Itineraries Spring 2009 | Partnerships In Aging

Contents:

When the Oil Gives Out by Theodore Roszak

Walking Like Lions by Trebbe Johnson

Going with the Flow by Cecile Andrews

Seeking an Elder Culture by Connie Goldman

Spring’s Stirrings: The Art of Being a Beginner by John G. Sullivan

Books of Interest: Two Women’s Reflections by Barbara Kammerlohr

Spring Poems, collected by John Clarke

When the Oil Gives Out by Theodore Roszak

…every institution in our society will be transformed as its
population drifts further and further from competitive individualism,
military–industrial bravado, and the careerist rat race. It is as if the freeways of the world will one day soon begin to close down, starting with the fast lane and finally turning into pastures and meadows.
— from The Foreword to The Making of an Elder Culture

One way to evaluate the prospects of Eldertown might be to start from the viewpoint of one of the more apocalyptic environmental groups. The peak oil movement focuses tightly on the issue of energy, the Achilles heel of industrial society. Convinced that global oil production will soon peak — or perhaps already has — the peak oilers predict a horrendous cascade of disasters in our near future. Cars, lacking fuel, will vanish from our lives. Suburbs dependent on commuting will have to be abandoned. Big-box stores will be empty as both the goods and money for consumption disappear. Big homes, too expensive to heat or cool, will stand untenanted. At the extreme, this is of course an unlivable world. But short of that, if one looks at the lifestyle such radical changes demand, are we not dealing with choices that elders are far more apt to make than a younger population? Smaller homes or condos in more densely populated centers. Less driving or no driving at all in private cars. Lower consumption. To be sure, environmentalists, who have never given any attention to aging, are apt to feel none of this will happen soon enough, but surely it is of some importance that one is working with rather than against a powerful demographic trend.
In the near future, as a growing retirement population fans out across the land seeking a new phase of life, we can expect a plethora of schemes for small-town restoration, efforts to turn the backwater into communities of character, many of them healthcare based. However it comes about, the private automobile may one day become an industrial relic, part of a pattern of life that belonged to the world that came before the longevity revolution.

The challenge for city planning will be to transform what started out among seniors as culturally barren Sun City retirement communities (“glorified playpens for seniors,” as Maggie Kuhn called them) into the sort of vital, decentralized cosmopolitan nodes many boomers will prefer. That opportunity is at hand. Culture once available only in metropolitan centers now comes our way via road companies and traveling exhibitions. The rest can arrive by satellite, phone line, mail order, and broadband. Lewis Mumford, our premier historian of cities, recognized this possibility soon after World War II when he predicted the “etherialization” of cities. The result might be an “invisible city … penetrated by invisible rays and emanations….If a remote village can see the same motion picture or listen to the same radio program as the most swollen center, no one need live in that center or visit it.”

Today Mumford would have included the enormous potential of broadband transmission via the World Wide Web among those “rays and emanations.” Here is a sector of our economy that is more than ready for the elder culture. Just as a restless, perpetually ambient, post-World-War-II generation aspired to a highly mobile, drive-in lifestyle, our digitalized, networked society today aspires to an online way of life. Stay put, find what you need on the Web. To an absurd degree, the computer makers and home-entertainment entrepreneurs seem out to keep us confined to our own homes. At its extreme, I find that vision stultifying, as if the face-to-face convivial experience we all need and seek in gathering places — town squares, public parks, shopping malls, cafes, sporting events, coffee houses — were not the very essence of city life. But there is no question that the Internet can be put to good use in the elder culture, especially for those who would give up on automobiles if they had a viable alternative. Once again, as in the way computers can be an aid to failing memory, the high-tech novelties we now associate with adolescents may have their greater future with the elders of the society.

As hellish as life was in the primitive factory towns (see Steven Johnson’s fine study of early industrial London, The Ghost Map), cities at last have matured into the most ecologically enlightened habitat for a world that numbers billions of human beings. Urban density compacts population and saves the land, its resources, natural beauties, and human lives. Cities are where ideas are exchanged most rapidly and where medical progress is made. Subtract the cars and freeways, condense the suburbs back into urban centers — some large, some small — mix in a good measure of social justice, and we have the best design for living in a world where over 50 percent of the human race now chooses to reside in cities. Eldertown makes all this more possible.

As I phrase the matter here, my words may sound overoptimistic. But it will not be words or ideas that draw people to Eldertown. It will be the body, not the mind, that spells the end of the automotive era. The last word will belong to diminishing stamina, declining coordination, aching joints, dimming eyesight, and a general need to get closer to quality medical care. On the small scale, these facts of life are already making a difference. The Japanese, who are reconciled to life in a “gray economy,” have turned longevity into the basis for lucrative investment. Instead of groaning over the size of their senior population, they have become the world leader in geriatric robotics and electronics — homes that give the elderly remarkable independence with security. Even in the United States, new forms of domestic architecture — so-called “universal design” — are becoming the rule in home building, a commitment to convenient access and functionality for residents of all ages and physical conditions.

Elder-friendly domestic architecture is becoming commonplace: wider doorways, fewer stairs or none at all, ramps to connect different levels, drawers and cupboards that open at more accessible heights, step-down bathtubs and showers equipped with grab bars and non-skid surfaces. Boomers in their fifties now commonly demand such features in new homes so they can anticipate staying where they choose to live into their deep senior years. They are thinking about the walkers and wheelchairs in their future. When changes of this kind finally reach the level of city planning, we may see garages, parking lots, and city streets that were once filled with expensive SUVs numbering far more electrically powered go-carts, hybrid flex-cars, and jitneys. Perhaps at that point boomers, who were born to drive, will look back to the world of suburbs and freeways in bewilderment, asking “What was that all about?”

