The aging turn to nurturing spirit and community

CHAPEL HILL -- The first part of life is for growing and the next is for striving, for making a living and maybe a family.

Then, say growing numbers of older people in North Carolina and elsewhere, it's time for being. Specifically, for being spiritual.

A conference Saturday at North Carolina State's McKimmon Center will bring together leading figures in a diverse movement to change the perception and reality of older people's lives in the 21st century.

In a world of wrinkled rockers, spiking longevity and the 8,000 boomers a day who reach retirement age, it's clear that the generation formerly called old will be making its mark for decades to come. But the speakers at Saturday's event, and those with similar views, think there's more to aging than trying to relive vanished youth.

"An increasing number of us are living decades longer than our parents or grandparents due to 20th-century advances in medical science and public health," says Bolton Anthony, 65, a former librarian and university administrator who's head of the Chapel Hill-based nonprofit Second Journey.

"Think of those years as a resource - a cultural and spiritual resource reclaimed from death in the same way the Dutch reclaim fertile land from the waste of the sea."

Anthony, a speaker and organizer at Saturday's conference, has spent the last 10 years heading Second Journey, a nonprofit focused on issues of aging and community. People in this movement acknowledge that old age is different, but not that it's inferior to other periods of life.

"Life creates an initiation into aging," Anthony said. "That can be illness, encounters with death, the death of a spouse, the death of a parent. All of those invite you into another way of looking at life."

Dene Peterson, also a conference speaker, thinks the labor of late life should be within. Peterson, 80, is a founder of ElderSpirit Community, a pioneering site for older people who want to live and grow together spiritually.

"I believe the work of old age is spirituality - much more conscious aging, your own self-growth and meaning," she said.

Located within two blocks of pretty downtown Abingdon, Va., ElderSpirit is home to 42 people who have separate small residences or apartments but meet often to talk, eat, help each other out and run the community. In fact, to join the community, people have to agree not only to help others, but also to be helped. With its emphasis on self-governing and sustainable living, ElderSpirit seems to offer an appealing alternative to conventional long-term care for many.

The nonprofit, with a central meeting place dedicated to spirituality, has more people waiting to get in than residents. ElderSpirit deals with hundreds of queries from all over about its practice of elder co-housing.

"I think the energy in the community comes from the fact that there are strong relationships here," said Peterson, a former Catholic nun. "There are things to do. There's a way to be useful; there's a way to give to others."

Communities in California and Colorado have followed the ElderSpirit model, and many more have created similar multigenerational versions, Peterson said. Elder co-housing isn't free from problems such as gossip and disputes during self-governing, Peterson said, but residents have been able to persevere, sometimes by cutting down on all the talk.

"Instead of having all these real regular meetings, people met when they needed to," she said.

Indeed, finding a quiet place for contemplation is key to one vision of aging, said John Sullivan, former head of the philosophy department at Elon University and the third main speaker on Saturday.

"We are very much a culture of doing and striving," said Sullivan, author of "Spiral of the Seasons: Welcoming the Gifts of Later Life," published this year by Second Journey. "If you are busy, the answer is, 'Oh, that's great!' [But] people do realize that there's a certain kind of busy-ness that isn't healthy - it isn't even productive.

"They want to bring a stillness into the activity - a small oasis of mindfulness into their lives."

Aging can be a time for letting go of accustomed directions, too-familiar narratives, the particular ways of seeing things that have driven our lives. Sullivan, who draws on poetry, philosophy and religion, refers to these world views as stories.

"We live in stories, and we take them with deadly seriousness, with deadly results," he said. "The story may be true, but it's too small for us to live in. We see people not only willing to die for their stories, but to kill for them."

Saturday's conference will start with talks from Anthony, Sullivan and Peterson, will include lunch and then continue with far-reaching discussions among all in attendance.

Anthony has helped lead similar events, filled with both laughter and deep reflection, as far away as Germany and as near as Greensboro. People tend to leave such communal events energized and relieved to know that others share their concerns about where their later lives will lead, participants said.

"We age and we die," Sullivan said. "We can't prevent that, but people can bear together what they cannot prevent."