Eldering — by Lucky

I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t been there. Maybe you won’t either.

For me it took an experience, maybe it will for you too. But, I think that my experience is so rare, that I want to convey it to you, in hope that it will touch something in you, as it did in me.

 

I’ve spent a great deal of my life struggling with myself to just be myself. What I have observed in my self, was that I had a tendency to make myself into whatever form I thought I needed to be, to earn love, respect, and caring from important others. In other words, in order to be loved I betrayed myself. I got really good at it. I could fool others, even sometimes fool myself, but could never get beyond the feeling that I was only too willing to sell myself out.

 

I knew the pain associated with being untrue to myself. I felt lost in a world that could not, would not, make a space for one like me. It is too simple to just say I was alienated, although I did sometimes feel like an alien, the truth was, that I couldn’t find a place, because I didn’t trust my self enough to take a lasting form, one that anybody could relate too. I was a blob, a changeling, restlessly trying to be something, anything, but myself.

 

There is a huge pain, and deep disappointment, in realizing you want someone else to love you, because you cannot love yourself. Coming to such a place, feeling so far from oneself, being so emptily alone is really disturbing. It is also liberating. The stroke forced me to do what I always was loathe to do, look at myself. It made me grasp, rather desperately at first, that I had one more chance to learn to love, and that I had to start with me.

 

I have spent much of my life being a freedom fighter. I have always sought, and advocated for causes, that increased freedom. This was part of my values, and part of the way I convinced myself that I was on-track when I wasn’t. In all that time I never took on the greatest tyrant, the chief restrictor of my freedom, the treacherous ambassador determining my relationships, myself. The stroke put me in a locked room with him. Learning to love a tyrant is no easy matter (maybe especially if its you).

 

That last sentence is the story of my recent life. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I came to realize that the struggle to love myself was one of the greatest gifts I have to give. It was in the elder’s circle that the light came on. We had just completed going around the circle stating our names and sharing one thing that we liked about being elders. I had been paying attention because instead of the usual aches and pains of getting older the group was talking about what aging had given them. It turned out to be a lot, so much that freedom and richness filled the air, and filled me.

 

I was touched, as I had been before, by how much hardship had grown the people present. I was impressed by how unique, idiosyncratic, and self-possessed this same group of people was. Suddenly it dawned in me that having survived the years, undergone real hardships, and struggling to fight the good fight, and stay true to themselves, these people had been initiated, they were not just a group of old folks, they were elders.

 

In that moment several things rushed into my awareness. Eldering wasn’t just about getting old, it was about being ripened, initiated really, by life. Eldering also meant that these souls, through hardship, loss, love, diminishment, and struggle had become themselves, not completely, but just enough to make a real difference. They were the most subversive beings imaginable, the antidotes to a world gone materialistically mad, different in the only way that matters, free to be themselves.

 

Doubly surprising is the realization that the life-long work of becoming oneself can come to fruition, and can mean so much, not only for the self that has been struggling for freedom, but for the world that needs models, that needs to know that being different is possible.  Out beyond rules, roles, and shape-shifting for love, there is a way to actualize our existence, to give Life its due, to become free, to become what Life intended.

 

When I realized what eldering was I sensed the possibility of happiness. I saw, for the first time, that the freedom fight, the struggle to be myself, is synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. I will write more about happiness later, but for now I just want to bask in the glow that arises as I see that loving the tyrant, loving me, makes me one with, aligned with Life. And, that is what eldering is.

Waking Up in the Early ‘60s – by Edward Bear

I was born in 1938.  In the early ‘60s, I was living in Greenwich Village in New York and just waking up to life.  Some friends wanted me to meet a special woman.  She was just a few years older than me but reputed to be a true Earth Mother – an Astrologer and a sage.

We met one afternoon and, after tea and about an hour’s meeting, she had described me to myself so thoroughly I was astounded.  She was very comfortable and direct about my preferences in things, my weaknesses, my skills, hopes and current state of affairs. Meeting her changed my life. 

I was a relatively open-minded scientist up to that point who felt a stronger calling to the arts and mysteries of life and love   Now, if the positions of the stars and planets could influence and even predict future behavior and events, then it was clear there was so much more going on in existence than I had previously believed, I had to take still another, deeper look at everything.

After buying a book recommended by my Astrological friend, which I still have, I did what any former lab rat would do and set up an experiment to test the validity of basic Astrological assumptions. 

