I bought the book, Jamie. I’ve been banging on about this subject for so long and it was so nice to read and listen to your post and have a few ah-ha moments along the way. I know Plotkin’s work but not as well as Jenkinson, Hillman or Shaw. Take care my friend. Julian
The journey of soul initiation! You will love it Julian. There’s so much truth to the wheel. Where have all the elders gone? They haven’t gone anywhere. They are not developing anymore. It’s a big eye-opener. Crossing those thresholds. Meet you at the age of wrinkles. Let’s leave it better than we found it. Blessings.
Interesting post. At 77, I don't feel younger and have given up soul searching. That said, there's much to say about optimism, e.g., what kind of mischief can one think up at 88.
Thanks Veronika! It is all about what is happening to our children. When are we going to be the ones we are looking for? Yes! That is the question. Now! Who is with me? In that space between age and time, place and space. There is a field. Meet you there. I always appreciate your wonderful insights! 🙏❤️
Poetry helps... keep them coming! It looks I am the oldest one here. The older you get the better it feels to be among friends.😊
Pass it on.
PS Got me thinking again... role of elders... reminded to read again... culture, voices we are born into... music, all that song and dance... who we are, where we dwell... Pre-civilisations (plural); those tens of millennia, the forests, the savannahs, the 'wastes', and the creatures every one a name, and those skills to live and inherit? Later the books?
Now the ego is about a century old. Freud went from 'brain science' to 'clinical observation', almost literary, an odd mixture? More like a metaphor for a society? Thinks... 19thC imperial structures? Something like that sentinel / command post above the jungle where hidden oppositional forces move?
Thanks Philip! Poetry definitely helps. Sounds like you’re reading McGilchrist again! The emissary. Thank you for being among friends. Your insights are a poem. I always get lost in. Blessings. 🙏❤️
Thanks Jamie. My writing sometimes reduces to telegrams, a touch cryptic. My point stems from a realisation that human culture goes a long way back. 'We' have had elders and poets for a very long time, proven necessities for our part in the creature / vegetable world. 'We', the two McGilchrists, creatures and all, stare at the same cryptic world.
PS Picasso is said to have commented from his visit to the Lascaux caves; 'We have learned nothing'. Which I suppose can be interpreted many ways, but for me the gifts keep coming out of what might be supposed otherwise as thin air.
Thank you for your provocative poem plus all the context. Such good food for thought. "Are the poets dead? Where did all the elders go?" I am relieved to be aware of so many poets, like you, that seem to be bringing the genre back to a place of soul-necessity. The mainstream media may be ignorant of poetry's power, but I bet there is a place for it in the Resistance we're needing today. Resisting the lies, the views of only the botox'd beautiful.
I feel lucky and honored to be aware and connected to so many wise elders, and part of an effort to share their wisdom through 3 forthcoming books I'm working on by octogenarians. Connecting their wisdom to the needs and conversations of the younger generations may be a challenge, but I've also heard (can't cite sources off the cuff) that young folks are also hungry for elder wisdom. Perhaps they need to skip a generation of "parental advice" to have open hearts to grandparents or surrogate elders.
I'm with you, Jamie, in wanting to be one of those earned-wrinkled elders and guides back to a creative imagination.
Here's a paragraph from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak" about the value we can offer as elders--sharing about the shadows:
“The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me to stay in the light. But I want to tell that truth for another reason as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”
Bring on the wrinkles and keep bringing out those books. You’ve already left it better than you found it. Thank you so much for bringing it back to soul. Thanks for reading. What a Poets for? Poetry is an act of resilience that opens up the doors to transformation. To soul. Thank you for seeing me.🙏❤️
that is coming near." This is what stood out to me most! Wow! Just wow! You have a gift to make me shift in my seat uncomfortably when confronted with all these questions and at the same time being wrapped in an incredible amount of Love, hope and possibility that you somehow weave through your prose and the poetry. I don't know how you do it, but it is brilliant! Thank you!
