Fierce with Age Digest, Volume 7

Special James Hollis Edition "Living with Borrowed Dust"

This special edition of our digest is devoted to excerpts from Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love and Other Grievances

Of all the many guides to growing psychologically and spiritually through life into older age, James Hollis has been my biggest contemporary influence. This most recent book of his is not an exception. Indeed, it is a culmination.

I am most proud that James has endorsed my own recent books, including Spiritual Aging. (I’m too modest to quote them to you here but if you happen to check the cover quotes…) You will understand when you read from this collection of his excerpts why I so resonate with his work and have used his many books as springboards to my fundamental beliefs about finding meaning: to accept reality for what it can’t help being and to know you are beloved unconditionally. I highly recommend you read this book and if you’re looking for an earlier classic, take a look at Finding Meaning In the Second Half of Life, then every one after.

—Carol Orsborn, chief archivist the Fierce with Age Journal of Boomer Wisdom and Inspiration

FINDING MEANING

When we are separated from our own souls, there is a terrible suffering that inevitably spills into the world, into relationships, onto children, and into the world at large. As Jung pointed out, neurosis is suffering that has not yet found its meaning.

A SUMMONS NOT A CURE

As I have said to more than one client, our work is not about curing you, for you are not a disease, but it is a summons to a deeper dialogue that will make your life more interesting and will likely take you to spiritual landscapes where you hadn’t planned to visit, yet each will bring a richer, darker hue to the course of your life.

SPLINTERED BONES

…We may have to live with matters unresolved, with injustice reverberating in our splintered bones, and the discrepancies between what we wish for our lives and what is achievable are often very great indeed. Accordingly, we all have to live with loss and treasure what we can wrest from it.

We have to live with disappointment and savor how blessed we are. We have to live with unachievable desires and be grateful for how they helped us move more fully into life and its struggles.

THE TENSION OF EXPECTATION

Behind the noise and beneath the surface, something in the soul of each of us cries out; something hums with the tension of expectation. While we may be distracted from this summons or unable to attend its entreaty, the soul keeps asking that we pay attention.

Those moments of summons come to us through our symptomatology, in our dreams, and even in those difficult hours of sleeplessness… Anyone who has truly grasped this fact, internalized it, felt it, is never wholly alone again. That person participates in a transcendent relationship, which changes the quality of one’s journey forever.

THE JOURNEY WE CALL LIFE

The desire for a complete merger with security is the enemy of life on this journey we call life…

When we risk the journey, something rises within to support and direct us, some deep knowing of the way—even when we are most lost. If that first step into the unknown is not taken, something within will never be birthed into this world….To each of us, this call rises with each dawn and awaits our decision.

WISDOM IN PASSING

· Life will break your heart, but at least then, you know you have a heart.

· In the end, we do not solve life; rather, life slowly unwinds us.

· If we wish to live fully, it is not happiness that is the goal, but to be consumed by that which we have come to love.