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THE CENTER FOR THIRD AGE NEWSLETTER – JULY 2009
1. FATHER WILLIAM’S MONTHLY MUSINGS
2. “NO, NO, SIT THERE ALONE IN A ROOM.”
3. “OH, THE HELL WITH THAT, LET ME JUST DO IT!”
4. “PERHAPS HAPPINESS...COMES MOST WHEN IT ISN’T PURSUED.”
5. THIS MONTH'S LINKS
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THIS MONTH’S QUOTE – MARY OLIVER
”Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
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1. FATHER WILLIAM’S MONTHLY MUSINGS
July Greetings, Good Friends...
We have just celebrated a very wet month including Independence Day here in Warren, Vermont, where the rain stopped just long enough for our parade to proceed and almost finish. There is a mythology about the powers that be not raining on our parade, and it definitely gained strength this year.
Perhaps because summer has yet to begin in our neck of the woods, I reread Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” and it motivated me to think about what I might do with my “one wild and precious life” in my 70’s. I’m finding guidance and support in many places, and I’ve included three in this newsletter.
The first is Rod MacIver’s most recent “Heron Dance” newsletter. He has been documenting his very personal journey of the last few weeks and has helped me think more deeply about the paradox of BOTH “paddling faster than the current” AND making “an art form of relaxation.”
Next, Bolton Anthony, founder of “Second Journey”, describes how he is using his Third Age maturity to make a difference in the outer world, or, as he puts it, to “contribute in some small way to the ‘coming of the Kingdom.’”
And in the third piece, Pico Iyer offers a glimpse into his choice of trading Rockefeller Center for a two-room apartment in Kyoto and living in “The Joy of Less.”
Even though Rod's, Bolton’s and Pico’s life settings and choices are different to my own, I find echoes of myself in each of their musings. Personally I’m drawn inward toward greater relaxation into the mystery of existence, and as I spend more and more time in solitude, my mind and heart keep presenting me with hundreds of bits from my past to review and reconsider.
These come as distinct images in which I relive the situations and my behaviors in them. The vast majority of these reflections, while causing me a great deal of discomfort, are also proving very freeing.
The consistent emotions I experience are embarrassment and regret I have behaved so badly so often over the last sixty years. This is what causes the discomfort, and I wish I had the opportunity to apologize and ask forgiveness from so many. Writing these musings is a step in that direction.
But dwelling on past negatives is useful only to the extent it can help me be a better person now, and that's where the freeing part comes in, at least for me. As I relive and review these bits of my past, I have to recognize that these were not mistakes at the time. In the overwhelming number of instances, I actually thought I was being “cool”; what I see as very unattractive behaviors now were what I went consciously out of my way to do then. That's what happens when you've modeled yourself on John Wayne, Steve McQueen, James Dean and "The Wild One."
And it is these repeating realizations that are freeing me from that past.
Yes, they are uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, but they help me know and accept I’m a different and better person now than I was in my earlier life. As I see how my motivations and basic values have changed over the years, I take heart. At 71, this old Father William now knows for sure that "the best is yet to be” - and that this wonderful mystery of life can fulfill us forever if we just learn to relax into it. I recently read “Son of a Witch” by Greg Maguire in which the ancient Senior Maunt (read Mother Superior) reflects:
“Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery, she said to herself, not for the first time. Wisdom is accepting the mystery is beyond understanding. That’s what makes it a mystery.”
What’s made it so hard to relax into acceptance is the 40’s and 50’s cultural brainwashing that led me to overvalue my Masculine and undervalue my Feminine aspects. I'm referring here to our psychological, not biological (female/ male), selves.
Perhaps some of you are readjusting the balance of your Masculine (“Make it happen”) and Feminine (“Let it happen”) selves as you move through Third Age. Rod, Bolton and Pico seem to be, too. Old Father William is still working - or, hopefully, not working - on it. And there are certainly no right answers because personal rebalancing depends on the conditioning you experienced in your life. For example, consider this excerpt from Bill Sadler’s “The Third Age” about a surgeon named Barbara as she reflected on her life at fifty-four:
__________
Barbara was very autonomous as a young adult and went through several transformations before she uncovered a fuller femininity after turning fifty…
“I’m changing and continually discovering things in myself that amaze me. One major thing I’ve discovered as a woman is a kind of balance of feminine and masculine elements within myself in a way I never knew possible. My journey has been to go to the edge, and as I do I find amazing dimensions to myself...”
