SI Communicator
Editor
Judith Helburn
Graphic Designer
Barb Warner
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Have an Idea for an Article?
If you are a member of Sage-ing International, please feel free to contribute to our quarterly e-newsletter. Email us your materials,
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Coordinating Circle
Chair
- Mary Anne Ingenthron
Secretary
- Marilyn Loy Every
Treasurer
- Georgeanna Tryban
Members at Large
- Don Adams
- Bob Atchley
- Gustavo Boog
- Anne Boynton
- Jann Freed
- Pat Hoertdoerfer
- Brian McCaffrey
- Stan Paine
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Administrative Coordinator
- Paul Severance
Certification Coordinator
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Jeanne Marsh
Education Coordinator
- Rosemary Cox
Tech-Webinar Coordinator
- Alan Rider
Website Assistant
- Anna Wisehart
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Membership
Council of Honored Sages
are key figures who have made significant contributions for elders in the world and who share our vision of "changing the paradigm from aging to Sage-ing®."
We are honored to have the following sages in our Council of Honored Sages:
Robert Atchley
Christina Baldwin
Gary Carlson
Connie Goldman
Eve Ilsen
Rabbi Shaya Isenberg
Lynne Iser
Richard Leider
Wendy Lustbader
Rick Moody
Bahira Sugarman
William Thomas
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Our Membership is free and open to anyone who is interested.
Benefits of membership include:
* Knowledge that you are supporting SI in its work for elders
* Knowledge that you are supporting the Sage-ing work of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
* Networking with other members through local activities and Conferences
* Discounts on merchandise
* Periodic E-newsletters and bulletins
* Discounts on workshops, national meetings and intensive weekends
You can sign up for your free membership here.
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MERCHANDISE
Any book ordered through our site gives Sage-International a percentage of the profit!
In this updated version of his popular book, Reb Zalman has added a brand new introductory chapter that provides insight into the shifts that have taken place in our culture since the first edition of this book came out in the 1990s.
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Sage-ing Workbook
A valuable resource for
your sage-ing journey, filled with information and exercises.
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Did you know that Sage-ing International is a registered organization with "Amazon Smile"? If you use Amazon for home or business shopping, Amazon Smile donates 0.5% of your purchase to SI. Simply go to smile.amazon.com and select Sage-ing International as your designated charity in "My Account". Then start all Amazon visits from that site. Let purchases you normally make support "Conscious Aging" through SI...!
If not, we welcome you to give a gift of acknowledgment and gratitude for all Connie has shared with us as a wise elder, mentor and friend. In Connie's words, "I am humbled and deeply honored by the establishment of the Connie Goldman Scholarship Endowment Fund. I am excited and hopeful that (it) will encourage others to accept the opportunity to explore their deeper spiritual learning
John Updike "Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead, so why... be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?"
Elders as Carriers of Treasures
"Who would we old people be without the gallery of memories, the treasures of experience? But with these treasures we are rich and we do not drag a used up body towards its end and oblivion, but know, we are also the carriers of treasure which remains alive and radiant as long as we breathe"
Hermann Hesse. The Season of the Soul
Reminder
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Sage-ing News and Happenings
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As Sage-ing International fills the niche of Awakening the Sage Within in our communities the response has been very positive. One indication is the increased interest in CSL training. The last few classes have ranged from 6 to 8 participants but the 2018 class will be 16. Growth has occurred primarily by word of mouth and the hard work of CSL facilitators in holding workshops. Most rely on host organizations to fill the seats. Some start from scratch with an email list, fliers posted and perhaps some free PR in a local newspaper. What would be helpful in both cases is an assist from a marketing campaign that would raise the profile of S.I. and offer tools and tips on the local level that would lead people to the web site and events and resources.
Also increasing is our web exposure. At this writing we have presented 6 webinars attended by an average of 30-40 each. Our goal is to archive all web offerings and make them available to all who have missed the live presentation. We are in need of a volunteer or perhaps a college student seeking an internship who would be interested in creating, editing and archiving webinars. If you have expertise but not these specific skills please contact us and give it a try.
