"How high's the water, Mama?"

Are We Elders “Eldering”?

At 78, I am an elder … or at least I should be .. wannabe.

Like most of us of any age, I see a wobbling world where an unholy man sells Bibles, housing is becoming a rich man’s luxury, and our young people face a future clouded with problems those of us born in the bubble of the 50s-60s passed along to them.

In 1937, in an already desperate time for people in the US,  a great flood came to the Ohio River Valley. Precipitation that year was four times normal and the river rose 37 feet above flood level. It killed 400 people.

Flooding was a common threat, especially for poor people who lived along the flood plains. A young poet living in Arkansas experienced one of those floods and wrote about it. Years later, while serving in the Air Force in Germany, he spent his last $5 for an unbranded guitar and began singing his poems. Among them was this one:

Click image to watch Johnny Cash singing “How high’s the water, Mama?”

I strikes me now, in our over-populated, beleaguered world, that we’re so over-whelmed by the flood of issues, that we’re hypnotized and immobilized, doing little except measuring the rising waters. Most of us elders live in homes no longer affordable by the young, retired from jobs built on an education no longer widely available to the young without crippling debt, protected by a safety net of services currently under threat of being eliminated.

Meeting Stephen Jenkinson

While on my recent trip to the desert, a friend introduced me to Stephen Jenkinson’s work. He is an Elder practitioner who now disturbs my sleep as I read his books and listen to his words and wonder how I can do more than just watch the water rise.

Jenkinson is not easy to read nor listen to. He’s not a happy-face nor an all-will-be-well guy. He talks about death and the responsibility of being an elder. He makes my optimistic self wince. But there is depth and musical rhythm in his words and wiffs of wisdom I want to understand. Here’s a sample of his words:

“If you wrestle an angel, you will grow muscle. There’s no doubt of that. You will also hurt in places that you didn’t know you had. There’s no doubt of that either. And you will lose, by the normal calculus of trying to engineer the life that you’re sure you deserve. It will not come out as you planned, wrestling angels. Your plans are usually the first casualty of the match.

But here is that great secret of it: you will be able to boast of your defeat. You will be able to stand in the wreckage of what used to be your certainty, your creed, your way of doing life’s business, and you can tell wild, true stories about how it all came to ruin. Whatever is left standing - and there is always something left standing when you wrestle angels - is the thing that was true about you and your life all along, as faithful a companion as the Earth that will one day cradle you again.”
― Stephen Jenkinson

Jenkinson’s website describes him as: a worker, author, storyteller, musician and culture activist. In 2010, he founded Orphan Wisdom, a house for learning skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. It is a redemptive project that comes from where he comes from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time he won’t live to see. When not on the road, he makes books, succumbs to interviews, tends to labours on a small farm, mends broken handles and fences, and bends towards lifeways dictated by the seasons of the boreal borderlands.

Stephen Jenkinson books

I would love to have more conversations with other elders contemplating what it means to be an Elder in today’s world.