver to sign off:

“You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway, it is the same old story –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and thank you for yours…

Questions of Midlife and Eldering

Over the years I’ve blogged some of my responses to entering the eldering stage of life, with one of my earliest references in 2016, when I cited the transition from ambition to meaning in Angeles Arrien’s The Second Half of Life. Searching this current blog, A Wabi Sabi Life, I again referenced Arrien in February 2020, mere weeks before the world was stopped by covid-19. In Threshold of Uncertainty, my first post of 2022, I described my experience standing on the threshold of a new year. Recently the gift of a question to a friend who has just crossed into his 7th decade – What joys and challenges will wearing the mantle of early eldering bring?… Last week’s wistful musings prompted by my short visit with my parents and to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral…Yesterday, an excerpt from Dr. Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude, cited in her weekly Art of Enchantment Substack…like a bell thrice rung:

In the last part of our life, focus is everything. The years when we imagined we needed to be all things to all people are long gone, along with our dilettante days: the days of experimenting with this and that, of adopting and discarding different personas, of reinventing ourselves for every season of the year. Now, it’s time to get serious. To let the inessential fall away and focus on the essence of who we are. What is it that is left of us when Old Bone Mother comes along and strips that old, decaying flesh from our bones? Who is it that we are; what is it that we feel we are here to do? What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for?

Dr. Sharon Blackie

Like Blackie, who says she asks herself these questions every year at this time, when the dark grows long, and she grows older, I’m feeling a similar urgency with similar questions. I realize typing now, this is part of the root of that knot I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and wondered what thread I needed to pull to loosen its persistent grip.

For me, the urgency is more in asking the questions with an open heart and mind, rather than anticipating a set of simple answers. As in the old stories of the Grail, the Question That Must Be Asked is always more important than the answer it provokes.

Dr. Sharon Blackie

Akin to Rilke reminding us to love the questions:

…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.

Who is it that we are, or think we are?
What is it that we feel we are here to do?
What is the world asking of us now?
What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for?
What joys and challenges will wearing the mantle of eldering bring?
What thread(s) do I pull in hopes of loosening the interior knot’s persistent grip?

Sitting with, in the growing dark,
growing patient with uncertainty.
Light a candle in this season of light,
advent of a holy reminder,
a mystery we learn to trust.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.