How We are Called

In the spring of 2020 when people around the world were taking to the streets to cry out that Black Lives Matter, my Facebook feed was full of calls to action. Many voices declared that there was only one right thing to do, and one right way to do it, and any other approach was wasting precious time. And of course we all wanted to do the best, right thing- perhaps you also agonized about whether you were doing the best thing or the right thing or were doing enough , or wondered why no one else heard the same call you felt so passionately in your heart. Today I want to offer a heart-centered approach to that discernment.

As I was struggling with this discernment myself, I coincidentally picked up a novel my friend had recommended, Starry River of the Sky the story of a young boy (Rendi) who has run away from home and hides out in a remote village where he hears a strange crying that no one else hears. Our young hero’s deepest desire, his deepest need is to return home to his family, a need he doesn’t even recognize in himself. But because of his own deep need he is the only one who can hear that same need from the one who is crying out for help.

I recognized in Rendi’s story a truth I’ve experienced in my own life- that when something is alive for me, is hard for me, I am sensitive to it in the world around me. Sometimes I wonder why no one else is aware of the calling that I am feeling so acutely.

For example, when I was young, I often felt left out- standing on the edge of things and not being welcomed in, or even, in some rough times, being actively excluded. Being singled out as one who was unwelcome, like those terrible lunchtimes in the junior high school cafeteria, created in me a special sensitivity to welcoming and exclusion. It itches me like a mosquito bite when a newcomer walks into yoga class and there is no space for them to put their mat. I wonder, how could anyone see a newcomer walk into the room and not move to make a place for them? This is one of the reasons I like being a minister, because everyone is welcome here; together we strive together to make this a continuously more welcoming and inclusive community.

But even in this small community, where we all affirm the same principles, we each hear different cries. One person may hear clearly the needs of hungry neighbors, another’s heart resonates with the isolation of elders who are home-bound. Some hear the cry of the earth, or the anguish of institutional racism. No one of us could respond to all those needs in a passionate, skillful and sustained way, so I believe that the health and healing of our world requires that we all respond differently, like the many organs in the body. We need a great complexity and diversity of responses to suffering. We need, for example, people who hear the emerging news of crisis and grab their pack and head for the front lines. We need the folks who stay behind and care for loved ones in the hospital, or raise our children. We need people to pivot quickly in our emerging changing world, we also need people who sound a steady drumbeat for a cause over years and decades as it comes in and out of fashion. We can’t possibly respond to or even feel every need; the world is too big, and we can only be the finite human beings that we are. But each of us can listen for the call we hear, and do what is ours to do.

So how do you know what is yours to do? "When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?" Jon Muth's  The Three Questions,  a retelling of a story by the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, provides a simple yet profound answer. We do good for the one who is standing at our side right now. The story does not consider, however our global context. His story does not help us know how to respond to the suffering in Ukraine. Because the person at our side tends to be someone like us, we might miss the calls for help that come from far away, that come from outside our social circle. If we are white and living in a majority white community, how does it call us to help end racism? This is especially important in considering our own privilege- how privilege can isolate us form the suffering and oppression of people different than us. If we only help those at our side, this approach would tend to keep our resources in our already highly resourced communities.
Perhaps the unique stirrings of our compassion can brings folks “in front of us” in our hearts, that might not be next to us in body. Could we think more broadly about “the one you are with,” “the one who is standing at your side?” Perhaps the heart creates such links in this ever widening global community. This is how it happened for Rendi, the young boy in our story:

“And suddenly in that moment, Rendi’s secret wish was revealed, a wish he didn’t even know he had. Because when Rendi looked into the toad’s eyes, he knew why the toad cried. The toad wished to go home. And Rendi could hear those cries because he did too.”

Psychologist John Neafsey describes that same phenomenon, in his book Act Justly, Love Tenderly. He writes “Paradoxically, there is a way that personal experiences of suffering can make us sensitive to the suffering of others. The memory of our own pain, even if our personal experience is not identical or equivalent, enables us to empathize and identify with the “stranger.” [here he refers to the story of exodus “you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt (ex 23:9)] he continues: “We were once strangers ourselves and so we know what it feels like to be a stranger.” 

That feeling of compassion, of “suffering with” can be the beginning of a call that we are especially suited to hear. We not only have the capacity to hear another’s suffering, but when we respond out of our own suffering, our own experience might assist our discernment about what might really help. If we know something about grief, perhaps we can help someone else who is grieving. If we know something about loneliness, perhaps we are uniquely able to support someone who is lonely.

