I am advocating a re-frame of that moment of retiring from a recognized role of positional power. I see it as the ending of one form of agency and the beginning of another source of influence that I am naming relational power. Within that frame is the call for elders.
As the humiliating debate around whether Joe Biden has “aged out” of the presidency continues to play front and center on the American political scene, it becomes more and more clear that America is basically repelled by the aging process and largely clueless about the deeper spiritual possibilities that may lie coiled within it.
Suspended animation…. those timeless few seconds between the instant you know the crash is inevitable and the moment of actual impact. A single blank freeze...
Cynthia reminds us of the tools we have to awaken our hearts, the task to which we were born: “…only with awakened hearts are we actually able to fulfill our purpose within the cosmos and take our place in that great dance of divine manifestation”
Each morning we wake to find ourselves on a river upon which we have never been, we proceed in uncharted waters, and we do not know where we are headed.
Chapter VI describes the necessary soul gesture of surrender, which requires the willing deconstruction of our small self, or the passage of the acorn self into the oak tree