Thanks Sadhbh! Sometimes I get caught between age and time, place and space, and in the distance, I can’t tell if somebody is coming towards me or moving away from me. That intersect of absence and presence spoke out loud in this poem. Thank you for going into the spaces between the words. I appreciate you. 🙏❤️
Hi Jamie, Oh, so many questions, l will have to keep coming back. ‘Are we now orphans of soul?’, those that are the fear based governance of humanity certainly want it so. They seem to be the angry adolescent prone to egoic outbursts, and entice us with the flip side, the allure of youth that you explore in this post. Perhaps this is a timely call for the ‘elders’ among the throng to set clearer boundaries, an affirming ‘No’, a reclamation of our power. This time in history the challenge would be a reclamation, without matching their aggression, one lead by our collective soul; for our children, for the angry adolescents. PS: Love the poem 🙏😊
Thanks Simone! Yes to rejuvenation as opposed to the juvenilization of culture. Yes to elders. Yes to collective soul. Thanks so much for reading between the lines of age and time, between place and space. The curtains are dancing 🙏❤️
A great, thought-provoking post, Jamie. I wonder how much social media plays a role in our desire to look and feel young, along with the constant selfies thanks to smartphones. We focus more on the external, the physical, and less on the internal, the soul. I believe wisdom comes with introspection. We need to embrace the whole journey of life, from youth to aging.
The door only opens to the inside. Maybe too many of us are trying to push it open. Pushing it out. It needs to be pulled in. Maybe we are a body in a soul. I’m right with you Sam on introspection. Thanks for reading. Poetry is a door to soul. 🙏❤️
Paper dolls is exactly what it feels like Jamie. Cut outs all the same, no substance, no depth.
I am anti anti- aging. I want this older generation to show the truth of what aging well looks like. The wrinkles, the grey strands, they are beautiful. As are the stories and learnings along the path - both the challenging ones and the uplifting ones.
Thank you for all your time and thought in putting this piece together. 💜
Anti anti ageing. AAA. The grey has stories that unfold the lines. Each one a new discovery. Thank you for reading and for meeting me in the spaces. Between the wrinkles. Blessings. 🙏❤️
This is majorly fascinating, Jamie. (Is majorly a word? No red line appeared!) I found my fingers, trained by Medium, wanting to highlight both poem and explication/meditation afterward.
Definitely going to look into the books you mention, too!
"Why must we learn the same lessons over and over again? Fire and time. Floods and killings. Arrogance and greed. It will leave us destitute. Destitute of wisdom. Destitute of knowledge. It will leave us to begin again like children who know nothing. Who have no memory of what came before. Who never knew the lessons of the wars. The ignorance a pestilence. This cult of amnesia. Orphans of soul."
When does a lesson decide it needs to be learned? Thank you so much for reading and reaching out. I hope things are settling down in California. I hope your daughter and her family are well. Big hugs 🙏❤️
Oh, Jamie, this post is truly, truly good. You've made so many great points and found the words I couldn't quite articulate to express the confusion I feel about aging and the obsession with eternal youth that I see around me. My own journey has been about embracing the privilege of becoming—of still being here, reading, breathing, and accepting my place in the world without getting caught up in trends, aesthetics, and the manipulation and pollution of photography.
I still grieve having to leave photography behind after 20 years of recording people's memories because I no longer feel aligned with today's societal trends and demands.
Thank you for this—it makes me feel less alone in trying to understand aging and our rites of passage. I love your tone as always—gentle, human, and wise. Sending hugs!
Katerina! Multumesc! Thank you for reading and for this deeper dive into that awareness of ageing. I hear you on the photography change and at the same time it must be hard for you to leave. Blessing you the possibility of creativity, in whatever new adventure sets your passion on fire. The world is big and at the same time small. Thanks for being here. Best wishes and big hugs in your new city out on the edges of everything. 🙏❤️
Great post, thank you Jamie. Many interesting questions. Rites of passage? Really important, and it feels like western culture has been castrated in that respect.
I'd like to feel I am getting ready for eldership but it always feels as if I'm only getting to the starting grid of life. Or perhaps I'm developing a true 'beginner's mind'; the older I get the less I'd claim to know. Perhaps that opens up space for listening, discernment, and inspiration.
Josh, I think you are the perfect elder. Creative imagination. The ability to say I don’t know. Never our role to give answers. Maybe just ask questions. Maybe to be the question. The will to grow. Wisdom is to be a beginner in the sense of possibility, inspiration, intuition, imagination, instinct, intellect. A body in a soul. To me, you are all of that. A Being aware of being. Thanks for “being” here. Thanks for sharing poetry🙏❤️.