The industrial city, the source of so many of the worst environmental ills over the past two centuries, still has a promising future — but not as the entrepreneurial arena for competitive self-interest it has been for the past few centuries. Nor for the frivolous fun and games that appeal to the young and well off. As it becomes the place where a growing population of elders turn for care, security, and tranquility, it will become an expression of what is best in us, the substance of our deepest ethical and religious values. Utopian literature has never explored the possibilities of Eldertown. It will take time to get used to its unhurried pace, its serenity, and its frugality and to see that as the goal toward which industrial power has been moving. But will we get there soon enough to escape the environmental horrors that now seem to await us?

The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation

In 1969, Ted Roszak took his first look at the boomer generation with his award-winning social commentary, The Making of a Counter Culture. Now, 40 years later, he has has written a call to arms for the same generation. It reminds boomers that they will spend more time being old then they every spent being young — and suggests ways in which they can uniquely transform our society, picking up on the ideals they formed in the 60’s.

As the author notes, “My hope is that people who grew up on J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Allen Ginsburg, the folk music of Pete Seeger, the protest ballads of Country Joe, the anarchic insolence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the biting satire of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, the acid rock of Bob Dylan, the sociology of Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, the Summer of Love and the Days of Rage, will not be content to spend their retirement years on cruise ships or feeding their Social Security income into slot machines at the nearest casino.”

Part demographic study, part history, part critique and part appeal, Roszak’s take on the imminent retransformation of our world is as wise as it is inspired.

Theodore Roszak was the author of 15 works of nonfiction, including The Making of a Counter Culture, Person/Planet, and The Voice of the Earth, and of six novels, including the critically acclaimed The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation was initially published by Second Journey in four online installments between October 2008 and March 2009 before the rights to the book were acquired by New Society Publishers. Ted Roszak was educated at UCLA and Princeton and taught at Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, San Francisco State University, and the State University of California – East Bay. He died at his home in Berkeley, CA, on July 5, 2011.

Walking Like Lions by Trebbe Johnson

Trebbe Johnson is the author of The World is a Waiting Lover and the director of Vision Arrow, an organization offering journeys to explore wildness and allurement in nature and self. She leads vision quests, workshops, and ceremonies worldwide, from Ground Zero in New York City to the Sahara Desert. A passionate explorer of outer as well as inner frontiers, Trebbe has camped alone in the Arctic Circle, written a speech for Russian cosmonauts to broadcast to the U.N. from Mir on Earth Day, and hiked through Greece. She teaches workshops on desire, allurement, and the figure of the beloved throughout the United States, Canada, and overseas, and has written on a wide variety of topics for numerous national publications. She lives with her husband in rural northeastern Pennsylvania.

We felt sorry for the lions. Driving out into South Africa’s Timbavati Game Reserve every day at dawn and dusk with our guides, my husband, our four friends. and I had already seen the pride three times before the night of the encounter: an old male and three females of varying ages. All of them were thin, and the coats of the male and the oldest female were dull and shabby-looking. The first evening we spotted them they were slowly making their way in the direction of a leopard’s scream that had split the warm, soft air just moments earlier. The females are responsible for doing the hunting for a pride, and our guide, Johann, surmised that these lions, whose prowess had diminished with age, were hoping to take advantage of the kill to get some meat after the leopard had finished. The next time we saw the pride the male had a deep gash across his nose. Once they were sleeping in the sun in the shade of an acacia, half hidden in the tall grass, their breath slow as sunset, deep and regular. So, we felt sorry for them. We felt like life was closing in for those old lions.

That aging shrinks our territory and diminishes our capacity to move about even in what is left to us is a common perception. It’s a view that is proclaimed, even championed, when times are socially, economically, or personally challenging. A friend told me the other day that she regrets not having left her boring, unsatisfying job several months ago, before the economy collapsed. Now it’s too late, she said. She feels she’s lucky to have a job at all. She doesn’t dare look for anything new. Besides, she added, as if the final obstacle were the ultimate one, “I’m almost sixty.”

When we find ourselves in personal or social tight spots, mystified and directionless, it’s easy to imagine only darkness ahead. However, that place is actually a threshold if only we perceive it that way. What’s on the other side is a new world made up of all we’ve lived and known so far and all we long to bring into being. Thoreau recognized the potency of those threshold times when the colors, shapes, and truths on either side of the here-and-now lose clarity and we’re poised in the present. He saw Walden Pond itself as a mirror of that liminal state, for “lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.” Thoreau also recognized the personal value of the threshold as a place for gathering one’s resources. “I have been anxious,” he wrote in his chapter on “Economy” in Walden, “to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

Wilderness thrives on that threshold moment. It is always unfolding into the next instant of what it must do to be fully itself, whether that means blossoming, as the rose does, for all it’s worth, with no thought for holding something back for the future, or, as for a pride of old lions, setting off without shame to scrounge a meal from a rival predator. Often when we humans are pressed into this in-between place, we doubt our own past as a valid credential for moving forward and fear that the future will fail to welcome us. With such an attitude we sink into fear and passivity instead of stepping over that threshold into our own wildness.

Recently, on the vision quest I co-guide each year in the Sahara Desert, there was among us a woman in her fifties, Kara, who told us that her one great fear about the journey — more than riding a camel, more than being alone in the wilderness for three days and nights — was snakes. When one of our Tuareg guides told her it was rare to see snakes in this area of the Sahara, she looked dubious. When I told her that if she did encounter a snake, it might have something important to teach her, she looked at me as if I were trying to communicate in a foreign language.

And of course, she saw a snake. The day before the solo started, each participant took a walk to tune in to what drew their attention in the natural world and then to their own responses to it, and hence gain insight about their inner journey. The snake was curled in some rocks. It regarded Kara, then slithered away. Although she was frightened, she was also intrigued. Throughout her solo, she worked with the mystery of snake. She built a long snake of stones and decorated it with sand and pebbles. She drew a mock snakebite on her leg, which she colored with iodine from her first aid kit, and reflected on what she needed to know about being sharper and more direct in her life. She considered the relationship between poison and self-protection. Creating a snake dance, she took on the beauty of what she was afraid of. After the journey, when she got back home, she began to fulfill her lifelong yearning to paint by making water colors of mythical snakes.

