WILDLY FREE ELDER
The Artistry of Aging
Elder Muse/Day #6: “Softening The Clenched Fist”
Blue Ridge Mountains/Western N. Carolina/Photography by Gaye Abbott
The letter below touched me deeply this morning as many of the On Being offerings do. It felt timely to share this. I trust that you will pass it on to others to encourage listening in on future and past global conversations plus serving as a catalyst for our own explorations.
“On Being is a conversation that has been building for over two decades with wise and graceful lives — across spiritual inquiry and science, social healing and the arts. On Being with Krista Tippett is a Peabody award-winning show that began on public radio with content that is:
An Adventure
in the mystery and the art of living
A Home
for shaping your presence in a tender, tumultuous world
A Companion
to the pleasure in thinking deeply with others
A Calling
to be part of the generative story of our time
Struck by the timeliness of Krista being at Plum Village, I am presently reading a historical fiction book entitled “The Mountains Sing” by Nguyen Phan Que Mai which tells an enveloping multigenerational tale of the Tran family, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
The author was born into the Vietnam War in 1973 witnessing the wars devastation and its aftermath. As I learn of the Vietnamese peoples experience through this narrative it changes forever what I thought I knew. The impact for Americans was also devastating and touched me personally as a young pregnant wife of a man that had to serve in the war and came back forever changed.
“It is a vivid, gripping story steeped in the language and traditions of Viet Nam and brings to life the human costs of this war from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and peace.”
Please take a few minutes to read Krista’s letter. I invite you to try the “Clenched Fist” exploration and see if it has relevance for you……wherever you may live.
Reflections from Plum Village on healing our world’s pain
Dear Friends,
I’m writing at the end of a retreat at the Plum Village monastery in France.
This place of peace has given me much to reflect on as I’ve watched our world this past week.
This is the place Thich Nhat Hanh came in exile as war raged in his country, Vietnam, in 1966. His book The Miracle of Mindfulness, which has such a tender practicality to it, reads differently when you know that it was written as a manual for monks and nuns seeking to be healing forces for people caught on every side of terrible violence.
The origin story of the Plum Village is one of the images that have touched me, and will continue to nourish and challenge me. This plot of land in a village in the French countryside was, during World War II, a site of bitter controversy and bloody reckoning. It is said that here, members of the local community who had participated in the Nazi occupation were executed. This ground was thereafter considered haunted, ruined for habitation or building. But Thay, upon visiting the site and hearing this story, decided that this was precisely where his community should settle. They were called, as he understood, to move towards and attend to the ruptures of this world.
And on the first morning of this retreat, the monk offering a Dharma talk invited each of us to clench a fist with one of our hands. Try this, if you will: move to force that fist open with your other hand. The fist only clenches tighter — as if by its own will, a natural reaction to force. And I invite you to try, then, a counterintuitive approach: cradle the fist with your other hand. With the same naturalness, but a wholly other quality of feeling and response, the fist releases. It softens.
A sea of clenched fists is a metaphor for our world right now. This exercise brings me back to a conviction I’ve long held, but can find hard to sustain in the tormented adolescence of this century: one of the most powerful ways we can be present to our world’s pain is with a countercultural tenderness.
I like that word “calling” above, as you may know about me. So many of us are asking how we can be healing forces, what we are called to in this moment. And as instinctive and right as it is that we creatively and imaginatively ponder how we can be actively present to our world’s pain and its promise, there is a quieter calling that each of us can pick up in the places we know and live: to be a calmer of fear. To soften the fist that so many of our bodies and hearts have clenched into. Like it or not — for an action plan feels stronger — this is slow, relational, essential groundwork that we must lay if we are to find our way to our belonging to each other and our shared callings to create a transformed world we want all of our children to inhabit.
Nourishing and activating that belonging is our deepest calling at On Being. Our Wisdom Season just concluded — which you can listen to and share as a whole with this playlist — was one quiet offering. (And we’d love to hear how it landed with you.) We will be spending the next few months engaging complex conversations in the Netherlands and the UK, while preparing to produce a special short season towards healing after the U.S. election in the fall.
One thing is certain: whoever wins, my country will be as fractured as before. And so, in 2025, we are going to hit the road with a national On Being conversation we hope to build, convening as well as conversing in live events, around the U.S.
In the months ahead, you’ll get the Pause in your inbox monthly. This will continue to be the place to hear all of our news and future adventures as they unfold.
I wish so fervently for you, for all of us, some respite and restoration in the months ahead — invite you, indeed, to know your need of these things precisely because of your love for this world, and your desire to be of service.
I send you my blessings, and my love – until soon!
Krista
Krista Tippett Image by Pascal Perich © All Rights Reserved.
31 days of Daily Elder Muse blog posts accessed from the unfolding of the day – not planned or scheduled. Yes, the Muse is back again during this powerful and challenging shift time on our planet. May these words, stories and images assist you to remember who you are….and how you can be of service.
I have no idea what will arise…..but then do we really know ahead of time what our moment to moment daily experience will be? We are only asked to pay attention. ~Gaye Abbott
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Gaye Abbott, Wildly Free Elder, 04/20/24
WILDLY FREE ELDER 