As we grow and rely on electronic media to reach a larger and more dispersed audience we are acutely aware of the need to maintain the closeness of community and the connectedness that face to face contact provides. To achieve this we hold all of our meetings on Zoom with advanced technology that even allows us to breakout into diads. Technology cannot fill the same need as face to face wisdom circles of eight to ten souls. There are about 40 Wisdom Circles today that meet at least once a month. There is a Wisdom Circle manual on the web site available to help in both the creation and ongoing functioning of the circle. We cannot overemphasis the value of the ongoing connection and support offered by the Wisdom Circle which also benefits the larger sage-ing community as well.
The bi-annual Conference coming up on October 25-28 of 2018 in Minneapolis will be an opportunity to connect with fellow sages in person as well as enjoy and learn from speakers and programs that will enrich and inform. Volunteers are needed for the conference as well; form Hospitality to the Silent Auction both items and sales.
Our growth does not immediately convert to financial support since we do not have a dues based membership, yet the cost of servicing the growing numbers does increase. Consequently, we have instituted a fund-raising campaign. Please look for a pledge form in the mail and consider giving. Think of the value that S.I. has in your life and what it is worth to you.
As we stand together in a circle and you extend your hand and say" take my hand" I say "I take your hand" and we both say " so we can do together what we cannot do alone" This is the spirit of sage-ing. Jerome Kerner CSL
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Save The Date!
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Elder Voices Changing the World-Our Stories in Action! October 25-28, 2018 Oak Ridge Hotel and Conference Center Chaska, Minnesota Details to follow
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Sage-ing International and Spirituality & Practice 2017 E-Courses
Sage-ing International is pleased to be offering two e-courses this fall, in a collaborative venture with Spirituality & Practice, guiding us on a restorative, enlivening journey. The e-courses consist of 12 emails, one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for four weeks, providing reflective tools, support, and an online Practice Circle to share with others in a worldwide community forum. Spiritual Elder Activism started on Monday, October 2, however there is still time to register and receive the first week of emails. Moving Beyond Life's Hurts starts on Monday, October 30, so please consider joining us for both of these inspiring opportunities.
Spiritual Elder Activism, Monday, October 2 - Friday, October 27, 2017
with Pat Hoertdoerfer and Bob Atchley
Moving Beyond Life's Hurts, Monday, October 30 - Friday, November 24, 2017
with Joanne Turnbull, Carol Scott-Kassner and Marilyn Loy Every
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Spiritual Elder Activism, Monday, October 2 - Friday, October 27, 2017
"An elder's work is to synthesize wisdom from long life experience and formulate this into a legacy to bless future generations
" - Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Like elders of the past, today's sages are wisdom-keepers entrusted with the responsibility to nurture the well being of our families and communities as well as to serve as leaders in restoring health and balance to our planet Earth.
In this e-course Bob and Pat will reflect on the meaning of "spiritual elder activism" from tribal elders, spiritual leaders and community activists whose lessons can open our paths of service today. Oren Lyons, Mother Teresa, William Martin, Marion Wright Edelman, Andrew Harvey, Joanna Macy, Drew Dellinger and others will serve as our guides with their life stories of "wisdom and spirit in action."
As we ponder what qualities elders uniquely bring to opportunities of service, we discover how to reclaim the Elders' moral voice in our own families, communities, and in the public square. We bless the world with our gifts of service whether as mentors or mediators, stewards or activists, practicing our gifts every day to live our legacy!
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Moving Beyond Life's Hurts, Monday, October 30 - Friday, November 24, 2017
When we courageously confront the past we discover how much we have gained from apparent losses. Once we get past our anxiety, we glory in the hidden benefits that accrue from what we took to be painful failures.
- Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Many of us have courageously and continuously confronted past events and relationships that have left us dispirited. Unaddressed, they can prevent us from reaching our full potential. It is within our capacity to reframe hurts that have affected us for many years, so that they no longer have such a hold on us. We will explore the role of life review, reframing the past with our current wisdom, regrets, forgiving self and others, and healing painful memories and relationships.
Moving Beyond Life's Hurts, Monday, October 30 - Friday, November 24, 2017
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Crones of the Flathead, Montana
by Ina Albert, Certified Sage-ing Leader
We sit as council on our lives, searching backward to find the roots of our being; looking deep into the core of what brought us to this time.
Together, we stare at old photos, trusting we will find threads that, strung together, will answer the questions that remain.
Splinters need pulling to expose raw truths.
We tell our stories to each other, harvesting their meaning one by one to make sense of our years, the weavings of substance to create a tapestry of each life.