The frontier we step into need not be a new career path, a new home, a new partner — although all of these may result. Usually it is something subtler, yet ultimately poignant and with a very wide reach. It may be so subtle, in fact, that we easily reject its summons or even refuse to acknowledge it. Those whispering intuitions, ideas that catch our attention at the periphery, dreams, stories that strike our curiosity or tug our heart, synchronicities, and other invitations that the world regularly sends us are new energy streams trickling deep in our unconscious. They’ll gather force if we let them. For Kara the call was to explore an old fear in many dimensions, and she ended up claiming her own power and authenticity, as well as her creative voice, as a result. For others it may be to learn a skill, contact a person, speak up, volunteer, say no for once, or say yes and mean it.

Stepping into the wild of ourselves is stepping into a mystery that we can never solve, but must ceaselessly explore. It’s an act that demands a combination of daring and faith — daring because there’s no guarantee of what lies ahead, faith because we have to step anyway, since our whole life cries out to do so. And we acquire this pair of skills not by working hard to summon them up before entering that new territory, but by stepping first and walking our daring and faith into being. We do it by walking like lions.

The last time we got news of the old lions twilight was spreading over the veldt. Earlier, as the sun moved toward the horizon, we had stopped for a while at the south end of a large grassy field to watch three healthy young lionesses that were crouched side by side, all their attention focused on a large herd of wildebeest perhaps two hundred yards away. The male of the pride was nowhere in sight. Every now and then one of the females would rise up on her haunches in slow motion, stare even more fixedly at the prey, then settle slowly down. We watched back with equal intensity.

Shortly after we had driven on, the other guide from our lodge radioed our guide from his Land Rover to report that they had just spotted another, older pride heading in our direction. A current of fear and excitement shot through our group. This must be “our” old pride that was coming. Would there be a fight? The young pride had obviously claimed that territory and was on the verge of snatching a meal from it. Would the older pride challenge them? Given the physical condition of the old lions, we had no doubt who would win. Although evening was falling, everyone wanted to see what would happen, so we headed back in the direction we’d come, driving this time from the north end of the field, the direction from which the intruding pride was making its way.

Almost the last thing we saw as the shadows thickened into black was one of the females from the old pride walking calmly past our vehicle. Suddenly one of the young lionesses emerged from the brush and approached her. They paused. Briefly they sniffed at each other. And then the young female flopped down and rolled onto her back, belly up, showing her submission. As the old lioness continued on, the younger one rose and slunk away, belly close to the ground.

Now our Xhosa guide, Giyani, flipped on the spotlight. Each night, as we drove back to the lodge, he would hold this large light and flick it back and forth, up and down in the darkness on either side of the track we bumped over, and miraculously he would illuminate such rarities as a giant slug or a feral cat. Now what we saw in the beam was the old lion. He was about twenty yards in front of us, and he was walking across the ground that the younger pride had occupied only half an hour earlier.

We had never seen him walk like this before, had never imagined he was capable of it. He was walking in large zigzags across the grassland. This was no weaving walk, however, not the walk of a feeble creature who had lost direction and balance. It was a walk that said, I know this ground. On all sides I know it and I claim it with my walking of it. The lionesses followed, each charting her own course over. They were, as Thoreau said, toeing the line between past and future. The younger pride had slipped away into the night. Not even Giyani’s skill with the spotlight could find them.

A friend of mine, who is 26 years old, said to me the other day, “We’ve been living in Plan B for too many years. The old ground is shifting under our feet. Everything is new. It’s a great time to go back to Plan A.”

He’s right. And his wisdom is especially relevant for those of us who are stepping into the territory of our second journey. Although some may tell us, and we ourselves may be tempted to believe, that the most desirable frontier is closed to us and belongs to someone else now, it is ours if we claim it — maybe not in the way we imagine, probably not as we might have when we were younger, but in a wild, bold new way that is defined by our experience, guided by our passion and curiosity, and fueled by our awareness of the precariousness and preciousness of every day of life on earth.

Back at our lodge on the edge of the veldt, we sat on the veranda talking while oil-burning torches gilded the ripples in the black river running below. Johann explained in detail what had happened earlier on the field. The young lions had clearly claimed that territory, he said. However, they backed off “because they have so much respect for the old lions.”

Going with the Flow 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.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
— Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3

For many years I’ve been suspicious of the medical establishment, preferring natural methods of healing like homeopathy, osteopathy, naturopathy. In many ways, I hold Theodore Roszak responsible for this. Once you begin to question the mainstream culture and explore a “counter” culture, you question all things conventional.
The theory behind these natural approaches to health and healing is that you work with the body in its own efforts to heal. You work with the forces of life. You understand that the body wants to heal and you find ways to cooperate.

I thought of this recently as I was reading Roszak’s The Making of an Elder Culture and realized that working with the Elder Culture is like working with the body’s effort to heal itself: Roszak argues that social change comes easiest when you cooperate with the forces that are already at work. Three of the forces of the elder culture are ideas I’ve been advocating for a long time: living more simply, slowly, and with greater reflection.

Roszak argues that as people age, most begin to cut back on consumerism, reduce their busyness and frantic pace, and spend more time in reflection about what’s important and what matters. Roszak says that elders do these things naturally, and that because the baby boomers are still a large group, they will continue to affect the whole society just as they always have.

So it gives me hope to feel that I’m working with the forces of healing that are part of the Elder Culture: the urge to simplify and slow down and live more deliberately.

Several years ago I wrote The Circle of Simplicity, and have worked for many years helping people understand these ideas. I think of Simplicity on two different levels. On one level it’s about limiting your outer wealth so you can have greater inner wealth. It’s cutting back on your consuming so that you can save money and afford to work less so you can have more time to pursue your interests and convictions.