When we listen to the call of the heart, sometimes we ourselves are transformed. Consider our hero Rendi, who heard the moaning of the moon. In listening to those moanings he knew himself better. He had been trying to not listen to his own inner moanings of missing home, but through listening with compassion to another, he knew his own self better. Both he and the magical toad and the whole community were healed.

The challenge with this kind of calling, however, is that we can over-identify with the one we feel called to help. Sometimes, to protect our own hearts from their pain and vulnerability, it feels safer to project all our suffering, our own inner discomfort onto another. We feel powerless, so when the person we are trying to help won’t take our advice, it amplifies our own inner discomfort. When our hearts are involved, we have to pay special attention to our own inner movements, and listen carefully to those we are wanting to help. It is important to discern “what is my story, and what is theirs?” This is why all spiritual directors have a supervisor we talk to regularly, so that if we are listening to someone and we notice that we are feeling impatient or powerless or frustrated or sad, we are invited look at what is being activated in our own hearts, what is touched in our own story by another’s story. When we can tease apart what is ours, and what is theirs, we can be more skillful in helping them and helping ourselves.

But what can we do when our hearts are stirred by the suffering in Ukraine these days, and we feel so far away and helpless? The instinct is to shut down our hearts, to protect them from our compassionate suffering. Buddhist activist Joanna Macy has grounded her work in the truth that “psychic numbing, while hindering our ability to process and respond to social realities surrounding us, also …depletes the resilience and imagination needed for fresh vision and strategies.” Writer Ipek Burnett builds on Macy’s work saying: “In feeling pain for the world, one realized that collective problems far exceed private wants related to individual welfare and well-being. ‘Pain for the world – the outrage and the sorrow – breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are.’” 

“What can we do?” we wonder helplessly. Burnett suggests that simply allowing our hearts to cry out in what she calls an “aesthetic response” has its own value to ourselves and to our culture. She writes: “The aesthetic response marks the first instant of that heart awakening – simply noticing the wrongness, expressing the outrage and anguish. It is about congruency and integrity. One may not know what must be done about most economic political, ecological dilemmas, but the immediate emotional experience and embodied reaction may be exactly the place to begin for public action.”  Simply allowing that emotional response to move in our hearts is the first step toward seeing our individual and collective problems, and to imagining solutions.

How are we called to help heal this suffering world? I invite you to begin simply by listening to the cry of your own heart. We don’t need to know that the one thing we do today will end the war in Ukraine, but like the boy with 3 questions, we help the turtle who is tired, and perhaps this leads us to hear the cry of the panda who was injured in the story, which leads us to find the panda’s missing child. We listen with our own bruised and broken hearts, to the cries that are ours to hear. And perhaps in so doing our own hearts will heal and grow, Increasing the field of compassion in ourselves, in our communities and in the world.

"Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing to do is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. For these,… are the answers to what is most important in this world

This is why we are here" (Jon Muth The Three Questions)

Roots and Seeds

This is my favorite time of year in my little garden. What has been an unbroken coating of snow and ice becomes a smooth horizontal plane of mud and flattened leaf litter. Even before the last snows have fallen the spring bulbs bravely put up their shoots- as of this morning I can report my snowdrops are in full bloom, and I have 6 clumps of purple crocuses.

Spring is a hopeful time, because we can see with our own eyes that what appeared barren can suddenly be transformed with new life, because those plants which have appeared to die turn out to have been only dormant, and later in the season plants that have indeed died will be replaced by their young.



Many of you have told talked about needing hope, and especially needing hope as we get older. Spring happens because all those plants have a plan for the future. Plants put a lot of resources and intelligent design behind their hopes for the future. Today I would like us to take inspiration from our plant siblings, not only to have hope for a future, but to consider how we choose to invest in our own future, and the future of our the next generations, investing in hope.

These early spring flowers I see in my yard this morning are not emerging from seeds, but from their roots, whether bulbs[i] or rhizomes. The strategy of these plants is to store nourishment and nutrients all year long into their roots, and when the winter comes, the plants die back to the ground, returning maximum resources to the root. Somewhere in that root system is also the plan for how to grow all those above ground parts anew, knowledge of the whole cycle. An because they have stored up resources, and a brilliant plan evolved over many, many cycles, they are ready to burst firth first thing in spring, flowering early, and then spending the rest of the growing season gathering resources for the next cycle.