Ours is a secret confessional.
A sharing beyond sharing. Beyond shame or guilt. Not a place for cowards. Where souls are bared and tears are the currency of trade.
We are healthy and handsome and humbled by this time together.
A time to harvest our lives-to peer through the lens of coming old age, to choose our most valued possessions as keepsakes for our heritage chest.
Only our most sacred memories and nubs of wisdom will dwell there.
We are strong now. Full of energy honed with years of caring for our bodies. Yet we see creasing skin sagging over muscles, hair turning ashen.
We chart each sign of aging, of memory loss, of fatigue, of wear and tear that scrolls its record in the furrows on our faces.
We are more careful now. Careful of our bodies, our money, our relationships. Careful with our children
Too soon we will be their children, trusting that they will be careful mothers and fathers.
Then it will be time to open our chests and offer their inheritance, hoping the gold of our lives will be their treasures.
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Helen Luke
"
The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than consent to one minute of diminishment of its sense of importance.
The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that which has always been.
The inner story, though the same in essence for all, is always single and unique in each human being, never before lived and never to be repeated." From Old Age is a Crown Instead of a Curse in Helen Luke's Beautiful Hands.
"Here are the proper occupations of old age: prayer, which is the quickening of the mind, the rooting of attention in the ground of being; song, which is the expression of spontaneous joy in the harmony of the chaos; the telling of old tales, which among all primitives was the supreme function of the old, who passed on the wisdom. -
[
Human Values in Aging]
Think of it this way: You have been in training all your life for this moment. How will you use your lifetime of knowledge, wisdom, experience, and capabilities to make life better for yourself and others?" [A quote from Human Values in Aging]
Great Lives in Aging: James Hillman. I met James Hillman only once, and at that time (1980s) I was too young and ill-informed to appreciate the private breakfast we had together. But all things come in good time. I later read his The Force of Character and the Lasting Life (1999), which may well be the best work on the psychology of aging ever written. In that book, Hillman writes:
"Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus, the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character."
Hillman died at age 85, and as he himself grew older, he harbored no sentimentality about later life:
"Aging is a time of risk, and older people have incredible courage. Just the way they cross the street. Just facing life with a more vulnerable constitution. Just going downstairs or getting out of the bathtub. Risks. Courage."
Hillman's "archetypal psychology" was controversial, and is best approached through his popular book, The Soul's Code. Hillman was interviewed in "The Sun" here [HR Moody in Human Values in Aging]
Resources for Reducing Ageism: From an Email sent by American Society on Aging President and CEO, Bob Stein to its members, and others who advocate for a better society for all: The way Americans currently think about aging creates obstacles to productive practices and policies. In response, and in collaboration with seven other leading associations serving the field of Aging, ASA is pleased to share a set of resources designed to help members and stakeholders join a movement to reframe the dialogue around aging, with the goal of reversing ageist assumptions about older adults. Through a two-year research initiative, our collaborative has learned that as Americans live longer and healthier lives, society needs to adjust both attitudes toward aging and systems that support wellbeing in later life.
Our Gaining Momentum Toolkit is now available so you and your organization can become part of the movement to reframe how the public views older adults. This work is SO important and our aspirations can only be achieved through large-scale adoption of the principals and tools we provide to you today.
Gaining Momentum, is what we call our new toolkit. The Toolkit is designed to help you and other aging advocates change the ageism narrative, using new guidelines for better, research-informed communications. We invite you to explore and use the full Gaining Momentum toolkit which includes: · A full research and recommendation report, Finding the Frame: An Empirical Approach to Reframing Aging and Ageism · A frame brief titled, Framing Strategies to Advance Aging and Address Ageism as Policy Issues · A Quick-start Guide with phrases to use, and to avoid · FAQs: Staying on Frame in Real Time - a list of common questions with guidance to help keep answers "on frame" · ReFrame Cards help advocates find the right metaphor and structure for reframed communications about aging · A Research Base and other resources Our work is not done and we remain committed to adding to, and enhancing, these resources to help all passionate professionals working in the field of aging join the movement, Reframing Aging [
Positive Aging Newsletter]
This following was adapted from sections of Ron Pevny's e-course Navigating Life Transitions, offered through the organization Spirituality and Practice. This organization has for many years offered a wide variety of e-courses on practical spirituality, and curates a rich archive of courses and other materials visit here
. This course has been archived on the spirituality and practice site.