But I like to think about Simplicity in a deeper way: I think of it as “the examined life,” making conscious choices about the effects of your behavior on the well-being of people and the planet. It’s stripping away the inessential so you have time for the essential. It’s living deliberately instead of being manipulated and deceived. Put succinctly, it’s taking time to stop and think and choosing your life based on your values. It’s cutting back so your life becomes richer. Less is more.

This definition makes the concept of Simplicity tremendously exciting! It’s deciding for yourself, after careful deliberation, what the “good life” is. Almost always, it is choosing to cut back on much of the stuff we buy, getting rid of the junk we don’t need. It is “life near the bone, where it is sweetest,” as Thoreau puts it.

The problem with Simplicity is that even though people are drawn to it, they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid they’ll never have fun again! I understand that reaction. People aren’t having much fun at all these days —what with our frantic lives and the worry about the troubled economy. Of course people are worried that there’s little to enjoy. Certainly happiness has been on the decline for the last several years, and things are getting worse. So people are worried about being happy! As one young man said to me, “What is that thing you’re involved in, the self deprivation movement?”

But if someone isn’t enjoying life more when they simplify, they’re doing it wrong! Remember Thoreau’s words, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow.” Living is so dear! How wonderful! But most people see Simplicity as a form of dreary drudgery.

And so, I began to look for another way to talk about Simplicity, and I discovered the “slow food” movement! Started as a joke when McDonald’s moved into Rome, it’s become a worldwide movement. The Slow Food movement says that the fast food style of life is all wrong. We’re supposed to be eating good food with good friends, good conversation, taking a couple of hours to enjoy ourselves.

Ultimately slow means we’re supposed to be savoring our lives. So I wrote Slow is Beautiful, seeing Slow as a way to experience all of life. Slow families, slow movies, slow thinking, slow reading. At the heart of Slow is the idea that we’re supposed to be thoroughly engaged with life, moving in a leisurely manner so that we can feel and think deeply. I even came up with an acronym: Sustainable Lives of Wonder.

That’s what Slow means to me: truly experiencing Thoreau’s words that “living is so dear.”

And so, when I read The Making of an Elder Culture, and discovered that Roszak thinks that living more simply and slowly and more deliberately is what happens naturally as we age, I thought, Yes! Move with that flow, move with the tide. Living more simply and slowly and deliberately, the Boomers will do as they have done throughout their lives — they will bring about change in the wider culture because of their sheer numbers. They will set the standard for the good life — slow and simple and deliberate. They’ll help us learn how to savor life, to appreciate it, to enjoy it.

And so I’ll continue to work to urge people to live more simply and slowly and deliberately, except now I’ll do it knowing that the elder culture is moving quietly to support these changes. I’ll be moving with the tide, more effectively bringing about change.

It’s like my health practices that work with life’s urge to heal, to grow and blossom. This urge to heal must be worked with, and this is what we’ll do with the elder culture.

Seeking an Elder Culture by Connie Goldman

Formerly on the staff of National Public Radio, Connie Goldman is an award-winning radio producer and reporter. For almost 30 years her public radio programs, books, and speaking have been exclusively concerned with the changes and challenges of aging. Grounded in the art of personal stories collected from hundreds of interviews, Connie”s presentations are designed to inform, empower, and inspire. Her message on public radio, in print, and in person is clear — make any time of life an opportunity for new learning, exploring creative pursuits, self-discovery, spiritual deepening, and continued growth. Her books include The Ageless Spirit, Secrets of Becoming a Late Bloomer, The Gifts of Caregiving: Stories of Hardship, Hope and Healing, Late Life Love: Romance and New Relationships in Late Years, and Tending the Earth, Mending the Spirit: The Healing Gifts of Gardening. Visit her Web site at congoldman.org.

Old age, I’ve decided, is a gift. I am now, probably for the first time
in my life, the person I have always wanted to be.
— Anonymous

“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Americans have an almost insatiable appetite for staying young, for remaining unwrinkled, thin, and youthful. Millions struggle in some way to resist, delay, deny, outwit, or camouflage the dreaded enemy — aging. Some resort to surgically altering their appearance to maintain the illusion tthat they’re younger than they actually are. Our culture, our advertising, marketing, fashions, and conversation cling to the ingrained myth that maintaining one’s youth is the prime value. Somehow that implies that a person who is older is of less value in a culture geared to productivity and consumerism. These have fed our endless efforts to retain the appearance of youth.

I know there are new words in our vocabulary created to soften our negative images of aging; successful aging, creative aging, active aging, and positive aging are only a few. These phrases are often used by healthcare plans or groups and organizations promoting healthy programs or exercise. They have used these terms wisely to encourage health and continuing mobility. Yet the media, advertising, and very often personal comments interpret successful aging as an anti-aging message: “Look like this model” or “buy this product” and hang onto your youthful appearance and lifestyle.

My mission for these many years has been to get people to appreciate that aging isn’t just about what we might lose as we age, but what we gain. For many years I’ve collected hundreds of interviews and recorded conversations with elders. I believe in the power of people’s thoughts and words— that they give us deeper understanding of oneself, of deeper meaning and purpose in life. They speak of continuing growth, spiritual deepening, insights, awareness, and wisdom. Youth has been oversold, and aging has value that we as a culture haven’t acknowledged. I believe an elder culture can, and eventually will, exist. For some it already exits.

I recently met a woman in her late 80s who commented to me on her stage of life with this remark: “The journey in between who I once was and who I am now becoming is where the dance of life really takes place.” In another conversation, I asked a woman if she would tell me the best thing about being 75. Without hesitating a moment she replied: “That age has given me what I’ve been searching for my entire life; it gave me, me!”

The late actor Ossie Davis shared his views on aging with me when he was in his 80s: “I would say that age is that point of elevation from which it is easier to see who you are, what it is you want to do, and from which you find yourself closer to the very center of the universe. Living through many changes, through many years, you get a sense of continuity. Age makes knowledge, tempers knowledge with experience, and out of that comes the possibility of wisdom.”