I taped big swaths of butcher paper up on the wall that I faced above the kitchen table in my apartment.  I wrote in twelve categories, one for each Astrological sign, and made areas for men and women that I could study as I ate.  Then I began asking all of my friends and relatives for their birthdays.  I only asked people I knew well enough to know something of their working lives, personalities and habits. 

I kept filling in names in the different Astrological fields as the lists of people grew to significant numbers.  I would study them over breakfast every to see if this Leo was like that, or if Scorpio men and women had similar Scorpio-like traits that should be recognizable.  I was amazed to see how uncommonly accurate the predictions usually were.  Conducting this experiment cost me the respect of my very scientific father who probably felt that his son had lost his mind into drugs and fantasies. No... I was just looking into some other disciplines.

But seeing that something as non-rational as Astrology could offer valid information, insight and understanding of human behavior at some level forced me to accept that existence as I had come to know it was way more mysterious and not quite as easily decipherable as my training would suggest. That realization was humbling and liberating for me and became a key catalyst in opening my mind to new life and understanding thereafter.  Experience has kept the process going indefinitely. 

The Astrologer, who so read me like a book, said that I would be a guide and advisor to those who immediately followed, and that same position would widely apply to a great many of my vintage, the ‘37-‘38 crowd.

*

It has seemed to me that we were great innovators and trend-setters for the Boomers.  There were so many profound changes in existence during our youth that it was unavoidable. 

An easy example for me to cite is the development of “high fidelity” music production in the 1960’s. That technological leap alone put us so much closer to the artists that were having such a major effect on youth at the time.  The trueness and richness of the sound that became available on record put us right next to the artists, intimately within “breathing range” of their inspiration. 

Since music is so much about, and connected to, the emotions, it is not at all surprising that we broke the bonds of traditional emotional and physical repression in the ‘60s and set in motion thoughts about sex, love and behavior that changed our world forever. 

**

But what makes us who we are to a great extent is that we have an unusually rosy view of what the world is and what people are like.  This is not a fault and shouldn’t be taken as a criticism.  It’s an “is,” that’s all.

The '30s were very hard on people, but the upside was that so many Americans came together to help each other through those times, that it became normal for most people to be inclined to give the other person a hand when possible.  It was sweet lemonade from lots and lots of lemons.

WW II drew the nation together even further, as only a major external threat like that could.  Americans, at least white Americans, pulled themselves together even closer in most aspects of life and work.  That feeling of unity on a large scale that our vintage grew up with was normal and helped shaped us and our views of life in profound ways.

The ‘50s were repressive in social matters but were also expansive as our nation grew stronger and wealthier and was teeming with opportunities from the Roosevelt-Truman era policies that were largely based on helping everyday people. 

That had not been the normal structure of governments prior to that, not even of the original U.S. Government our revered Founding Fathers created.  The rights and freedoms they established, as lofty as they were, applied to men and not women, and to white men at that, and really to white men of European descent, which I believe, represented about 17% of the people living in the original 13 colonies at the time.  

But we kept improving the Dream of American Democracy.  Slavery was ended in a torrent of blood and destruction.  Women became full citizens and were allowed to vote in 1920, which, for the record, is after my mother was born.  She is still alive and living independently. 

My mother, Rose, was almost married off to a man she didn’t like.  It was as though her parents “owned” her and had the right to give her to someone without her having any say in the matter.  I am alive to mention this tale because she had the courage to run off with my father before her parents snatched her adult life away from her.  Times change.

We are different, I believe, partly because we grew up in times when our parents’ generation were unusually giving and heroic in facing the economic hardships of the '30s and World War II in the ‘40s.  We benefited from their sacrifices and their wish to give us a better life and a better world.  Our growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s was a blessing because the United States had truly become the Land of Promise as never before.

Our generation carried The Promise a lot further and expanded life, love and possibility to levels unheard of since before the Dark Ages.  We are products of a particular time that infused us with behaviors and views of humanity that are more idealistic than the reality of these times, certainly, and most times, probably.  

But reality becomes what we make of it through our vision, hard work, knowledge, wisdom and patience.  I don't have to tell you how much the '60s changed us and the world at the time, and how deeply it had to have affected those who immediately followed.

The vision we brought earlier is desperately needed now to help humanity save itself from the ecological disasters that are surely coming if we don't change our blindness and arrogance into vision and compassion in very short order.  We may guide, but others will have to implement.

Through the happenstance of time, we came to experience and know humanity's beauty and brilliance more intimately than the madness, selfishness and absurd stupidity that are currently gripping the United States and much of the rest of the world.

We are a different crowd for good reasons - a group imbued with strength and creative gifts that impacted the world and opened life to new vision. 

