And So It Begins

July 5, 2023

My professional sabbatical journey starts officially in August, is starting practically now, and started in general at the start of the spring semester, as students and colleagues joined me in a little Spiritual Formation after Sixty lit review group. I'll have until the end of the year to explore the topic of spiritual formation after sixty as a scholarly research topic for this work sabbatical.  I have the rest of my life to explore it personally. 

My own spiritual formation-after-sixty project really began in the last months of age sixty, just ten years ago. It has been a rich decade. It has been transformational.  Before sixty I had no interest in matters spiritual, for the last decade that's what I've come to be most interested in. How much further I can go, how much deeper and more meaningfully, is one thread I'll be following these next months. How my life was turned around is another, how it might intentionally proceed is another, and how – drawing from sources beyond my own personal story – others in later life might take their lives into deeper, more meaningful, richer-in-all-the-most-important-ways places is still another.

This morning, after hearing neighborhood Fourth of July celebrations last night louder than I can remember hearing before, I woke at 5:15 a.m., pushed the coffee-maker button and weighed myself.

189.

189 is a good marker. A good starting place to key off of for the next half of the year. Which will include a 75-mile week walking on the Camino de Santiago with my son Shane in September.

Spiritual health is not the only part of my life that I’ll be attending to these next weeks and months.

Then I addressed a haiku card and walked to the mailbox. The moon was (is?) still shining, the night was fading. The air the cool crisp of a hot summer-day-to-come. 

And blessed silence.

I stopped for a moment just to experience it. Then I dropped the card in the box and walked inside to write this, the start of my project journal.  Thoughts for what scholars might conclude, were I a bit more disciplined, as the start of an autoethnography.

Today I travel to the Monastery of the Ascension in Jerome, Idaho for a short personal retreat which will be another kind of marker to start this sabbatical. 

Over the last days of June I took myself off of all social media, in particular Facebook, unsubscribed from most of my regular sources of news political, and other online, extraneous-to-this-sabbatical-topic, distractions.

Wordle is an exception.

I did not make myself completely bereft of simple pleasures of the mind, eh?

For though I know I have some discipline, focusing on a particular topic is not one that comes naturally – I am interested in too much. I have an endlessly curious mind, it seems. So, just as the most important choice I must make when trying to eat healthily is what is available for my consumption (i.e. not buying bags of chocolates to bring home) the same limitations apply when it comes to what I have available to read. If I want to make good decisions about what I put in my mouth or in my head I have to give myself only healthy options. If it is around, I’m likely to eat it or to eat it up. 

I’ll be writing essays about matters of spiritual formation – mine, others, ideas and concepts – over the next months as I explore myself and what others have to say about it. My particular attention will be on later life, not only because I am in later life and want to learn ways to continue my own development, but also because spiritual formation – spiritual development, one’s openness of deeper meaning and depth of experience, one's experience with the divine, transcendence – is one of the few areas where elders can grow even to the very last breath, as other parts of their lives inevitably decline.

I wanna know more about that.

My problem now, as I said before, is there is too much I want to read and experience and discuss. My retreat starts later today, and we’ll see if we can become a bit more mindful about how I spend my time and attention going forward.

Say a little prayer for me, eh?