Several writers have stated this point of view in their own way. Here are the words of only a few:

“In the second half of life, our old compasses no longer work. The magnetic fields alter. The new compass that we need cannot be held in our hand, only in our hearts. We read it not with our mind alone, but with our soul. Now we yearn for wholeness.” (Mark Gerzon)

“The task of the midlife transition is to make peace with the past and prepare for the future… midlife brings with it an invitation to accept ourselves as we truly are.” (Paula Payne Hardin)

“One of the good things about getting older is that life becomes so precious on a day-to-day basis. I think I’ve always had a certain amount of daily joy, but now I find it even more so — the sight of a clear sky which doesn’t come all that often, or being out in the country, or now in the spring where the trees are just the greenest they’ve ever been, and even the colors that people wear. I feel my senses have become heightened. I know that some scientists think that our senses become dimmed with age, but I think it’s just the reverse!” (Eve Merriam)

“I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say, ‘Of what?’, I can only answer, ‘We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be a discovery.’ I want to say ‘If at the end of your life you have only yourself, it is much. Look, and you will find.'” (Florida Scott Maxwell)

“All of us want to live a long time, but no one wants to grow old. With blinders on, we march through life pretending we’ll always be the way we are today…….our mission is to teach people how to age on purpose.” (Seattle Times Columnist Liz Taylor)

To me, “aging on purpose” is part of the process of embracing the changes and challenges that come with growing older. By opening up to accepting who you are now — that you’re not who you were — we can become aware of new opportunities to thrive and grow in our later years. Age comes with the responsibility of planning, not only for one’s health care and financial stability, but for activities that give both pleasure and purpose to life. That personal challenge that has been present in our younger years and remains our responsibility as we age. One woman told me, “I admit that my aging was unexpected but quite beautiful. I have grown to enjoy my hair and face as it is now. I have new hobbies, I take classes, I have new friends. I actually have found great joy in my aging.” Others I’ve spoken with validate that kind of positive acceptance of attitude and challenge.

76-year-old Ellen told me: I know one thing for sure — you’ve got to wake up in the morning with direction, some purpose that will shape your day, something to do. That meaning, that purpose, takes charge. It gives you the energy to get through the day. It’s very important that I say once more that I’m happier, more content, more pleased with my life than at any time in my many years. Aging is a wonderful, unexpected opportunity. I look at this time of my life as the very best time of my life.

64-year-old Irene shared this thought: When I am with my women friends we laugh a lot about our shortcomings that have to do with getting older, and we share a wonderful camaraderie. We care much less what impression we make on others; we have become more ourselves. We often talk of having learned to distinguish between what is important and what isn’t that important. That is an accomplishment, a wisdom that has come with older age, and I continue to grow.

82-year-old Betty said this: So in the first half of life I went out to discover who I was in this funny, silly, dark, frustrating world. Then came the unease of the middle years and then came the opportunity, no—it’s more than that—to go inward. In order to respond to the call, to even hear it, I had to say no to so many seductive calls to be active and busy in the same way I was. I know that now is my time to simplify and listen to my still small voice within, the deepest part of myself. And that’s what I would tell others, because it’s available to all of us.

The challenge of aging isn’t to stay young. We must not only grow old, but grow whole and come into our own. The aging process is woven into human destiny. All must embrace the challenge to understand who they are, now that they’re not who they were. If we accept ourselves fully as each of us age, we will create an elder culture in which we think differently, not only about ourselves but about the world around us.

Hopefully, the struggle to retain youth will also diminish for both the media and the world of advertising. Hopefully, too, individuals will willingly and openly embrace their later years. Those changes will be the seeds to an elder culture that looks at bigger truths, acts in a more socially concerned manner, takes responsibility for the environment, and views all life as a gift. Maybe, just maybe, an elder culture could teach the young that war, killing, and cruelty can be replaced by a sincere regard for other humans. Ah, then the true value of a long life would become a reality!

Spring’s Stirrings: The Art of Being a Beginner by John G. Sullivan

In spring we are all children again. We experience beginnings — life on the move, arising before our eyes. Everything new. Everything now. “Now the ears of my ears awake. Now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”1

My teaching colleagues suggest that when we are tempted to say: “It’s difficult — I can’t,” we shift to saying “I am a beginner at this. I can seek help. I can learn.” 2 This is compassionate counsel. We are all beginners in many arenas. The invitation is to help one another.

Beginners in many arenas. Apprentices — with some skill— in others. Masters and virtuosos rarely.3 In the spring, new growth and the awe and joy of beginnings.Zen practitioners gives us an even deeper perspective by celebrating “beginner’s mind” throughout all the circumstances of our lives. Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki tells us:

In Japan we have the phrase shoshin,
which means “beginner’s mind.
The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind…
Our “original mind” includes everything with itself.
It is always rich and sufficient within itself…
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything;
it is open to everything.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities;
in the expert’s mind there are few.4

Consider the season of spring and the notion of “beginner’s mind.” Can we carry this touch of spring into all the seasons of a year or a life? Ancient Chinese healers said “yes.” They taught that all of the seasons were present in any of the seasons. To be sure, the note of spring is sounded most strongly in the season of spring. However, with practice, we can hear the note of springtime beginnings in summer and autumn and winter too. The art of being a beginner is evident when we are at the stage of youthful student. (And we remain students life-long.) The art of being a beginner has a different flavor when we cultivate it in the summer of our householder years. And, as we enter the later years of life — the autumn and winter stages — surely we are a beginner at doing this phase of life too. In short, there is a permanent place for being a beginner wherever we are in our life.

Constant Beginnings

In a sense, we are always beginning again. We get good at kindergarten and then we move to first grade. Just when we are getting the hang of elementary school, we move to middle school and then high school. We learn how to operate in high school and, in a flash, we begin again in college. After our school years, we start anew in the work world. We are novices, rookies, still wet behind the ears. Perhaps we marry and have barely adjusted to marriage, when we begin again with children. And so it goes. When we move into mature competence at our work and a settled feeling of seeing the children into adulthood, retirement arrives. And we begin again, here, seeking out what it means to be an elder, what it means to simplify and enter the deep waters. How do we preserve beginner’s mind, in the best sense, throughout the seasons of a life?