This is a solid investment, or savings plan. Chances are pretty good that a bulb or rhizome will come back the following year if conditions are normal. Setting aside energy and resources for the future is always a good idea, but it becomes more important we age. We tuck something away for our future selves, for hard winters so we are ready to start growing again with the time is right. I’m sure you can think of a time in your own life when you thought “thank goodness I put this aside for later, for right this moment” whether that was a backup jug of dish soap, or retirement savings.

We do this as a beloved community too- we not only put aside investments for hard times, but our tradition itself is an investment in the future. We know this UU faith, which is over 400 years old, has not only gotten us through this pandemic, but also wars, like the Civil war and the American Revolution, has gotten hundreds of thousands of people through their individual struggles and transitions, and our collective struggles and changes. I had always through of our tradition as a big tree, all those hundreds of years of growth evolving slowly over time a beautiful form that shelters and feeds us. But right now I am thinking about the importance of those roots, how even when a beautiful mature plant is cut way back, is diminished by hard times, it stores the wisdom and nutrients in its roots to spring back when it is time to grow again.

This wisdom is in the ancient Taoist text the Tao Te Ching,

“Though everything is flourishing, each will return to its root,
Returning to the root means stillness, and
Stillness marks the cycle of life.” [Translated by David Hong Cheng, 2000, Chapter 16]

I feel like this is what we have been doing these past 2 years as a congregation, returning to our root, returning to the source of all our wisdom, to nutrients stored up both for hard times and for future growth.

The cycle of flourishing from our root and returning to the root is playing out beautifully all around us right now as we see those tulip an crocus shoots coming up from bare ground. But this method of perpetuating and renewing life has limits- it is preparing to do the exact same thing in the exact same place for as long as that place can sustain it.

But in this dramatically changing world -- climate change, political change, economic change, cultural change --we also prepare our legacy for an unknown and evolving future. This is what seeds are for. For example, many kinds of seeds are spread by birds, and as their migration patterns change with climate change, so they will take with them the seeds of the food they will need in future generations. This is an important time for us to be thinking about our seeds- as individuals, as a community and as a faith tradition. I’m not talking here about biological offspring, but the values and wisdom and traditions that are life affirming, the seeds of a world where each and every being has inherent worth and dignity, where we live in harmony with the interconnected web of life. Some seeds we will plant close to our roots, to perpetuate this local ecosystem of which we are a part, but let us also consider the seeds we scatter far and wide.

Seeds are both a risky and a necessary investment. In Hidden Life of Trees Author Peter Wohlleben theorizes that a beach tree which grows for 400 years will produce a total of about 1.9 million beechnuts, and of those exactly one will grow to be a full-grown tree, which is considered a smashing success. Its genetic wisdom lives on even when its nutrients are returning to the soil. That beech tree will never see it’s successful offspring full grown, that is the point. The tree is investing not in itself, but in its genetic wisdom, in its legacy and the contributions it's offspring will make to future ecosystems. Let us not hold back from planting seeds because not all of them sprout, as Emily Kedar writes:

What good gardener
Would waste the gift of seed
For a sliver of doubt
Wedged inside her mind?

I want dirt
Under my
Fingernails
And all my
Seed packets
Empty.

Let seeds be a metaphor for those million tiny bits of wisdom and caring we plant far and wide, knowing that most of them will never result in even one new member to a UU church, but may help preserve our special wisdom, like universal love, or democracy, or reason and science, for future generations, in times and places where they are most ready to grow and most needed for the evolving ecosystem.

What are the seeds we need to plant now as our legacy?

Consider the legacy of unconditional love- how people who experience love at key moments in their development grow and flourish in certain ways, and when people are not supported in love, say in their childhood, or formative years, or during a trauma or transition, the lack of love also ripples out into their lives.

Consider our interconnected web of life, how when we interact with our ecosystems with respect for non-human life, and for the wisdom for our complex ecosystems, those systems flourish and endure, but when we build and harvest thinking only of our own short term gain, this too ripples out in toxic waters and barren soils and climate change.

Consider Democracy, (our 5th principle) a value so basic I assumed it would flourish forever; we are learning anew now how precious our living democracy is. What seeds can we plant to ensure democracy grows and thrives into the future generations?

