Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
I spoke with two dear friends on the phone this week, both powerful gray-haired women whom I consider Elders. Each served the Elder function for me at different points along my path. And once I realized what they’d done—not always immediately evident—I told them so. In response to my nomination, I heard something like: But who am I to offer guidance to anyone? Me: “Perhaps this is a sign of one’s readiness for Eldering—not thinking that you are.” Translation: You might have the opportunity to practice Eldering when someone younger than you shows up in your dooryard. The Why Me? question will be answered by how you respond and by what ripples outward from the encounter. The wake, if you will. I’ve asked these two women if I could tell the stories of our phone conversations, and they’ve said yes. Many thanks to them for their willingness, their courage.
Learning to trade Personal Preference for Willing Participation: Who teaches such a thing anymore?
I have searched long and hard for Elders, and often found myself wondering what happened to the once-commonplace reminder to “respect your elders.” Was it eclipsed by the retirement instructions carried in the term Bucket List, coined by the director of the 2007 Film with that same title?(I draw this connection from Stephen Jenkinson, listen HERE) The film casts interminable self-indulgence as a form of modern heroism. Despite receiving poor reviews from critics, the film Bucket List rose to #1 at the box office and grossed over $175 million worldwide. I missed the film, encountering the term later as it infiltrated the vernacular. The same year the film came out I turned twenty-seven and, perhaps ironically, followed my longing back to the Old Country for a proper adventure. Over the course of an unseasonably mild winter, I biked the backroads of Southern Germany knocking on doors in search of apprenticeship. To my amazement, many country people took me in and taught me a great deal about traditional breadmaking, butchery, animal husbandry and cheesemaking. More importantly, they offered me a glimpse of the remnant threads of a living Culture’s commitment to intergenerational transfer.
Was the arrival of the Bucket List—the film, the phrase, the directive—hard on the survival of a threadbare Elderhood? Or would it be more accurate to say that Hollywood was happy to take the cultural reins as the Elders increasingly receded from the scene? Which was the Chicken and which was the Egg, as the saying goes?
The First Call
The house glows with the dancing light of a single tallow candle when the phone rings.
Summer Sunlight become
sweet-Grass
stored as Fat
on a Cow’s back,
released to the
Winter-dark-House
by Wick and by Flame
Answering, I begin a practice of listening with someone who takes the art very seriously, and sculpts it to a high form. I am learning, constantly. This friend, recently retired from richly meaningful work, tells me she finds herself unexpectedly drawn into the emotional turmoil of an unravelling community. As often accompanies a death in a family, heightened emotions have emerged as the scaffolding that upheld the community is disassembled and reassembled. Conflict is in the air. She describes how she imagined a post-retirement Winter set aside for reflection on a life’s work. Some seasonal solitude in the outer landscape, some deep quiet. But then the conditions changed. She is chosen to listen to various players in an unfolding story of hurt and broken heartedness. She’s been drawn right into the center of it, and asked to provide guidance. “I didn’t imagine folks saw me in this way” she says. I am listening to a story of someone saying yes to unsought service for which others have deemed her qualified. “But here I am,” she says. “And I find myself grateful to have something to offer to a community I love. I’m reminded I belong.” There is no mention of a bucket list anywhere in her story.
The Second Call
Sun sets pink and purple in the Western Sky as I hustle to the house for the phone date with my friend the farmer. I was mid-project when I noticed the time. I meant to warm up dinner beforehand so that I wouldn’t be distracted. Instead, the kitchen is a mess and I am hungry. No time for candles this evening. Practice doesn’t immediately make perfect, it seems. I am still fiddling at the stove when the cell phone rings.
Handheld transmuter
Plugged in
it never tires
Tempter
lifeline
and lonely-maker.
Whispers
anywhere but here.
Several years before that pilgrimage to southern Germany, I left college for an internship on a small, human-powered Farm in the Pacific Northwest. Before leaving, I had become deeply involved in anti-War activism ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Increasingly depleted by the activist work, I finally finished my undergraduate studies and flew West, to begin my adult life. My first day on the Farm was also the first day of the invasion, and after many hours in the fields digging garden beds by hand the farmer invited the other intern and me to travel with her to a protest. The first full day of my adult life I learned that I could use the stored energy in my body to build things up. Beautiful and useful things. I had only known how to use my mind, my voice and the power stored in my social position to try to tear things down. I pursued Farming because of the beauty I found there. And, for the first time in my life, I learned how to work. The long hours and small stipend laid out in the intern agreement taught me as much as any of the lessons on Soils or Plants or marketing. During our first week, as the other apprentice and I shared stories across a bed of Kale, the farmer came over to us and said, “If you can’t talk and work, stop talking until you learn to do both.” Harsh by today’s standards and certainly unpleasant in the moment, this comment slowly matured into one of the most important farming lessons I ever received.
But on the phone this unsettled evening, I hear from my friend the farmer that the societal conditions have changed. During the end-of-the-season review last Fall, each of her four apprentices shared feedback that they wanted to work fewer hours and be paid more. With remarkable sorrow in her voice, she tells me, “If I gave them what they asked for there would be no Farm.” Or, at least, the Farm would have to become more profitable—read: mechanize—such that it would no longer be recognizable to itself. None of the interns decided to return for a second season. As the farmer, my friend, stands on the precipice of retirement, she looks back over a life’s work and wonders if any of it was worth a damn. She is broken, deeply hurting. I remind her of the ‘talking and working’ story, how her honesty on that day informed my capacity to labor. I sense little solace.
Bucket List—a phrase, a film, a cultural directive, a Chicken and an Egg at once—debuted a few years after that first farming season. Over the decades since, I have observed a steady deterioration of the cultural conditions on many local Farms. Division, distrust, and disappointment between Farm workers and Farm owners seem to deepen every year. After several seasons of negative experiences, many young people choose not to pursue farming. There is a lot to grieve here, and yet it is possible to grieve without needing to find someone to blame. In fact, I believe it was an Elder that first suggested that possibility to me.
Such is the Story of the Elder, the Apprentice and the Bucket List.
Thank you for reading.
With great care,
Adam Wilson