Here is a nursery rhyme:

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He had whiskers on his chin again
Along came the wind and blew them in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan….Begin again.

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He kicked up an awful dinnegann
Because they said he must not sing again
Poor old Michael Finnegan….Begin again.

There is likewise a comic Irish ballad called “Finnegan’s Wake.” In the song, Tim Finnegan dies. His body is laid out at his house for an Irish wake, complete with the expected food and drink. As the evening progresses, the wake turns into a brawl, “woman to woman and man to man.” A noggin of whiskey goes flying and spills on the corpse. Tim Finnegan awakes! A “wake” and “awake.” Round and round. We are all Finnegan and we constantly “Begin again.”

Beginning again after a fall

“Time for you to get back up,” my father said. I was young, riding horseback, and had taken a serious spill. After checking to make sure the damage was not dire, my father made sure I got back on the horse. “Time to get up and continue,” he said.

Consider beginning again after a fall. Sometimes, the fall is something out of our control. A setback, a natural disaster, a disappointment, a betrayal, an injustice suffered. Sometimes the fall is our doing. We caused the suffering to others and to ourselves and to the web of relationships that surrounded us. Furthermore, our harsh words or deeds hardened the hearts of those affected.5 What is needed is a reversal — metanoia, in the Greek — a change of direction.

Here beginning again means to “true ourselves up,” to remember and return to who we are at our depth, to heed the call of our larger and deeper self. The Roman Catholic tradition advised three steps and called them (1) confession, (2) contrition, and (3) satisfaction. We can think of them as mirroring three aspects of the present moment — the past-in-the-present, the present-in-the-present, and the future-in-the-present.

We find these three steps embedded in the Twelve-Step Program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Much earlier, we find them expressed poetically in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante places the three steps at the doorway to inner work.6 In Dante’s imagery, the first step is white marble, polished like a mirror. The second step is rough, black and broken, the color of grief. The third step is blood-red porphyry, representing sacrifices needed to put things right. The three steps are the steps of confession, contrition, and satisfaction. Here is how we might think of them:

Confession: The marble mirror asks us to admit what we have done — to say it out loud, preferably to another human being, to own the action that caused harm — whether an act of commission or omission.
Contrition: The black step invites us to bring our heart into the picture. To feel and express sorrow for the suffering caused — to others and ourself and the web of trust that sustains us. This step also prompts us to ask for forgiveness from those we have wronged, where that is appropriate.
Satisfaction: The blood-red porphyry step asks us to amend our ways, to redirect our conduct, to repair, so far as possible, the harm we have caused. We are called to seek a future path more consonant with our own deep nature and the nature of our life together. We are asked to finish the “turn around” by restoring harmony, outwardly repairing the harm, and inwardly committing ourselves to install the practices and gather the support to proceed in healthier fashion. [Satis-facere = to make it enough]

This older way of beginning again after a fall is down-to-earth, honest and robust, much like tough love. We are called to face, in sorrow, what is unresolved in us, to dismantle destructive habits and to walk a more positive path. The practice of the three steps is not meant to have us dwell in guilt nor regret. In fact, such regression often is a kind of sentimentality in disguise. Instead the three steps point us to the inner work of practice whereby we stop, look and listen to what is ours to do. The restorative work is done with compassionate gaze, with help at hand — remembering that we are not solitary beings but already and always enfolded in communal bonds. Where we were unskilled, we can develop skills. Where we were mindless, we can practice mindfulness. Where we were unloving, we can enkindle loving kindness.

The mystic Rumi encourages us:

Come, come, whoever you are.
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
This is not a caravan of despair.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve broken
your vows a thousand times, still
come, and yet again, come.7

Steady as we go — celebrating the Good and Beautiful

To reduce unnecessary suffering and to promote creative possibility for our common life — a worthy mission. The three steps, like three notes on a xylophone, aid us to reverse patterns that diminish life. Yet there is another side — to affirm and celebrate the good and the beautiful. This is also a part of a daily “beginning again.”

How do you keep the music playing?
How do you make it last?
How do you keep the song from fading too fast?
How do you lose yourself in someone and never lose your way?
How do you not run out of new things to say?
And since we know we’re always changing, how can it be the same?
And tell me how year after year you’re sure your heart will fall apart each time you hear her/[his] name?
I know the way I feel for you is now or never.
The more I love the more I am afraid
that in your eyes I may not see forever.
If we can be the best of lovers yet be the best of friends,
If we can try with every day to make it better as it grows
with any luck, then I suppose the music never ends.8

Suppose we distinguish between phenomena and the stories we tell about the phenomena.9 Then we can ask: When I go home today, do I see my spouse or parent as phenomena-ever-able-to-surprise-me or do I see that spouse or parent as covered over with stories so I do not have to see anew and listen anew and respect anew and love anew? When I go to the place where I work or volunteer, do I see my co-workers as phenomena-ever-able-to-surprise-me or do I see them as storied over? How do we keep the music playing? How do we make it last? Is not each day a great gift of beginning anew, always anew?

A Chinese saying instructs: “Renew yourself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again.” I would amplify by adding: “Renew your relationships completely each day; do it again and again and forever again.”

Dwelling always at the beginning

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Amen.” At our core, we are linked to the revolving universe and the Ever-present Origin — the still point of the turning world, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.10 In the eternal present, before creation, so teaches Islam, we — the human ones — said “Yes” to God.11 We agreed, in a time before time, to serve in what we might call the Great Work and the Great Love. Such primal directedness is inscribed in our very being. In the biblical account, we are created in the image and likeness of God.12 To dwell always at the beginning is to engage in remembrance of ourselves in relationship to the Great Mystery, the ground and goal of our being and becoming.