A seed needs the blueprint for a grown up plant and for the whole lifecycle of that plant. It also needs the nutrients to get the first sprout started, and it needs a system of propulsion since a sprout literally cannot grow in its parent’s shadow. As we consider the seeds we want to carry our legacies, consider all these things, the enduring wisdom, the nutrients needed for new growth, and how it will be propelled far and near.

Gardeners know that even with all the best care and perfect conditions, not all seeds come up. And of the seeds that sprout, even fewer will grow to be mature plants. We sow seeds, again and again, even when we can’t see them sprout. And we nurture the seeds of our tradition planted by others to shelter and support them into maturity.

If you have some seeds handy, I encourage you to grab them now as a physical reminder and object of blessing and meditation. I invite you now into a time of contemplation- hold your seeds in your hand and ask yourself what seeds you most want to sow, what legacy you want to plant now so it grows and thrives even after you are gone. Your own legacy, and that of our faith tradition. Let’s enter a moment of silence

You might let the question follow you around this week, or this season, this discernment sometimes grows slowly and takes time to become clear. Until you are ready to plant them, set your seed Pack somewhere where you can see it regularly as you ponder this question.

If you are looking for sources of hope in your lives, look around as spring unfolds, noticing that all that flourishing and blossoming happens because all those plants have a plan for the future. Today I would like us to take inspiration from our plant siblings, not only to have hope for a future, but to consider how we choose to invest in our own future, and the future of our the next generations, investing in hope. 

When Your Fire is Burning Low

What do you do when your fire is burning low? This wonderful question emerged in our monthly Soul Matters reflection group, and I imagine it’s one that a lot of us have struggled with, now especially as we come up on 2 years of dealing with Covid, as we hear the heartbreaking news out of Ukraine, as we who live in the North East enter March, which is often a grey and discouraging month, perhaps some of you have low burning fires this morning. At the same time I know some of you are already excited about spring and travel plans, so I don’t want to assume all of our fires are burning alike.

Let’s begin by just noticing, how is your fire this morning? What is the energy like in your body? In your mind? In your spirit? In your heart?

Now, I invite you discern- for what do we need your inner fire? I remember when my son was young he and his friends would have so much energy I couldn’t keep up- they would run and play for hours. I remember one young friend who, after a fun day at church camp, literally fell asleep while sitting at the dinner table, head into her spaghetti – that bright, fast fire had burned all her fuel and she couldn’t even eat dinner.

Those of us who are not children have to tend our fires more carefully. We live in a culture that values more-faster-bigger, as if one could or should burn brightly at all times. We know that this is part of how we got into our global climate crisis- this craving for infinite easy energy. Instead of wanting to burn bright all the time, we can develop the skills to match our flame to our precise needs.

So let’s take a moment of silence to discern- for what are we hoping to use our fire? Not someday, or for the rest of our lives, but for right now, and maybe for the rest of today...

I know that my mind can always imagine endless goals and tasks. So I invite you to be sure to check in with your body, your heart, your inner wisdom as well. Sometimes our inner wisdom has turned down the fire for a reason- perhaps we need to process or grieve something we have been through, and would best do that now, in a time when our fires are low, before starting something new. Perhaps our fires are low because we are out of fuel like my young friend, and need to restore ourselves before our flames leap bright again. Perhaps this is just kind of a boring time, an in between time, and we are saving our fuel for a time when we are going to need it for something special, for something important. Pause and ask yourself, what do I most need my inner fire for in the interest of health and wholeness of myself and the web of life? 

Get back in touch with that feeling of your own fire, your own energy level or motivation right now and compare that to what you are hoping to use it for today. Is the way we feel today a good match? If it’s not a good match, consider this, what would it be like to match your day to your fire, rather than changing your fire to meet the day? If, for example, you are recovering from an illness, or slowing down after a busy week, or just haven’t been quiet and still for a while, what would it be like to imagine a day that matches the energy you have right now?

Did that idea feel like a relief?
Or maybe a “yes but!” asks to be heard. If so that’s great feedback- what is that “yes, but” asking for? Does that “yes but” comes from a place of aliveness, a place of your own inner wisdom? Like- yes, but the sun is shining today and I want to get out into it! Or, Yes but, I miss my friends and want to see them?
Or does it come from a “should” – I should get something done- it’s Sunday. Or I feel lazy when I don’t get anything done? Just notice...

