Following, you will find the Older, Wiser, Fiercer Archives, Carol Orsborn’s library of blogs. The blogs are searchable by category at the bottom of the page.
I founded my personal blog in 2011, having blogged as an expert in the fields of life stage and spiritual development and on marketing to Boomers for over twenty years, for outlets like Huffington Post, BeliefNet.com, Next Avenue, FH Boom and many more. As I personally crossed the threshold from midlife author to someone who, herself, was coming into age, I established this website to chronicle my struggles and discoveries as I became Older, Wiser and Fiercer.
Under the best of circumstances, growing older represents a disruption of how things used to be. This is a particularly difficult message for our generation of Boomers coming into age. We are a cohort who are used to thinking of ourselves as getting our own way, and who are now struggling with both individual and societal disillusionment. It is clear that our world needs wise elders more than ever. More than this, we who have lived long and well must become the wise elders. But how shall we accomplish this in our unexpectedly perilous times?
Immersed as I have been all my life in my generation, as both a thought leader and member, I knew I needed someone from outside the system of generational attitudes to shake me awake from assumptions I did not even know I held. I capped my doctorate in the History and Critical Thinking of Religion from Vanderbilt, specializing in adult and spiritual development/ritual studies, with immersion in the wisdom of elders from other generations and across a wide spectrum of eras and traditions . I found my inspiration in the likes of Ram Dass, Zalman Schachter Shalomi, Joan Chittister, Connie Goldman, Rumi, Parker J. Palmer and May Sarton, and in the woman I have come to think of as my soul sister, Jungian author Florida Scott-Maxwell, who fifty years ago, at 85 published her classic on aging The Measure of My Days.
This level of authenticity I encountered was something to which I also aspired, and yet this is not the understanding of success promised by Boomer optimism nor is it a transcendence of life’s messiness. Rather it is a plunging in: heartbreaking and disturbing, piercing, joyful and alive.
I approached my blog as both a living document—an interactive response to elders who have walked the path ahead of us–and a daring dive into my own experience of conscious aging. Faithful readers of my blog over the years will recognize many evolving themes as I’ve crafted 20 years of writing on the subject of spirituality and age into the culminating body of work I have shared with you here: Older, Wiser, Fiercer: The Wisdom Collection.
In the archives that follow, you will find the complete CarolOrsborn.com archives populated by my blogs, poems and your comments searchable by subject matter. You are also invited to visit our sister archives, Fierce with Age, with nearly a thousand digest entries from wise elders past and present, along with commentaries and links.
It is my hope that both these archives and the Older, Wiser, Fiercer: The Wisdom Collection join the growing body of conscious aging literature paying testimony to the human spirit through the entire cycle of seasons. Like life, itself, conscious aging is a perilous journey that can at the same time be wrenchingly honest and passionately alive, if only we let it.
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