Conscious Aging

My grandparents Max and Lena Antenson, and me, 1958.

Today is the first day of winter, with a pale sun barely seeping through the damp air. I’m sitting stubbornly on the back deck wrapped in my heaviest sweater, trying to write about what it is like to be … I don’t know how to say this. A woman growing old? A woman aging? Or forget the woman part, what is it like just to be getting old now. We’re all so relatively healthy, we have so many more resources and solutions than our parents and grandparents did, and so many more expectations for ourselves. Read more »

As I wake up this morning, it takes a little while to remember where I am. I sit up in bed, pulling the quilt around me against the damp, and wait. Here it comes: the hills above Half Moon Bay. Old growth redwoods drip through the front window, and in the distance, fog rises off the Pacific. Wild geese, moving across the sky like a pack of barking dogs, are heading…where? What month is this? I wait again. Read more »

Paul & Sherry Walking on Deer Island, photo by Gail Horvath

The Hidden Secrets of Growing Old part 2: An Adventure so Exquisite

It’s a cool July morning with the Pacific fog sitting plump as a grey hen on the far hills. I love the way the mist hides us here in the flatlands for awhile, as if we were in a time out of time. When the sun breaks through around noon, I have a phone date with my niece Catherine. It will be 3 p.m. in Rhode Island. Ava’s still at day camp and the baby might be asleep. I tap the number into my cell phone and wait. No answer. Ten minutes later I try again. Someone picks up and I can hear Cat yelling in the background, calling goodbye. Now she’s shouting into the phone, “Hi Auntie Sherry! I’m just finishing my Filipino stick fighting lesson!”

Cat’s my god-daughter, my brother Howard’s second born. At 34, with two kids and her work as an acupuncturist and a terrific husband, she has a life that seems expressible mainly in exclamation marks. Cat is the child of my heart, the girlfriend-daughter I never had. To the amazement of our extended family, she and I tend to see the world pretty much through the same lenses. Our conversations reflect this, generally sluicing through the rush of our lives, washing out the gold along with the assorted detritus along the way. But once in a while, the pace slows down. Like now. Read more »

Parasol by Natasha P.

The Hidden Secrets Of Growing Old ~ Part 1:Pentimento

Sitting here on a May morning, curled up in my favorite spot on the chintz sofa in front of the picture window in our living room, I’m gazing at a single salmon colored rose just peeking out of its bud cover. It seems to glow with its own light. Slowly my view spreads out, easing into the quiet of the young day and drifting across Olive Avenue to the poplars in the distance.

A gust of wind shudders through the light green sheets of leaves, when—amazing!—a cold wet sting of ocean breeze slaps me in the face. In an instant, I’m smelling the briny whiff of the Atlantic Ocean as surely if I were back on the beach I used to walk as a child. How is it possible—a November wind bringing its salty self across half a century of time and a continent of space as I sit here on a summer morning in California?

This must be what my friend Joan meant some forty years ago when she told me about pentimento. I was in my early thirties then and Joan, who seemed very old to me, was in her late fifties. We’d just finished a long hike through in the green hills of southern Ontario. It must have been June because school was out and wildflowers were everywhere. We were resting on the grass, drinking from our canteens and gazing out over a field of willowy flowers with centers composed of tiny white blossoms.

“Queen Anne’s Lace,” Joan told me.

I was admiring them in my usual extravagant way, remarking on the delicacy of their faces and the graceful way they swayed in the wind.

“Where you see the flowers,” Joan replied, “I see a pentimento.”

I’d never heard the word. “It’s a painter’s term,” she said. “Canvas is so expensive that artists sometimes paint over their old pieces to have fresh surfaces. For awhile, this works just fine. The new painting completely obscures the old one. But in time the top layers grow transparent with age and then the earlier images bleed through. That’s pentimento.”

“Pentimento,” I repeated, liking the pleasant staccato of the word in my mouth.

“It comes from the Italian meaning ‘repentance,’” Joan told me. “Because the painter has changed his mind about the composition. But still, after awhile, the original is there too.” Read more »

by Ron Hines, PhD

When you encounter a question that won’t go away, it keeps pestering you, tapping at your inner doors and waking you too early in the morning or keeping you from sleep at night.  Sometimes, if you ignore it enough, your question will go underground.  But eventually, unless you work very hard indeed, it will begin to call you to itself until, almost without your noticing,  you will find yourself turning  towards your question like a flower growing towards sunlight.

This is true throughout our lives, of course, the part about turning towards our questions.  But somewhere in the intense busyness of raising children and finding or keeping a job and maybe a career and a marriage and remembering to have sex and keep up our friendships and get some exercise, the questions that seemed so pressing in our twenties—Who am I?  What am doing here?  Is there a life purpose that is calling me?  What’s most important?— seem to molt.  Like wild birds shedding their worn down feathers, our big questions may become flightless for decades, seeking a protected habitat in our unconscious.

But once we find ourselves living past midlife, our questions begin to poke up again.  Just pin feathers at first, soft and tentative, they come in dreams and in our small wandering thoughts.  Sprouting from what seemed to be bald or barren, full feathers of questions take shape as images or lines from poems or long forgotten memories that perplex us in unfamiliar ways.  By the time we’ve passed sixty, new questions arrive to make us delve into what it means to be growing old now, at this time in history when so much in our world has been lost and so much is calling for a wisdom we haven’t yet found. Read more »

Path of Light by Bonnie Bisbee

In the story I told last time, Meeting the Wise Elder, when a baker named Rose turned 50, she was awakened by a question that would not go away. In desperation, she journeyed to meet a Wise Elder but when Rose asked her question, the Elder smacked Rose hard and kicked her out of the house.  Rose was outraged. It was not until later that she understood that questions don’t always have answers and what is more, that she was trying to give away her precious question for somebody else’s answer.