If we have discerned that this is a moment that calls for more fire than we have in our bellies right now, remember that fires need 3 things- fuel, air and heat. Perhaps this metaphor will help us skillfully tend our inner fire.

What fuel are we giving our inner fire? are we getting enough good food? Plenty of water? Plenty of rest? What gives fuel to your fire?
Is there enough fresh air moving in our lives? New ideas? New perspectives? What ways do you bring fresh air to your fire? 

How about our metaphorical heat? In the body we literally build heat by getting up and getting moving, doing activities that warm the muscles. It turns out the same concepts works for our psyches as well- a recent study shows that just getting up out of your chair and doing something, pretty much anything, helps change our spirits. This is called “behavioral activation.” It doesn’t have to be a big action, it can be a small action, like adding small, fast starting kindling to a fire that needs a boost. When I get sluggish in the afternoons but still have work to do, often just a quick walk down to the kitchen to fill my glass, perhaps moving the laundry or watering a plant gets me moving in a helpful way. Sometimes just stirring up the coals of a fire makes old fuel available in a new way, and a burst of fresh flames results.

Fire builders also suggest moving your logs closer together which helps them hang on to their warmth. I often find that when I don’t have enough energy to do the task I believe is important, teaming up with a friend often helps get me started. Lately, whenever I feel like I am not up to a task, I assume my inner wisdom is correct- perhaps I am not up to this task if I do it alone. When my partner and I have a chore that neither of us feels motivated to do, we do it together. It’s why our congregations have done their pledge drives together these past 2 years- the heat from our community helps us retain our own heat.

As Rev. Soto suggests in her poem:

[the invitation] brings us … to a hearth around which
we gather to be nourished, energized, and
warmed and where we get ready to disperse,
enlivened.

When I was young, we used to pile as much wood as possible on our campfires building the biggest, hottest fire we could, but these days we are more circumspect in our approach- when the fire is getting low, we ask “how much longer are we going to stay up tonight? How much longer do we want to tend this fire?” If the party is just getting started, we will add more logs, stir up the coals, make sure air is flowing through and enjoy the new dancing flames we have created. But experience has taught us that a fire without great leaping flames has its own gifts- you can get a nice, even toast on a marshmallow over some mature coals. It can be peaceful and warm just to sit and watch the embers glow. Like the grandparents in Lights Out Shabbat knew, there’s a lot a wise person can do with a couple of candles when all other power is unavailable.

I think that, metaphorically, I have been doing a lot of this lately. My fire is often lower than before the pandemic and if I don’t have any special need for bright hot flames, I remember that embers can produce a reliable steady heat. What could I do by these warm steady embers? R
ev. Rebecca Parker writes:

A chair by the fire,
A window that looks out on bare trees, and a
Cup of tea are all it takes to begin turning the world upside down.
This is prayer:
Seeing the world in all its beauty and need,
Dreaming a world of gratitude and justice.

This can be a beautiful time for dreaming a better future, for study, for introspection, for prayer and meditation for sharing warmth with the hearts of those our loved ones and our community.

Or maybe it’s just time to rest, We learned earlier in our tutorial about "banking your coals" we that by carefully stewarding our embers one can save those coals for later, overnight even, by banking the coals .We can preserve the warmth and some of the fuel of the coals by pushing all our embers together in a tight, small space and covering them with ash so there are no active flames. Perhaps it would help for us to think of ourselves as “baking our coals” on days when we are staying home in this time of covid, in the cold grey wet days of March. Perhaps I can reduce my carbon footprint and preserve other resources while I am resting up and staying close to home, saving fuel and heat for a future time when I want to be ready to leap into action when the need is clear. Our fire teacher tells us that having banked coals is a great way to have a quick start in the morning- just a spark and a fresh log gets your fire going for the new day when you need it most.

However your inner fire is this morning, whether you are burning high with the promise of spring or the passion for justice, or whether you feel like you are just keeping a few embers burning, I wish each of you the wisdom and skill to tend your own unique and precious flame. I wish you enough fuel and air and warmth to fulfill your unique calling, and I offer you the warmth of community, which helps us keep all our embers aglow.

Finding Life in the Second Half of Life

I told my spiritual director that I felt confused and adrift and spiritually ungrounded. My spiritual director said “It sounds like a mid life crisis.” This confused me because I liked my job, I liked my husband, I was very emotional about my son going off to college, but wasn’t that the whole point of raising a child? I had achieved pretty much every modest goal I had set for my adult life. I knew I had many blessings and a life of privilege; how could anyone fail to be grateful for meaningful work, shelter and food, a life partner I get along with? But my spirit was restless and didn’t know what it was looking for.