At the deepest level, we stand at this point — in time and out of time. Foolish beings of wayward passions13 yet touched, through and through, by the divine. To see one another in this way is to love with exquisite courtesy. As if the play were ending and we let go of our roles to take a bow. Brothers and sisters of royal lineage. Realizing that we are and are not the roles we play.

Forever Young

We live in a youth culture. When youth is the measuring stick, then, as we age, all seems to be decline. Perhaps we have confused youth with vitality. To be vital, interested, engaged in ongoing learning and consistent renewal —perhaps this says it better. Earlier I spoke about how there was a touch of spring in every stage of life — student and householder, forest dweller and sage. A unique vitality for each task. If so, we can reclaim the words about youth, without having to cancel the gift of years and without having to pretend we are what we are not. I invite you to be blessed by listening to the Bob Dylan song, “Forever Young,” with new ears:

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young. 14

Notes

1 I am quoting the last lines of ee cummings’ well-known poem “I thank You God for this amazing day…” See Selected Poems of E.E. Cummings, ed. Richard S. Kennedy (New York: Liveright, 1994), p. 167.

2 I am thinking of my colleagues in the Master of Arts in Applied Healing Arts program at Tai Sophia Institute in Laurel, Maryland. See http://www.tai.edu

3 I think here of distinctions used in the EST training of Werner Erhard with its reliance on some of the work of Fernando Flores.

4 See Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1970), p. 21.

5 “Sheikh Muzaffer [a modern spiritual teacher in the Sufi Halveti-Jerrahi order] 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 and Soul: The Sufi Psychology of Growth, Balance and Harmony (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1999), p. 62.

6 See Dante, The Purgatorio, Canto IX.

7 See Coleman Barks, translator, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 225.

8 How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” Music by Michel Legrand, lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman (WB Music-ASCAP).

9 For more on this key distinction, see my book Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality (Laurel, MD: Tai Sophia Institute, 2004), especially the first three chapters.

10 The Ever-Present Origin is a phrase from Jean Gebser, the still point is an image from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and the phrase “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” comes from the last lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

11 I refer to what is called in Islam “The Day of Alast,” referring to a covenant between God and humankind prior to creation. “Am I not [a-lastu] your Lord [bi-rabbi-kum]? They [the humans] said, “Yes, we do testify.” However paradoxically expressed, this is a way to affirm who we are in the widest possible context. See Qu’ran 7:172.

12 See Genesis 1:26-27.

13 David Brazier (Dharmavidya), a teacher in the Amida or Pure Land strand of Buddhism, translates the Japanese word “bombu” as “a foolish being of wayward passion.” See David Brazier (Dharmavidya), Who Loves Dies Well: On the Brink of Buddha’s Pure Land (Winchester, UK: O Books Division of John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2007), p. 12.

Books of Interest: Two Women’s Reflections by Barbara Kammerlohr

Old Age: Journey into Simplicity
by Helen M. Luke
Morning Light Press, 1988

The Gift of Years:Growing Old Gracefully
by Joan Chittister
Bluebridge Books, 2008

The two books reviewed in this issue are both about the journey we must all make into our our essential self — a journey in which we willingly leave behind the trappings of the ego that seemed so important in youth and our second age. Both authors write of that phase of life that not only increases in importance with age, but — if we are to find peace and grace — requires that we travel alone with only vague directions and a map that at times seems useless. Helen Luke and Joan Chittister lived quite different lives, one Jungian analyst, the other a Benedictine sister. Their conclusions about the importance of old age in human development, however, are remarkably similar.

A short book of 131 pages, Old Age: Journey into Simplicity, is a collection of five essays written by a woman, well into her eighties, who spent her life studying the insights of Carl Jung. Her thesis is that, near life’s end, a point comes when we must choose how to go into our last years, how to approach death. The choice, Luke tells us, is “whether we will let go of the trappings of the ego so that a new man who is the creation of Mercy will be born, or whether we will hold on to the old man.”

These essays are not about one’s second journey. I myself, as I write this review, do not yet face that final choice that Luke is writing about; nor do most of my friends. We still possess the creative energy that serves the desires of ego. It is a time of good health and the freedom to choose from many different paths, to explore the fascinating creation of God — a time many describe as the best days of their lives. Gone is the 40-hour-work week and the demands of raising children. The sun gently kisses the colorful days of life’s autumn; the earth and our bodies treat us with kindness and in a gentle manner. We can still do anything we truly desire to do even, though we can no longer do everything we want. The journey Helen Luke writes about arrives in the end of the second journey, or perhaps it is a third journey. It is the time Reb Zalman calls the “late fall” or “winter” of life, a time when we are called upon to relinquish much that we have considered essential. Bodies no longer do our bidding, and we may find ourselves imprisoned in one that can no longer walk, talk, or do many of the essential functions needed for survival. We may be dependent on others for life itself. It is instructive, however, to be aware of positive choices and to make small ones as the days pass. Aging is a gradual process and seems to creep up on one.

Those readers who might be turned off by the thought of reading essays should fear not: Reading this book is more like diving into a fascinating story than plowing through an essay. Luke is the ultimate storyteller, adept at marshaling metaphorical passages from great literature (The Odyssey, King Lear, and The Tempest) to make her points. She retells these stories focusing on the symbols important to a Jungian view of the aging process. Readers with a love of stories similar to my own will find themselves having finished an essay thinking we were reading a story. Amazingly, we also find ourselves understanding how to apply the metaphor to our own situations. There has been no need to read in a disciplined way, concentrating on the arguments of an essay. It came naturally as the suspense of the story grew.

For instance, Luke takes us back to the time in The Odyssey when a seer foresaw Odysseus’s successful journey home. Few of us remember that he also predicted a second important journey for the hero. Some years after his return, he would take a journey into the inner kingdom — to a place where the residents had heard only rumors about the existence of the sea. There, after sacrificing animals such as the wild boar (a symbol of his masculine powers), he would plant his oar (another important symbol) and return home to journey out no more. Luke made quite a point of the necessity for both Odysseus and the sacrificial animals to come willingly to the ritual — a metaphor on aging that few can miss.