”A major development in my midlife has been to become aware of my feminine side. Recovering a balance—between control and caring, being intellectual and emotional—is one way of viewing how I got out of the trap. I become a much more feeling person. I’ve realized that feelings have a very important part in medicine. You start with knowledge, but in your interaction with patients you need compassion. An emotional level of interaction is perhaps most important in treatment. By discovering my feminine side and expressing it in medicine and with friends, I’ve been experiencing inner movement, an awareness of being feminine and vulnerable.”
Barbara revealed that by becoming a doctor, she had deliberately undergone an identity transformation, repressing feminine qualities and adding masculine ones:
”I used to be tougher than tough. I would never show emotions; I thought that would be a sign of weakness. Now I allow my emotions to show. The biggest risks for me are letting people see who I am. I wanted to be well thought-of and would act to please people. I still want to be well-thought-of, but I’m more concerned to express how I feel as openly as honestly as possible...”
Barbara, a very successful woman in a male world inhibited her Feminine in order to succeed in that world. In her Third Age, she realized she needed to open to and develop her Feminine in order to claim her wholeness.
__________
Do you have a personal story like this? I’d love to have the next newsletter be built on your thoughts – and there’s only room for so much in it. But I do promise to respond personally to all who contribute and to post your messages on my blog. As you experience your personal maturing, how are you addressing your own Masculine/Feminine, Make It Happen/Let It Happen, Paddling/Relaxing, Be Tough/Be Feeling paradoxes?
Like Rod, Bolton and Pico, we live in a time where we can share ourselves, more honestly and openly than ever before. I’m enjoying my own internal learning and sharing process, and I hope this stimulates yours, too.
Until August, Father William
For more of FW:
http://www.fatherwilliam.org/
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2. “MAKE AN ART FORM OF DEEP RELAXATION”
FROM “HERON DANCE” BY ROD MACIVER
Rain. Rain again today. Birds singing in the rain. Their songs sound different bouncing off wet leaves and navigating between raindrops. Rain in the woods gives birdsong fullness and depth. In the background, drops hit the forest floor with a percussive effect. Wind rustles branches. The woods are a symphony in the rain.
I like to walk and paddle in warm rain. Rain invites you inward.
Thank you to all who wrote in supporting the recent experiments at Heron Dance, as well as those who expressed concern. I was paddling faster than the current for a little while. I felt I needed to in order to break through into new territory. I needed to break out of a cycle of struggle and disillusionment, and I built up my energy to do that.
As one example of many, subscriber and songwriter William Renfrow wrote, “Yes, press for greatness, push oneself beyond boundaries, but what about the flow of the river, attunement with nature, quietude leading to an appreciation of beauty, in each exquisite moment?” (We’ve posted William’s entire letter on our website.)
I set that river aside for a little while to venture into new territory. I felt like I was riding a tiger and the excitement combined with nervousness was akin to ecstasy. Ultimately though, the objective is a life of meaning, a peaceful, thoughtful life, but one that also is full, alive and creative. Peace is elusive. Living in touch with calmness is elusive.
I’ve been making notes in my journal about the times when my life has had a deep peace about it. My thoughts first go to early mornings on wilderness rivers and lakes. I think of long, tiring fall canoe trips in the cold and rain followed by a day of warm sunshine.
Wilderness memories are ballast in my life but, to find peace in the human world, something more is needed. Peace comes from knowing what you want out of life, paring down, simplifying, focusing on a few important things. Do works of beauty. Serve something bigger than yourself. Pour yourself into satisfying work. Then, deep relaxation. Make an art form of deep relaxation.
Nurture your friendship with yourself, with your inner world. Minimize the extraneous. Minimize the number of moving parts. Be careful of who and what you let into your life. Protect your time. Do creative work. Be gentle on yourself. Make room for love in your life. Build close friendships with good people. Read. Think. Spend time alone.
“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” - James Baldwin
A peaceful life requires a center point, a place of balance. Everything unique and beautiful grows out of the still point, that place of quiet reflection, meditation or prayer.
No matter how extreme my experiments and adventures, everything is fine in my life if I make sacred room for a quiet center. It needs to be nurtured, paid attention to. If I do that, it will guide me through troubled waters. It has guided me through some very troubled waters indeed, including cancer and the early years of Heron Dance. When I lose touch with it, my life spins out of control.
To nurture a quiet center, we sometimes need to be hard on ourselves, hard on our attraction to trivial and insignificant things.
