Dear Fierce Ones,
As we approach the waning days of 2016, it has become increasingly clear that our country needs wise elders more than ever. Seeking guidance and inspiration, this special edition of the Digest reviews the best content about spirituality and aging that has surfaced over the course of the year to light the way.
I dedicate our Fifth Annual Best of the Year issue of Fierce with Age to all of us who are willing to take up the torch with open hands and hearts. May the love and hope of the season replenish your spirit and keep you warm through the longest nights. See you in 2017.
–Carol Orsborn, editor Fierce with Age
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BUGS AND LOTUSES
“We may have thought of the spiritual path as all-glorious, like a rose-tinged, many-petaled lotus opening into unimaginable radiance. Maybe that’s so, but…there will be a lot of bugs and spiders and slugs that will scurry out of their hiding places in the lotus petals before those petals are fully opened…
Some passages of the journey include many long and sometimes discouraging experiences of realizing how lost we’ve been, in ways that perhaps we never allowed ourselves to feel before.
Although it leads to greater and greater ease, the spiritual path is not all easy. It is, however, doable by any of us ordinary human beings, with wise effort and clear intention.”
–Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older
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“I am ashamed to admit to myself that I am disappointed in humanity. Nothing less. That is the ache that lies behind other aches. Not disappointed in this beautiful world…but somehow broken-hearted at the incorrigibility of man…
The ordeal of being true to your own inner way must stand high in the list of ordeals. It is like being in the power of someone you cannot reach, know, or move, but who never lets you go; who both insists that you accept yourself and who seems to know who you are. It is awful to have to be yourself…
Natural people avoid it. They obey for comfort’s sake the instinct that warns, ‘Say yes, don’t differ, it’s not safe.’ It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty.”
–Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days
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IS EVERYTHING JUST AN ILLUSION?
“Emotions are tricky entities. They confuse the mind and disturb perception, isolating an individual in a private sense of reality. So what to do with them? A type-cast, non-dual stance has been to banish feelings and emotions to the Neverland of illusion…
As Matt Lucia recently wrote…’ we have been conditioned to fear and feel ashamed about our emotions. Responding to pressing psychological need, however, voices from the non-dual community are increasingly calling for greater compassion towards our own emotions (and those of others), as vehicles of human wholeness.’
In the words of Jeff Foster, ‘It’s becoming clearer that the real adventure, the real beauty and joy of life, lies not in being ‘nobody’, in detaching yourself from the world, in numbing yourself to feelings and denying emotions, in endlessly parroting spiritual clichés such as ‘there is no me’ and ‘everything is a story’…but in fully engaging with life from a place of vulnerability and deep acceptance, in dancing with so-called ‘relative existence’.”
Thanks to Leanne Flask for this item.
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AGE CRACKS US OPEN
\“Aging brings home to us what we have done or failed to do with our lives, our
creativity or our waste, our openness to zealous hiding from what really matters.
Precisely at this point, age cracks us open, sometimes for the first time, makes us aware of the center, makes us look for it in relation to it.
Aging does not mark an end but rather a beginning of making sense of end questions, so that life can have an end in every sense of the word.”
–Ann Belford Ulanov, in Aging: On the Way to Ones End, p. 122. Thanks to Harry (Rick) Moody in his electronic newsletter, sponsored by the Creative Longevity and Wisdom Program of Fielding Graduate University and distributed by the Committee on Humanities and Arts of the Gerontological Society of America. For a free subscription, contact: hrmoody@yahoo.com
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“A critical aspect of my own work of growing toward a conscious elderhood, has been working to strengthen trust that I and the world around me are agents for a strong evolutionary impulse towards the creation of a transformed world, and that as such we are all supported by a loving, wise power much greater than our fearful personalities.
My challenge when I find myself being ruled by the spiritually deadening energy of fear has been to remember those experiences of support that have been crucial aspects of my life, remembering how they felt as they stirred my body, mind and spirit…
I commit to living in trust that day, dealing with the physical realities of my life while recognizing fear when it arises but not giving my true power to it. And slowly but surely my tendency toward fear is being replaced by a deep trust in life and the mysterious, unfamiliar LIFE we are all invited to embrace as we face the challenges of these times and the challenges that our aging will inevitably send our way.
—Ron Pevny, Center for Conscious Eldering and author of Conscious Living, Conscious Aging
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“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and that fact that I think that I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
–Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
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“’Sister,’ I pleaded like any young disciple in the throes of fear at the loss of a mentor. ‘Hang on. Please hang on. Don’t go.’…
Her eyelids flickered for a second, she gave a long, tired breath, and she said very quietly, ‘History records, dear, that you will do quite well.’…
The fact is that history records that we all really do quite well, however we do. Transitions complete us. We ripen. We learn. We hurt. We survive one thing after another. And we go on, whatever the odds against us. Then, in the end, we gain what we came to get—a kind of well-worn, hard-won wisdom.
Sometimes we get it with glory; sometimes we get it in disgrace. Whatever the circumstances, the problem is that we all too seldom bother to stop and notice how much we have become in the process.”
–Joan Chittister, Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir
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“When the world seems to be falling apart,
Stick to your own trajectory,
Hang on to your own ideas
And find kindred spirits.
That’s the rule of life.”
—Joseph Campbell
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For Carol Orsborn’s Words of Age and Awe, click HERE
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Contact Dr. Carol Orsborn at Carol@FierceWithAge.com
Feel free to share this providing proper credit to Carol Orsborn
and a link to CarolOrsborn.com.
