With my husband’s birthday last Saturday–finally we are both 77, but my enthusiasm wanes as I realize this means I am closer to 78–I have been joking about being elderly. And we are. If we want to deny it, our bodies will remind us.

In no uncertain terms, metastatic cancer has invited me to be reflective about the way I am in the world. My assignment has been to live beyond my mother and my grandmother. (Read my post “Living Beyond Evil”). Now it is to live as fully as I am able in the time I have.

This is being an elder: sharing reflections with others more spontaneously and more boldly. It is walking passed the things I “have” to do in order to walk up the steep stairs to my third floor nest. Tucked under the eaves with a view of Grandmother Ocean’s rollicking waves which seem to say, “where have you been?”. How often I forget eldering when the have-to’s sing their well-worn siren song, shouting out “Do me,” drowning out my soul’s “Look. Listen. Quiet.”

Eldering, listening so that I become more of who I was created to become. Soul satisfying listening, becoming more fully human, adding my hard-learned wisdom–knowledge, experience, doing– to change the world for the elder generations to come.