From Hero to Elder Parts 1 and 2 are a sample of an upcoming webinar

I hope you’ll join me for more on this topic with The Waking Heart School of Wisdom on November 15, 2024 from Noon to 2 PM EST.

Part 1

“All sickness is homesickness.” Chinese Proverb

Imagine for a few moments that you have been a seaman all your life who used wooden oars to row and steer you through your early and mid-life years. You have also been a warrior and fought your share of battles—won some, lost some. You’re strong from rowing your craft but you have spent so many years away from your true home. After struggling, striving, and scraping you finally do get home, but the journey has left you tired, a little wrinkled, and grayer than when you began.

Now further, imagine a blind seer knocks on your door and says you have to make one last journey before you can really settle in. You are of course excited to get your oar and get back to your boat, go see other distant lands, slay a few more giants, and have more great mid-life heroic adventures.

But much to your chagrin the seer says, “You will not go back to sea, oh no; you will take your best, well-crafted oar and walk so far inland until you reach a country where the people have never seen the sea, have never tasted salt and know nothing about ships, boats, or sailing vessels of any kind. You will know you’re at the right spot when you meet a stranger; who seeing the oar on your shoulder will ask you why you’re carrying a winnowing fan? (Note a farmer’s winnowing fan is something that creates wind to separate the wheat from the chaff.) At this point, you will halt and plant your oar firmly in the earth and make sacrifices to the gods and only then you can really go home.”

If we can connect, understand, and relate to the story of Odysseus and the Odyssey, we can enter elderhood a little more gracefully and gently, and if not, good luck trying to be a hero at 50, 60, 70, or 80.

“I am making a case for Elderhood, not for easy agedness.” Stephen Jenkinson—Come of Age

Part 2

A good friend of many years asked me the other day, “John what are you working on these days?”

“I’m working on aging these days; good work if you can get it and keep it; the pay is not that great but better than the alternative.”

I must admit I’m still sort of tempted to try and reproduce and repeat the “glory days” of mid-life. I’d try harder to do some of the activities if not for the arthritis setting in; in other words, stay in hero mode.

Heroes are mostly outward focused, still courting validation; still looking for appreciation; still looking for dragons and damsels, and ladders to climb.

Elders, as I understand the term so far, is mostly about turning inward toward Source and Soul and looking for those who are wanting and waiting for mentors to give them a leg up in their own life’s journeys.

Elders are still adventurous and open to trying new things but with the objectives being securing peace rather than profit, receiving visions rather than commercial victories, and resting in the results instead of pushing rivers.

Carl Jung says during the first forty years we’re just doing research and reconnaissance. Mid-life heroes are still engaging the ambitious life, building family, careers, empires, and receiving credits.

Elders are about giving credit where credit belongs and are still learning and growing while sowing spiritual seeds for future generations. We’re still interested in being productive, but less for money and more for meaning and connecting to something as my dear friend and colleague the late poet Robert Bly says: “…larger than anything you’ve ever heard, vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats… when someone knocks on your door, think that he’s about to give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven, or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s been decided that if you lie down no one will die.”