My discomfort, the Mid-Life books told me, arose because I was not the same person I was before I had my son, before I started into the ministry. The person I was at 50 was not who I thought I would be. Moreover, many of those things that used to bring me excitement and fun just didn’t anymore, like the wellsprings that fed my inspiration had dried up.

Part of the reason I didn’t recognize the life transition I was experiencing is that the stories we tell, especially on movies and TV, are mostly about the first half of life, about the life’s work of our teens and 20s- figuring out who we are, what we are good at, finding work, finding a family, having wild adventures. We don’t have a many models or stories or archetypes for the important crossroads of the second half of life.

In my 20s I had been inspired by the women’s spirituality movement which proposes 3 phases of a woman’s life- Maiden, Mother, Crone. But when my son Nick was out of diapers I wondered “so, am I a crone now?” I read up on the Crone archetype, which is often associated with the wisdom of being near death. That didn’t seem quite right. Yes, growing older does have something to do with getting your affairs in order, and coming to grips with your own mortality, but what then? Where was the life in the second half of life?

Author Elizabeth Davis suggests that between mother and crone is a 4th archetype called “matriarch” – this makes sense to me. I liked this image of someone who is not actively parenting, but still has many years of meaningful work to do.

It’s not surprising that we need new archetypes for our times; our lives are different than they were in the old days when the traditional archetypes were being formed. We need new archetypes still that are not so deeply embedded in a gender binary, and archetypes that aren’t bound to reproduction, since not everyone is called to parenthood. We also need new archetypes and stories for the 2nd half of life which illustrate how people of all genders can be generative, growing, and full of life.

I spent a lot of time in contemplation, looking at my life as it was, and clarified that I did not feel called to a new career, a new marriage, a new home, so how could I find that spark of new life inside the life I was already living? I waited and waited for this next phase of my life to begin, gradually realizing 2 things; first that I was just going to have to grieve some parts of the old life before I could let them go, my father’s death, the empty nest, the closure of our music store, my aching back and arthritic fingers. Second, I realized that I was not getting anywhere sitting around waiting for this next part of my life to begin. I was just going to have to experiment and try things and do something different, anything, it didn’t really matter what. If there was no fresh wellspring of life in the things I was already doing, I was going to and try some things I was not good at, risk making a fool of myself. I fact, the books said, re-integrating the child part of ourselves was crucial for adults in midlife. The middle-aged person might forget how to have fun, how to play and explore, but the inner child knew.

This next chapter started to unfold as I followed openings of aliveness wherever they lead- like the colors of a sunrise- wouldn’t it be something to draw with colors like that? Like, what if small congregations could work together somehow, maybe collaborate in some way? Like, maybe I could get my old bike repaired and join my partner on his bike rides?

This life transition required not a big change in my outward life, but making a choice in my inner life. I remembered that back in my 20s I had committed to always being a life long learner. At this crossroads I could have chosen to be done learning and growing and just coast to the finish line. But when I started approaching the world as a learner, when I started asking new questions, new pathways of energy, life and imagination began to open.

While I was at this crossroads of midlife, my Dad was at a crossroads as well. After living with cancer for a decade, he made the decision to enter hospice care. I had imagined that once you entered hospice there was a steady decline to the end, but not for my dad. Yes, some days when I called, he told me things were hard, that he was discouraged, as his fingers could not play the clarinet any more or even type on the computer. But I’ll never forget those calls when he, a lifelong musician, rediscovered music. “Have you heard the Sibelius viola concerto”? He said “Unbelievable!”. Another call “I’ve been listening to Tchaikovsky again, boy that is really where it’s at” he barely had the words to explain how moving it was to rediscover Tchaikovsky, a composer he knew well. Just a few days before he died, that was discovering new wellsprings of life.

They say that not everyone who grows old becomes an elder, and I am beginning to understand this now. The elders are the ones who face who they are right now in this very moment, and choose life, choose growth. And the joy of it, the hope of it is that this learning and growth lasts our whole lives. Remember. we have a partner in this journey, which is life itself -- always animating us and connecting us to the web of beings. Blessings for each of you that you may find the new life growing under your feet as you journey each turn of the spiral of life