great mother tree

the offering of aging

“Your grandmother is like a great mother tree now. Pouring out so much—transferring all she knows into the next space and offering it to us.” An indigenous friend relayed this astounding comment made by her Dad. We both marvelled, drinking in the subtle forces at play in this vivifying image of ripening into a good old age. Our old ones do this for us. We, too, will do this for our young ones when it’s our turn. That is, if we grow old in a useful way.

Useful? Rudolf Steiner once noted that “Young people turn away from older people not because the latter have grown old but because they remain young—that is, they don’t know how to grow old in the right way.” He goes on to say, “Growing old in the right way means allowing the spirit to unfold in our souls as befits an aging body…Young people will find their way to older people who seriously attempt to experience spirit.”

This, of course, will mean something different for each of us, but it usually entails having had our share of suffering. And like a great tree, having been weathered and tempered by life, rejected, broken down and broken open. We will likely have reached our limit of understanding and strength, and being sufficiently humbled, have asked for help.

This may sound dismal, especially when that shining star in our youth heralding some future dream dims. But in its place, instead of the far away star, a tree, rooted in the here and now, is becoming the benefactor of the future. And while interwoven with others, she has become unique in herself. Not special, unique, bearing the particular marks of the passage of time in a specific place, bark peeling, leaves withering, limbs bent or broken by the winds of change, the whole unfolding process obedient to the nature of things. Growth has given way to something grown, properly aged, yielding to a stripping away, right down to spirit, until an authentic form and unmistakable character remains, one sustained by and serving a much larger purpose and design than youthful fantasies could conjure.

Now is the time for a less recognized but perhaps more enduring kind of fruitfulness—for in and on and all around her, young seedlings find nourishment and protection, as all manner of life feeds off this mother who will die into the way of things, thereby serving to preserve and sustain and deepen a larger cycle. As I mention in The Call to The Far Shore, “It seems that a tree lives half its life as a living tree and then a second life as a rotting trunk. In fact, it may be that when a tree’s life has ended, its usefulness is about to peak, not diminish.”

My friend’s grandmother would probably not be surprised by such a spirited growing old in a useful way. Nor Stephen Jenkinson, who observes, “For a lot of great reasons, none of us are young in the way we once were. And people deserve to hear from people who’ve escaped their youth, finally.

Order The Call to the Far Shore: Carrying Our Loved Ones Through Dying, Death, and Beyond through your local bookstore, Amazon, and most major booksellers.

Reviews: “What a weight in gold the pages of this book The Call To The Far Shore offer us! This book must be available to all who walk the earth and will depart from it.” — Phyllida Anam-Aire, Irish poet, psychotherapist, and author of A Celtic Book of Dying, The Last Ecstasy of Life, and Let Love Heal

“You must read this book and you must make sure that those you love read The Call to the Far Shore because it offers profound spiritual wisdom and practical empathic guidance for navigating the inevitabilities of death. Beautifully written, this is as much an essential resource for helping the dying as Spiritual Midwifery was for assisting birth. Sure to be a classic." —Perdita Finn, author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World

https://www.amazon.ca/Call-Far-Shore-Carrying-through/dp/B0D9TMVNL9

The Call to the Far Shore: Carrying Our Loved Ones Through Dying, Death, and Beyond. Amazon.com

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