Not all readers of Itineraries will find themselves as fascinated by old age as this reviewer did. One must have come far enough on the second journey to recognize the road signs — those signs that counsel preparation for winter’s arrival and remind one that the end is nearing. A third journey, the one that leads inward and to eternity, approaches. This book is for those who are preparing to make the right choices and deal with, or at least prepare for, this last stage of life. Readers ready to undertake this important task will find guidance in the metaphors and symbols as they contemplate ways to deal with the next stage of life.

During her lifetime, Helen Luke was a much- sought-after lecturer, author, and analyst who devoted herself to the insights of Carl Jung. Born in England in 1904, she studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, then moved to the United States and established an analytical practice with Robert Johnson in Los Angeles. In 1962, she founded the Apple Farm Community in Three Rivers, Michigan, a center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives. In her later years, Helen Luke became to many the very model of the wise old woman. She died at Apple Farm in 1995.

Luke was the author of at least 35 books, ten of which are still available on Amazon.com. Those books include: The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine; Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy; Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of; and Woman, Earth and Spirit: The Feminine Symbol and Myth. A few years before her death, she was the subject of a documentary film, A Sense of the Sacred, hosted by Thomas More and including illuminating and inspiring interviews with Luke as well as with friends, colleagues, and admirers such as Dr. Robert Johnson, Peter Brook, and Sir Laurens van der Post.

The 40 short essays in The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully grow out of Sister Joan Chittister’s belief that the spiritual task of later life is embracing its blessings and overcoming its burdens. “There is a reason for old age,” she writes. Intention is built into every stage of life, and old age is no exception. It is the mental and spiritual attitudes that we bring to our challenges during this time of life that determine who we become as we advance from one age to the next.

“It is time for us to let go of both our fantasies of eternal youth and our fears of getting older, and to find the beauty of what it means to age well. It is time to understand that the last phase of life is not non-life; it is a new stage of life. These older years—reasonably active, mentally alert, experienced and curious, socially important and spiritually significant—are meant to be good years.” (p.xi)

In reading the essays, one quickly forgets that the author has spent her life in a religious order. This is not a book about mysticism, the Church, or even prayer. Chittister understands the mental and spiritual attitudes needed for aging well, and they are about getting down to practical business. She understands the pain and joy each attitude brings and quickly shows the reader practical ways of facing the realities of aging in a way that leads to grace, wisdom, and joy instead of pain. Her topics include: regret, fear, joy, transformation, sadness, wisdom, limitations, and many others — total of 40. Each essay closes with a summary of the burden and the blessing of the attitude under discussion.

The essay on Sadness will serve as a good example of how she deals with all topics. First, she explains sadness and its causes. Then, she offers the antidote.

Sadness comes because we

settle into a routine of friends and foods and places and plans and ideas. These things are our identity as well as our pleasure. They say who we are, who we have always been, where we belong and why.

…The cost of [this] familiarity is the angst of loss, the anxiety that comes with feeling more and more alone as the old commonplaces of life disappear… As one thing after another goes, there is our growing awareness that we are becoming a world unto ourselves, whom no one knows anymore.

The life that is gone is the life that shaped us. And what makes us sad is not so much that it isn’t here anymore—it’s the wondering whether what this life formed in us is still here or not. (pp.129-130)

The antidote to such sadness is realizing that life is still here. The old aspirations are still here. There is plenty of unfinished business for us to do. In fact, there is so much to do that we have no time, no right, to be sad. The implication is to get busy with the work you have to do and sadness will disappear.

The book is not meant to be read in one sitting; there is little entertainment here. It is deep, practical advice that takes time, attention, and contemplation to assimilate. Although I have read all the words, I am not finished with it. It may require years of re-reading and thought for integration to occur. I am optimistic, however, that the reward will be a wiser, happier, more graceful older me.

Sister Joan D. Chittister is a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, where she served as prioress of the community for 12 years. Sister Joan is the founder and current executive director of Benetvision, a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality that is also located in Erie. She is co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a UN-sponsored organization of women faith leaders working for peace, especially in the Middle East. She writes a weekly web column for the National Catholic Reporter called “From Where I Stand.” She has over 30 books to her credit. They include: The Cry of the Prophet, In My Own Words, Friendship of Women: The Hidden Tradition of Women, Twelve Steps to Inner Freedom, In Search of Belief, and 25 Windows Into the Soul: Praying with the Psalms.

Spring Poems, collected by John Clarke

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

— Mary Oliver

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined —
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

— by William Carlos Williams

The Tulips

Red tulips
living into their death
flushed with a wild blue

Tulips
becoming wings
ears of the wind
jackrabbits rolling their eyes

west wind
shaking the loose pane

some petals fall
with that sound one
listens for

— Denise Levertov

from Spring Giddiness

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

— Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Spring Is Sprung

Inner light germinates outer darkness.
Spring springs forward inside and out.
Little buddies wake old giants up from winter torpor.
Hibernation blossoms into waking flora dreams.

April’s cruel beauty runs roughshod over
whatever resists dying to live again.
Battered, we learn the hard way how, in and out,
light still may run the budding show.
However old we be, tiny friends refresh crusty soles
with tender shoots’ moist touch.

Slowly we learn to stand empty-handed,
like the old one begging at the scholar’s door.
There a prayer to Green Tara —
Botticelli Madonna, Bodhisattva, Kuan Yin,
Gaia, Mary, Sophia — Generosity of Very Being — she
who may be compared to the air we breathe —
evokes her kind, gratuitous disrobing,
grants us her gold-sprayed, leafy
green cloak as shelter and new life.

Beauty herself shares her present glow —
revives marrow of old bones in hope.

— John Clarke

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

— by James Wright