Whenever I’ve been alone for more than twenty-four hours, my mind has become preoccupied with my screw-ups, my embarrassments, the things I should have done differently. There are a lot of those things. I’ve bounced up against boundaries all my life. But others have told me that they experience the same. After three days, a deep peace takes over, but in the interim, I encounter anger towards myself and others — others in the broadest sense, including the systems of power in human world. My mind, operating in a vacuum, is simply looking for something to do, something to focus on. After three days, I’m fine. I’m free.
The human mind solves problems. That’s what it wants to do because that’s what it is good at. It is all about the world out there; it is uncomfortable turning inward. It doesn’t want to be alone with itself in a room or a forest. It wants activity, controversy. Conflict excites it. It is constantly searching for something to worry about, something to fear, something to get excited about. It likes human relationships. It craves distraction from the truths at the center of our lives.
Nothing is more controversial, nothing more avoided, nothing more threatening to our self-constructed narrative, than the truth. We certainly don’t want to be alone in a room or a forest with truth for any length of time.
But art and writing and all creativity, including creating a full, deep experience of life require a relationship with that quiet center. There’s always something more important to do. The house needs cleaning. Bills need to be paid. There’s a great show on television. No, no, sit there alone in a room. Confront that scary silence, that aloneness. Make friends with it.
Your creative work requires that.
Everything beautiful grows out of that.
In celebration of the Great Mystery of Life, Roderick W. MacIver
http://www.herondance.org/Turning-Points-W328C2_webpage.aspx
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3. “OH, THE HELL WITH THAT, LET ME JUST DO IT!”
FROM “EXCAVATIONS IN THREE PARTS” BY BOLTON ANTHONY
The great reward from mining our life experience comes when we strike that vein of purpose and find that the seemingly diffused endeavors and commitments of our life cohere. A hidden pattern is revealed, a “strange attractor” around which the once random trajectories of our life now constellate, disclosed. And we arrive at the place where “everything belongs” — ready, as the poet Yeats says, “to cast out remorse” and “live it all again and yet again” (“Dialogue of Self and Soul”)...
...I remember praying silently that some aspect of my work with Second Journey would contribute in some small way to the “coming of the Kingdom,” the words we use in the Lord’s Prayer. Then, as a postscript, I remember qualifying the sentiment: May I do this good thing. AND may I do it for the RIGHT REASONS. Not because I enjoy the work… which I did, immensely. Not because it taps my creativity… which it did, immensely. But because it will leave the world a better place.
Catholic theology, distinguishing between ethics and morality, holds that the merit of an action depends on the intention of the actor:
“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that you’re giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:2-4)
In the incident in question I remember the two thoughts — May I do this good thing. AND may I do it for the RIGHT REASONS. Then I remember a NEW thought, that came fast on the heels of the second thought and that signaled a cataclysmic psychic realignment: “Oh, the hell with that, let me just do it!”
When we act from a place deeper than ego, from the place of our deepest joy, we come into alignment with the divine spark in us and are absolved from asking further questions...
http://www.secondjourney.org/Itin.htm
*“Second Journey” is among a small number of emerging organizations helping birth a new vision of the rich possibilities of the second half of life. That vision sees the Longevity Revolution — the dividend of extra years which in this past century has extended life expectancy by 30-plus years — not as a demographic time bomb threatening the social safety net, but as an unprecedented historic opportunity:
- an opportunity to open new avenues for individual growth and spiritual deepening — so that our longer lives become more meaningful lives;
- an opportunity to birth a renewed ethic of service and mentoring in later life; and
- an opportunity to encourage the growth of new communities — and new models OF community — to support living, learning, and social change for the 21st century.
Captured in shorthand… Mindfulness, Service, and Community in the Second Half of Life.
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4. “PERHAPS HAPPINESS...COMES MOST WHEN IT ISN’T PURSUED.”
FROM “THE JOY OF LESS” BY PICO IYER, THE NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 7, 2009
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches... My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?ex=1260072000&;en=662530a9293faaa0&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0610-L11
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5. THIS MONTH'S LINKS:
FACES IN THE SAND – UNBELIEVABLE SCULPTURES!
http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/10-Faces-in-the-Sand.html
AMAZING CHOIR (PERPETUUM JAZZILE) USES HANDS TO STIMULATE STORM...
http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#1U7a36/www.youtube.com/watch?v=05ip-N0H1Ig/
NEED A GOOD PAINTER?
http://poorbuthappy.com/yourthing/post/need---a-good-painter--this-guy-should-qualify/
RACHEL (89 YEARS) & CHARIOT (540,000 MILES)…
http://positivepelham.blogspot.com/2009/06/video-rachel-and-chariot-together-for.html
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