The first time I heard this story, I was about 50 myself and the conclusion felt like a knife slicing into my heart.  Wasn’t I doing all the time what Rose had done?  Looking in books, listening to teachers from many traditions, and asking my friends questions that really were mine to answer?  The story stripped bare my efforts to find other people, in person or in books or on tape, who would answer the deepest questions of my soul.  I was chagrined to discover how determined I had been to leave myself in order to find my own truth.

Over the years I’ve come to love the story of Rose and the Wise Elder. The shock of it has helped me to grow up.  Or, more exactly, to find my way to trusting and following my own questions to their source in wisdom.

I wonder if we all need shocks like this to stop looking outside ourselves for wisdom. I don’t know.  Maybe for you growing up happened gracefully, the scales dropping away from your eyes as you turned steadily to confront your own questions.  My process for a long time seemed not the least bit graceful but punctuated by shocks and jolts and surprises. I couldn’t fathom what to do with my questions if I didn’t give them away.

I think that is true for many of us but for a long time we don’t notice that we are trying to give our questions away.  Until finally we do.  And there is something about turning 50, or maybe it’s 60, or even 65, that makes certain kinds of fundamental questions more disturbing, or perplexing, or just plain persistent, than they were when we were younger.  And then some of us become as desperate as Rose was to find out how to be with the questions that will not go away.

I see the questions now like race horses, snorting and stamping their hooves in the starting paddock.  We can’t keep them there forever, turning our backs on them as if they weren’t great beasts panting to take off.  We are going to need to climb on, throw open the gates, and lean down close for the ride of our lives.  We’ll need to breathe with them and feel into their rhythm and in the end, what we’ll need to do most is to love them, to love our big questions because, as the great inventor George Washington Carver said, whatever we love will open its secrets to us.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross by Diana Vandenberg*

Here is a version of a story I first heard from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man many years ago.  I have changed a number of the details but never forgotten the essence of the story because it felt like a knife going into my heart.  It has come back to me now as I contemplate what it means to be a Wise Elder.

Once, in a tiny village in Eastern Europe, there lived a woman named Rose. She spent her days as a baker of breads with fragrances that wafted invitingly from her open window. Every morning, Rose and her husband Abe would wake in the earliest hours to prepare the yeast and knead and bake sourdough rye breads and grainy black breads and dark molassesy pumpernickels and, on Fridays, sweet egg challahs that were the talk of the village.

Each day when she awoke, Rose would lean over, kiss her husband, and swinging her feet to the floor, hum a little tune for the pure enjoyment of waking and being a baker of breads.  And so it was day after day until the year she turned 50. On the morning of her birthday,  instead of waking with a little song and a kiss for her husband, she lay in bed quietly, her brows knit in a small frown.  After several weeks of waking this way, she said to Abe, “There’s a question that won’t go away. Every morning it’s there, the same question. And I can’t think of an answer.”  She told Abe her question and asked if he knew what the answer was, but he said, no, he had no idea.

Next Rose asked her mother, and then each of her four sisters, and then her father and her neighbors on either side.  None of them had an answer either.  So Rose put on her good shawl and wrapped up a big loaf of double braided raisin challah as a gift and went to visit the Rebbe who lived across the river.  She told the Rebbe about her question that wouldn’t go away and how it was waking her every morning and disturbing her.  The Rebbe couldn’t answer her question either but he had an idea.  “There is a wise elder who lives in Chelm ,” he said, naming a town seven days distant.  “Maybe she can answer your question.”

So Rose prepared a pack with some blankets and food for the long journey, kissed her husband goodbye and set out for Chelm to ask her question of the elder.  Read more »

The only place to start is here, which is to say, in the middle of a life that has no true markers, however much you might try to find or create them.  Here has no need for markers.

It’s a center with no perimeter.  Which is a relief actually—to not have to worry about patting down one’s edges (that are always fraying anyway), or pulling them in or otherwise having to keep track of that fictional construction of I that we’re always fussing with, checking in the mirror to see if it’s still there and how much it has deteriorated since we last looked.

When did I start to notice that all this fussing and checking and tending was such a chore?  I think it happened backwards.  It was after the walls that were keeping here boxed in relaxed themselves, as if the tension that had held their molecules together couldn’t be bothered to get it up anymore.

It wasn’t dramatic.  It was, in fact, a very gradual and tender sort of process.  But at a certain point I noticed that my usual sense of hurtling through the backyards of life on a Bullet Train was gone.  Evaporated.  And here was the only place to be.  I was going to say, The only place I wanted to be, but it wasn’t like that.  It wasn’t a choice.  Here was, and is, what is real and everything else seems to be beside the point.

I hope I’m not driving you crazy with this.  I’m just trying to tell you how it is these days over here in Cronehood or Cronedom or Elderville or whatever you want to call this most interesting time of being alive in my late sixties.  And to explain why the idea of my making a map makes me feel like the handless maiden.  Read more »

Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph. D. is the co-author of the The Feminine Face of God: The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women and The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World. From her Jewish heritage, Sherry learned to love questions.  In her thirties, she met the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn Soen Sa Nim, studied with him and became Head Dharma Teacher at the Ontario Zen Center in Toronto. During this time, she also hosted a daily radio talk show on psychology and consciousness and co-produced (with Paul Ray) a four part documentary series for the CBC titled “Changing Our Minds.”

Another topic that fascinates Sherry is the process of becoming an elder in contemporary society. Currently she is writing a book on elders and what it is to truly ripen. She also leads inquiry groups for women, for elders, and for writers.

For more information about Sherry’s profound and inspiring body of work please visit her page in our Sacred Living Resource Directory, or click here to view all of her video on our site.