This article is about the power of transition to be the vehicle for our growth if we support the inner unfolding this process calls forth in us. The transition from mid-life adulthood into elderhood has the potential to shape a rich, fulfilled stage of our lives, but this transition, like all major developmental steps forward, requires our conscious, intentional support to realize our rich potential in life's culminating chapters.
Our lives are not merely a series of unrelated events to which we respond as best we can. The more conscious we become of the outer events and our inner experiences that constitute our lives, the more we can see the truth of the mythic image of human life as a hero's/heroine's journey. On this archetypal journey each significant change and the inner transition it calls forth requires us to once again leave home -- that state where our lives are relatively stable, predictable and secure -- to enter the unknown, a neutral zone, to embark on a journey across a foreign land that we know little about. We are called to a journey whose duration cannot be predicted, in search of a new home that offers what we need to thrive. What distinguishes this hero's/heroine's journey from other types of journeys is that, whether we know it or not, whether we intend it or not, the process is more about who we become as a result of this sojourn in a strange land than about the particulars of what we find at journey's end. This journey is not primarily about us undergoing some trials and toughing it out until we see what's next. Rather, it's purpose is to change us in some essential way; to help shape a new self; to broaden our vision of what is possible for us; to help us shed limiting beliefs, attitudes, and ways of living so that we can live larger lives that reflect a new stage of growth; and to help us access qualities and inner resources that we will need in our new life stage.
91-Year-Old Lebanese-American Poet, Philosopher, and Painter Etel Adnan on Memory, the Self, and the Universe
. Oftentimes during meditation, I am visited by flash-memories dislodged from some dusty recess of my unconscious - vignettes and glimpses of people, places, and events from long ago and far away, belonging to what feels like another lifetime. They are entirely banal - the curb of a childhood sidewalk, mid-afternoon light falling on a familiar building in a familiar way, the smell of a leather armchair on a hot summer day - but in their banality they intimate the existence of the former self who inhabited those moments, a self that seems so foreign and so remote, yet one to which I am forever fettered by this half-conscious memory.
A century after Virginia Woolf painted memory as the capricious seamstress that stitches our lives together, Paris-based Lebanese-American poet, essayist, philosopher, and visual artist
Etel Adnan
(b. February 24, 1925) picks up Woolf's thread throughout Night (public library)
- her slender, powerful collection of prose meditations and poems that, from the fortunate vantage point of Adnan's ninety-first year on Earth, concretize in luminous language and incisive thought life's most elusive perplexities: time, memory, love, selfhood, mortality.
Etel Adnan: "The Weight of the World" (Serpentine Galleries)
Adnan, whom the polymathic curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has celebrated as one of the most influential artists of the past century, was born in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father. She began writing poetry in French at twenty and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne a generation after Simone de Beauvoir
, then crossed the Atlantic for graduate studies at Harvard and Berkeley. In the 1960s, Adnan took a teaching position at a small Catholic school in California, where she began painting and transcribing the work of Arab poets. She moved back to Beirut and in the midst of the Lebanese civil war composed politically wakeful poetry and prose that arrested the popular imagination with an uncommon precision of insight. Adnan now lives in Paris with her partner, the Syrian-born artist and publisher Simone Fattal, where she continues to paint and write.
Memory, and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks, and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured, but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside, or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us, but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon the head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.
Is memory produced by us, or is it us? Our identity is very likely whatever our memory decides to retain. But let's not presume that memory is a storage room. It's not a tool for being able to think, it's thinking, before thinking. It also makes an (apparently) simple thing like crossing the room, possible. It's impossible to separate it from what it remembers.
Etel Adnan (Photograph by Simone Fattal
In stretching between the poles of existence and nonexistence, memory, Adnan suggests, might be the native consciousness of the universe:
We can admit that memory resurrects the dead, but these remain within their world, not ours. The universe covers the whole, a warm blanket.
But this memory is the glue that keeps the universe as one: although immaterial, it makes being possible, it is being. If an idea didn't remember to think, it wouldn't be. If a chair wasn't there, it wouldn't be tomorrow. If I didn't remember that I am, I won't be. We can also say that the universe is itself the glue that keeps it going, therefore it is memory in action and in essence, in becoming and in being. Because it remembers itself, it exists. Because it exists, it remembers.