There can be no doubt that we hit the right combination of parenting and circumstance, scholastic and scientific growth, and advances in health, nutrition and community that were the gifts to us that became the gifts  we, in turn, generated further to and for others. 

Wisdom — by Lucky

“Wisdom is directly proportional to the size of the group you take responsibility for.”

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi

I have been wondering about wisdom. As part of an elder’s circle I’ve been thinking about what constitutes the wisdom in this group of human beings. I don’t think I understand what I’ve noticed here, but I think I’ve got a part of it, and if that is true, I think that there is something here for all of us. Here is what I mean.

It is true I’ve found perspective being amongst these people. I can see a lot of things I couldn’t see before, or could only see dimly, partially. My sight is sharpened as it is failing, but this isn’t the source of the wisdom.  I can see the way the years have brought some things into focus, and that is good, but it isn’t what has moved folks to go beyond themselves. Sight, seeing the bigger picture, certainly is edifying, it brings about a change in consciousness, but it doesn’t go all the way to wisdom.

What is it — what moves a person into a realm that goes beyond conventional ways of knowing? As I sit with these folks I sense the presence of a broader way of knowing, of feeling. I can feel it. It is in the group, sometimes it comes out of someone’s mouth, behavior, or demeanor. Sometimes it sits over, or amongst, us like an atmosphere, about to storm through us, or someone amongst us. Sometimes it is ripe in the silence. Sometimes I am suddenly pierced, something in another’s words, or quietness, takes me away, and simultaneously delivers a chastened, or healed, heart. I want to cry, to exalt, to exclaim my undeserved privilege. Sometimes it just hurts so good.

I have been after this experience for a long time. For me, it started in a community-building workshop, in 1986. I felt something, a presence I knew was bigger than the group gathered that spring day. It included all of us, was somehow of us, but went way beyond us. I had the audacity to believe then that whatever it was, was something that could be integrated and made a regular experience of the world. I’m glad I had that impulse because it has kept my butt sitting in large circles paying attention and trying to learn. Now I’ve had enough experiences of what I’ve come to call communitas that I can tell when its present and when to shut up and listen real hard.

And I’ve been changed. I don’t know how much is a result of the stroke (though I do recommend near death experiences), and how much the world appearing as a circle changed me, but I do know the combination created some kind of strange hybrid awareness. Now I’m always in a circle, always feeling my self, extending out in disconcerting and overwhelming ways. I’d say I simply like it, if my circle of caring didn’t bring in so much human suffering. The Universe now is my circle, and I am just a part of it, trying to act consistent with the whole, and failing magnificently. Practicing being part of the circle has disrupted my life, so much that I no longer think it mine, and delivered me into a circle I intuited, but really had no idea about.

Oh, but I’m trying to write about wisdom, not about circles. I can’t help it, they seem to be linked in my mind. Its like, when I’m in the circle of elders, being in a gold mine, and discovering there are many rich, untapped veins, just calling out to be explored. I feel the rush of sudden wealth and an urge to share such abundance. The location of this mine is a secret though. Strangely it can be sensed, but remains hidden, right here in the midst of us. I can feel its presence, know its here, feel the wealth it implies, and am helpless to go there, to cavort in our shared wealth, until more of us open the doors. Which doors? Our doors, whatever that means.

Wisdom, of the sort that is present in the elder’s circle, is an emergent quality. It becomes manifest as we invest in each other. Not the passive kind of investment we’ve been taught, like into stocks, but a more active, even interactive kind of investing, of shared knowing, caring and responsibility. I really believe that it has been my investment in the others of the circle that has made the circle come to life for me. And, I know the circle, especially the big, unpredictable, other-populated, never safe, circle delivered me more fully into the wonderful mystery of Life.

What is wisdom? I don’t know, maybe its like pornography. Didn’t one famous, but now forgotten justice of the Supreme Court once say, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Yes, I think wisdom is like that, but I can’t help but feel it is more likely another group of humans, motivated by something more exquisite and elusive than pornography, that create it. Like pornography, it probably starts between the ears but goes to the heart instead of the loins.

I’m sure that one dimension of this experience relates to the quote above. Large circles, circles filled with conflict, chaos, diversity, and differing capacities have served as microcosms of the larger macrocosm and have thus stretched me out in a variety of directions. I think I have been exposed to wisdom, and grown wiser, because of those circles. With exposure to them, like the elder’s circle, my circle of caring has grown, and with it, I have been grown.

From here, wisdom is mystery unfolding, in whatever circle I care enough about to be broken by.

l/d