Invitation - 09-24-25 Sangha Meeting

One Wild & Precious Life

We spent our last session with a writing exercise to get us closer to knowing, caring for and living our higher purpose. With this next session we want to continue that inquiry focused on purpose and time. As those engaged in becoming an Elder, we tend to have a unique relationship to time as we engage our purpose. There seems to be less urgency and a refined awareness of past, present and future. Time can be lived as an emotion where it moves quickly when we’re excited and happy, but more slowly if something goes awry. Elderhood affords the experience of feeling urgency without the anxiety.  

Some of our questions are:

• how do we gain balance and equanimity

• how do we live in relationship to calendars and things to do

• how do we inhibit full engagement with our purpose

• how do we notice the thoughts that distract, the thoughts that liberate

Mary Oliver wrote the following poem which is a marvelous guideline for purpose and time:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean--

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

7:00pm EST / 4:00pm PST / 1:00pm HST

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using the LINK below.

The Sangha is a community examining how to live our best expression of wisdom and Elderhood. To be this expression, we must shift our way of thinking so that we transmute information and insights into wisdom. In this Sangha we offer experiences and discussions that inform the process of becoming Elder. We draw from the rich traditions of Eastern and Western practices, philosophies and psychologies.

With Gratitude - The Contemporary Elder Sangha

Zoom link:https: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81636149753?pwd=hl9UKRLHACDrHTl1UB7bI9PgOjdylO.1