Art by Etel Adnan (Steir-Semier Gallery)
Memory is intelligent. It's a knowledge seated neither in the senses, nor in the spirit, but in collective memory. It is communal, though deeply personal. Involved with the self, though autonomous. At war with death. It helps us rampage through the old self, hang on the certitude that it has to be.[...] Reason and memory move together. And night and memory mediate each other. We move in them disoriented, for they often reuse to secure our vision. Avaricious, whimsical, they release things bit by bit.
Building upon Woolf's metaphor, Adnan adds:
Memory sews together events that hadn't previously met. It reshuffles the past and makes us aware that it is doing so. [...] Memory is within us and reaches out, sometimes missing the connection with reality, its neighbor, its substance.
Are Older People Really Happier?
I began my research into this question [of happiness] by reading the best seller, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin She observes that happy people are more altruistic, productive, likable, more interesting, better friends and a bunch of other good things. (She also suggests that dancing in the morning is a great practice. I haven't let that happen yet.) In writing her book she took each month of the year and assigned to it an aspect of happiness that she was going to focus on. In January it was Boost Energy, e.g. go to sleep early, exercise better, etc. In June it was Taking Time For Friends: She vowed to remember birthdays, be more generous and make new friends. May's focus was to be Serious about Having Fun.
It was a wonderful book but I wondered if happiness was different for a 40-year-old, attorney, wife and mother of 2 young children. I wanted to know if happiness was different as we age.
In mounds of recent research, scientists have found a clear, linear relationship between age and mental health: Older people are the happier. Now after you pick yourself off of the floor, you might ask, "How can it be that given the many well-documented losses that occur with age, we also see this improvement in emotional well-being?"
Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, does not believe there is a paradox here In her work, she has found evidence that people's goals and reasoning change as they come to appreciate their mortality and recognize that their time on earth is finite.
Dilip Jeste, director of the UC San Diego Center for Healthy Aging, finds the consistency quite striking. "People who were in older life were happier, more satisfied, less depressed, had less anxiety than younger people." Experts in psychology of aging say that the new findings add to a growing body of research that suggests there are emotional benefits to getting older.
Dr. Carstensen feels her work has major implications especially considering that within just a few years more people on the planet will be over 60 than under 15. "Policy leaders are saying, 'How are we going to cope with all these people?' '" she said. "But a population who are in good mental health, emotionally stable, more grateful, and more likely to forgive are a pretty great resource for a society with so much strife and war."
There may be many lessons here for us. Happiness isn't an emotion that just happens. We need to work at it. We need to be aware of it's elements and aware that we have the power to increase that experience in our life. Since we are wiser now we need to focus on good memories, push aside negative ones and eliminate people in our lives who bring negativity. Because of our age, we can let go of disappointments and regrets quicker. By facing our own mortality, we can become more grateful and savor each moment. It is a great eye opener to stop in the middle of a very busy day and ask yourself the question, "Am I happy?" And to explore your answer! [ Barb Warner www.barbwarner.com]
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Composing A Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom.
Mary Catherine Bateson. Vintage. 2011. An oldie, but goodie.
This is an exceptionally well-written exploration, with many interviews and examples, of what to do with yourself when you don't know what to do with yourself. This is not a "guidebook" but an offering of possibilities to absorb, think about, and discuss before taking steps forward in life. [[
rkgnycon on Amazon]
Dying: a Memoir. Cory Taylor. Tin House Bks. 2017. Dying is bracing and beautiful, possessed of an extraordinary intellectual and moral rigor. Every medical student should read it. Every human should read it. My own copy is so aggressively underlined it looks like a composition notebook. [Jennifer Senior]
This is an inspirational book about the art of aging with a Zen attitude. In narrative conversational style, the author conveys some important issues of the aging process and gives real-life examples of challenging situations facing many older adults today. The book is an informative and entertaining read that leads the reader to the most relevant point of the theme: you have the choice to face the inevitable with a positive and courageous spirit (the ZENior CitiZEN way), or you can give in to the stereotypical misperceptions and fears that mainstream culture passes on to us through the media. The choice is evident--and it's yours to make. [jakz/amazon]
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Spirituality: The most recent issue of the Journal of the Life Planning Network is devoted to the theme of spirituality and later life. Read it at:
Meg Newhouse on what environment we leave for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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