Thank you for your support, and confidence in me :) I remember meeting RainbowHawk of the Ehama people 25 years ago on vision-quest - and I thought 'now I know what eldership looks like'. It has stayed with me ever since. Something to hold as a possibility in this lifetime.
We can’t grow old in wisdom until we grow into ourselves. And there is the question. There are no rights of passage it seems in the west. We each have to it find our own way. But then maybe that is only for outliers.
I totally agree Charlie! Seems to be harder to do now then maybe it was a generation or two ago. I’m certainly feeling like an outlier. Not that I have anything down pat. Living into the questions of I don’t know. Something calls me to those Hebrides. There’s something there.
I love those places…. Those wild spaces. I’m 74 on the 18th. We have been losing the elders for a long time. Maybe I am one. I think elders are extra ordinary. I see my self as an oddity. A year ago roughly I had this thing going on about a mapless map. Driving in the dark with the lights off. It was a dream. Not knowing is a knowing of sorts.
I’ve recovered. I had such a beautiful experience of being cared for, my heart was and is bursting. It’s lovely when people You care about care for you.
Love this post. So much presience
Thanks so much for reading and reposting Julian. Appreciate the shout out. 🙏❤️
I bought the book, Jamie. I’ve been banging on about this subject for so long and it was so nice to read and listen to your post and have a few ah-ha moments along the way. I know Plotkin’s work but not as well as Jenkinson, Hillman or Shaw. Take care my friend. Julian
The journey of soul initiation! You will love it Julian. There’s so much truth to the wheel. Where have all the elders gone? They haven’t gone anywhere. They are not developing anymore. It’s a big eye-opener. Crossing those thresholds. Meet you at the age of wrinkles. Let’s leave it better than we found it. Blessings.
I can't guarantee that my friend but I'll keep being troubled aloud.
Interesting post. At 77, I don't feel younger and have given up soul searching. That said, there's much to say about optimism, e.g., what kind of mischief can one think up at 88.
Lean into those wrinkles! Mischief definitely calls. Thanks for reading, and reaching out Frederick. 🙏❤️
Many important questions to live into in this piece, Jamie!
What happened to adolescence?
How long until we are adulting?
Where have the elders gone?
(and ~ while we're at it ~ what is happening to our children?)
When are we going to be the ones we are looking for?
"how long does it take before a lesson
decides it wants to be learned?"
🙏 💕
Thanks Veronika! It is all about what is happening to our children. When are we going to be the ones we are looking for? Yes! That is the question. Now! Who is with me? In that space between age and time, place and space. There is a field. Meet you there. I always appreciate your wonderful insights! 🙏❤️
Poetry helps... keep them coming! It looks I am the oldest one here. The older you get the better it feels to be among friends.😊
Pass it on.
PS Got me thinking again... role of elders... reminded to read again... culture, voices we are born into... music, all that song and dance... who we are, where we dwell... Pre-civilisations (plural); those tens of millennia, the forests, the savannahs, the 'wastes', and the creatures every one a name, and those skills to live and inherit? Later the books?
Now the ego is about a century old. Freud went from 'brain science' to 'clinical observation', almost literary, an odd mixture? More like a metaphor for a society? Thinks... 19thC imperial structures? Something like that sentinel / command post above the jungle where hidden oppositional forces move?
Thanks Philip! Poetry definitely helps. Sounds like you’re reading McGilchrist again! The emissary. Thank you for being among friends. Your insights are a poem. I always get lost in. Blessings. 🙏❤️
Thanks Jamie. My writing sometimes reduces to telegrams, a touch cryptic. My point stems from a realisation that human culture goes a long way back. 'We' have had elders and poets for a very long time, proven necessities for our part in the creature / vegetable world. 'We', the two McGilchrists, creatures and all, stare at the same cryptic world.
PS Picasso is said to have commented from his visit to the Lascaux caves; 'We have learned nothing'. Which I suppose can be interpreted many ways, but for me the gifts keep coming out of what might be supposed otherwise as thin air.
You are the gift Phillip! Thank you! Your wisdom is a warrior of love and light. Keep shinning!
