🌿 Integrating Seeming Paradoxes in Spiritual Elderhood

This morning, as I entered reflection on what Wilbert Alix calls the 11th Stage of Evolution — Spiritual Elderhood, I found myself wrestling with a paradox.

Scrolling through Instagram, I saw a young woman I once coached, radiant at her pre-nuptial celebration. To my surprise, I felt a sting of jealousy. At 80, I am less drawn to parties, less eager for the constant mingling that once animated my life. And yet, a part of me longed for that sparkle of recognition.

How do I reconcile this?

• With my deep desire for international recognition for the storytelling and deep listening circles I hold.

• With my role as Keeper of the Field, tending invisible threads across generations (as I describe in Chapter 8 of A Listening Grandmother).

• With my yearning to be closer to Mother Earth, embodied in my new allotment with its small stone house, where I hope to deepen into the Path of Alchemy.

At first these seemed like competing directions: visibility and invisibility, ambition and surrender, outer recognition and inner rooting.

But the Field whispers differently.

Jealousy is not failure — it is a messenger. It shows me what I once sought but no longer need in the same form. Elderhood does not erase desire; it re-tunes it. The recognition I seek may no longer come from parties or applause, but from the quiet magnetism of truth-telling, presence, and tending the invisible field.

Sharon Riegie Maynard recently offered me a reading from the Destiny Cards. This year, she said, is one of transition — a time when my values will shift so deeply that my outer life cannot help but follow. That word, transition, feels exactly right.

So I return to the paradox:

• I long for recognition, yet I am called to invisibility.

• I desire rootedness in earth, yet my work ripples across unseen fields.

• I feel the pull of change, yet I am asked to trust what has not yet come into view.

The resolution is not to choose one over the other, but to integrate them — to let them spiral together into a new way of being.

At the heart of this integration, I received a declaration to carry with me into my allotment, my circles, and my mornings. It is a simple practice for cultivating quiet joy:

🌿 Declaration for Quiet Joy in Elderhood

“I root myself in the earth of this moment.
I breathe in the fragrance of simple being.
I release the need for noise, striving, or proof.

I am the grandmother who tends the invisible field.
I walk in trust, not haste.
I receive the gifts of life with open hands.

Joy comes quietly,
like a flower opening to the sun.
I let it rise,
I let it stay,
I let it guide me.”

Perhaps this is the essence of Spiritual Elderhood: not solving the paradoxes, but holding them until they ripen into quiet joy.