Age-ing, Sage-ing, Integrating

City Club member Oak Thorne bird-banding with Charlie and Gabriella Minnis.

"A farmer got so old that he couldn't work the fields anymore. So he would spend the day just sitting on the porch. His son, still working the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there. "He's of no use any more," the son thought to himself, "he doesn't do anything!" One day the son got so frustrated by this, that he built a wooden coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in. Without saying anything, the father climbed inside. After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where there was a high cliff. As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it up. Still lying there peacefully, the father looked up at his son. "I know you are going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?" "What is it?" replied the son. "Throw me over the cliff, if you like," said the father, "but save this good wood coffin. Your children might need to use it." (Zen proverb)

So who exactly is that, making that "light tapping" sound? It's you. No, it's certainly not me -- I'm the guy out there working the farm. I'm the startup guy looking to score big, the guy bump-skiing the moguls, the guy raising two kids. No, no, it indeed is you, your future self -- a few decades means nothing within the vastness of time and space.

The stoics refer to it as memento mori i.e. the ancient practice of reflecting on your own mortality. Meditating on your mortality is depressing only if you miss the point. It is, in fact, a tool to create priority and meaning. It's a tool that generations have used to create real perspective and urgency, to treat our time as a gift and not waste it on the trivial and vain. Death doesn't make life pointless but rather purposeful.

Passage of time enables perspective. Perhaps read a few memoirs by the aged or departed (Frasier Meadows once housed a splendid library of these). Aside from offering a unique first-hand view of history, say WWII and the Great Depression, such memoirs often reveal a startling freshness to these accounts of lives as meaningful, urgent, and full (if not more so) than yours today. You might even catch a glimpse of the calmness possessed by that old man in his would-be coffin, depicting Faulkner's well-known quote, "The past is never dead. It isn't even past."

Otherwise: civilization is but one generation deep.

That lesson often seems lost in our culture, as if there's some underlying societal fear that the very proximity of the aged, and what it portends, is somehow contagious and needs to be literally and figuratively hidden in the shadows. There are exceptions, of course e.g. the power of a strong family unit may overcome any such aversion. So can a strong sense of community such as Highland's where multigenerational perspectives are so embraced that many of those "up in the years" are regarded with a kind of respect, awe, reverence.

But, by and large, the instinct seems to be one of segregation, a kind of benevolent warehousing. You might see some steps toward a sense of community like the Green House Project but even those tentative measures (just a handful in Colorado), while featuring a dozen or fewer elderly housed in residences within the larger community, are geared towards those of the same age. That's not true communal integration, that's retail segregation.

Yet, if there were ever a need for deep tribal wisdom it would seem to be now with our hyperkinetic culture just trying to catch its breath. As such, the words of William Steding (click: Get Out Of Your Box) might just be the ballast we need for a society on the verge of seasickness. Of course, Oak Thorne’s journey out of the box is legendary as he applies the ur-language of nature to establish intergenerational communion. (photo above)

We will also be joined by Michelle Pinkowski as we discuss her life mission centered on the need and challenges of true elderly communal integration.

Tap, tap.