Thank you for your provocative poem plus all the context. Such good food for thought. "Are the poets dead? Where did all the elders go?" I am relieved to be aware of so many poets, like you, that seem to be bringing the genre back to a place of soul-necessity. The mainstream media may be ignorant of poetry's power, but I bet there is a place for it in the Resistance we're needing today. Resisting the lies, the views of only the botox'd beautiful.
I feel lucky and honored to be aware and connected to so many wise elders, and part of an effort to share their wisdom through 3 forthcoming books I'm working on by octogenarians. Connecting their wisdom to the needs and conversations of the younger generations may be a challenge, but I've also heard (can't cite sources off the cuff) that young folks are also hungry for elder wisdom. Perhaps they need to skip a generation of "parental advice" to have open hearts to grandparents or surrogate elders.
I'm with you, Jamie, in wanting to be one of those earned-wrinkled elders and guides back to a creative imagination.
Here's a paragraph from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak" about the value we can offer as elders--sharing about the shadows:
“The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me to stay in the light. But I want to tell that truth for another reason as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”
A Soul Journey! A Cuoreodyssey! Thanks Shelly!
I love this quote! So so good!
Bring on the wrinkles and keep bringing out those books. You’ve already left it better than you found it. Thank you so much for bringing it back to soul. Thanks for reading. What a Poets for? Poetry is an act of resilience that opens up the doors to transformation. To soul. Thank you for seeing me.🙏❤️
"Presence and absence
are the same thing in the distance
of what is moving away
that is coming near." This is what stood out to me most! Wow! Just wow! You have a gift to make me shift in my seat uncomfortably when confronted with all these questions and at the same time being wrapped in an incredible amount of Love, hope and possibility that you somehow weave through your prose and the poetry. I don't know how you do it, but it is brilliant! Thank you!
Thanks Sadhbh! Sometimes I get caught between age and time, place and space, and in the distance, I can’t tell if somebody is coming towards me or moving away from me. That intersect of absence and presence spoke out loud in this poem. Thank you for going into the spaces between the words. I appreciate you. 🙏❤️
Hi Jamie, Oh, so many questions, l will have to keep coming back. ‘Are we now orphans of soul?’, those that are the fear based governance of humanity certainly want it so. They seem to be the angry adolescent prone to egoic outbursts, and entice us with the flip side, the allure of youth that you explore in this post. Perhaps this is a timely call for the ‘elders’ among the throng to set clearer boundaries, an affirming ‘No’, a reclamation of our power. This time in history the challenge would be a reclamation, without matching their aggression, one lead by our collective soul; for our children, for the angry adolescents. PS: Love the poem 🙏😊
Thanks Simone! Yes to rejuvenation as opposed to the juvenilization of culture. Yes to elders. Yes to collective soul. Thanks so much for reading between the lines of age and time, between place and space. The curtains are dancing 🙏❤️
Dancing, swinging, singing and beating to the rhythm of our soul 🤗❤️🤣
A great, thought-provoking post, Jamie. I wonder how much social media plays a role in our desire to look and feel young, along with the constant selfies thanks to smartphones. We focus more on the external, the physical, and less on the internal, the soul. I believe wisdom comes with introspection. We need to embrace the whole journey of life, from youth to aging.
The door only opens to the inside. Maybe too many of us are trying to push it open. Pushing it out. It needs to be pulled in. Maybe we are a body in a soul. I’m right with you Sam on introspection. Thanks for reading. Poetry is a door to soul. 🙏❤️
Paper dolls is exactly what it feels like Jamie. Cut outs all the same, no substance, no depth.
I am anti anti- aging. I want this older generation to show the truth of what aging well looks like. The wrinkles, the grey strands, they are beautiful. As are the stories and learnings along the path - both the challenging ones and the uplifting ones.
Thank you for all your time and thought in putting this piece together. 💜
Anti anti ageing. AAA. The grey has stories that unfold the lines. Each one a new discovery. Thank you for reading and for meeting me in the spaces. Between the wrinkles. Blessings. 🙏❤️
This is majorly fascinating, Jamie. (Is majorly a word? No red line appeared!) I found my fingers, trained by Medium, wanting to highlight both poem and explication/meditation afterward.
Definitely going to look into the books you mention, too!
Thanks Jeni! 🙏❤️
"Why must we learn the same lessons over and over again? Fire and time. Floods and killings. Arrogance and greed. It will leave us destitute. Destitute of wisdom. Destitute of knowledge. It will leave us to begin again like children who know nothing. Who have no memory of what came before. Who never knew the lessons of the wars. The ignorance a pestilence. This cult of amnesia. Orphans of soul."
This so struck me.
When does a lesson decide it needs to be learned? Thank you so much for reading and reaching out. I hope things are settling down in California. I hope your daughter and her family are well. Big hugs 🙏❤️
Oh, Jamie, this post is truly, truly good. You've made so many great points and found the words I couldn't quite articulate to express the confusion I feel about aging and the obsession with eternal youth that I see around me. My own journey has been about embracing the privilege of becoming—of still being here, reading, breathing, and accepting my place in the world without getting caught up in trends, aesthetics, and the manipulation and pollution of photography.
I still grieve having to leave photography behind after 20 years of recording people's memories because I no longer feel aligned with today's societal trends and demands.
Thank you for this—it makes me feel less alone in trying to understand aging and our rites of passage. I love your tone as always—gentle, human, and wise. Sending hugs!
Katerina! Multumesc! Thank you for reading and for this deeper dive into that awareness of ageing. I hear you on the photography change and at the same time it must be hard for you to leave. Blessing you the possibility of creativity, in whatever new adventure sets your passion on fire. The world is big and at the same time small. Thanks for being here. Best wishes and big hugs in your new city out on the edges of everything. 🙏❤️
Great post, thank you Jamie. Many interesting questions. Rites of passage? Really important, and it feels like western culture has been castrated in that respect.
I thought of Jeannette Encinias's poem "Silver" in regard to getting older (https://janicefalls.wordpress.com/2021/03/03/silver-for-suzy-moore-by-jeannette-encinias/)
I'd like to feel I am getting ready for eldership but it always feels as if I'm only getting to the starting grid of life. Or perhaps I'm developing a true 'beginner's mind'; the older I get the less I'd claim to know. Perhaps that opens up space for listening, discernment, and inspiration.
Josh, I think you are the perfect elder. Creative imagination. The ability to say I don’t know. Never our role to give answers. Maybe just ask questions. Maybe to be the question. The will to grow. Wisdom is to be a beginner in the sense of possibility, inspiration, intuition, imagination, instinct, intellect. A body in a soul. To me, you are all of that. A Being aware of being. Thanks for “being” here. Thanks for sharing poetry🙏❤️.
Thank you for your support, and confidence in me :) I remember meeting RainbowHawk of the Ehama people 25 years ago on vision-quest - and I thought 'now I know what eldership looks like'. It has stayed with me ever since. Something to hold as a possibility in this lifetime.
Lovely! I am with you!! I agree with you on all counts. Thanks for this blessing today, my friend. XO
Thanks Danielle 🙏❤️
Excellent, Jamie. A youth-obsessed society is one devoid of wisdom.
Thanks Perry 🙏❤️
We can’t grow old in wisdom until we grow into ourselves. And there is the question. There are no rights of passage it seems in the west. We each have to it find our own way. But then maybe that is only for outliers.
I totally agree Charlie! Seems to be harder to do now then maybe it was a generation or two ago. I’m certainly feeling like an outlier. Not that I have anything down pat. Living into the questions of I don’t know. Something calls me to those Hebrides. There’s something there.
I love those places…. Those wild spaces. I’m 74 on the 18th. We have been losing the elders for a long time. Maybe I am one. I think elders are extra ordinary. I see my self as an oddity. A year ago roughly I had this thing going on about a mapless map. Driving in the dark with the lights off. It was a dream. Not knowing is a knowing of sorts.
Dammit Charlie every time you speak, you write a poem and a song starts singing through me! You are a gift.
Jamie, today in substack I’ve found such stimulating thought
I’ve recovered. I had such a beautiful experience of being cared for, my heart was and is bursting. It’s lovely when people You care about care for you.
Love. We know it when we feel it. 🙏❤️
I feel it’s a place where we find mirrors. And in that somehow we see ourselves more clearly. I hope you’re feeling better from the flu. Blessings.
I’ll be posting somethings soon.