November First, All Souls
by Creative Director, Honora Foah

Honora Foah is the Creative Director and member of the Board of Directors for Mythic Imagination Institute and the Mythic Journeys conferences. She was the chief producer and designer for the UN Pavilions featured in the 1992 World Expo in Genoa, Italy, and the 1993 World Expo held in Taejon, South Korea. As the artistic force behind Visioneering International, Inc., Ms. Foah brings to every endeavor her extensive training and professional experience in the fine arts, including dance, music and theater.

I'm worrying a lot about my parents. We are at a terrible moment as a family where we 'have to do something'. At this moment, dignity seems more important than safety, but it is a balance that seesaws uneasily, unhappily back and forth in my mind.

Things are not going so well with all of this, and I find myself once again blocked by a culture that has no place for old people, no understanding of what old people are or are for. And heartbreakingly, this is true about the old people themselves. They wish for doing the things of young people, they do not wish for the beauty that is their own, if they will only claim it.

With my parents, as their coping-with-the-world skills lessen, they are also unable to think this through. It makes me realize that preparation for the role of elder has to begin very early in life. The best preparation is probably to be a child who breathes in the knowledge, the aura, the character of a manifest elder. This child will just know-in-the-bones from then on how valuable the elder is.

The blindness to the value of old people, this failure of old people to senex, to deepen, is a picture of a culture that does not want wisdom. Being in the wisdom game myself, I see this from both sides. I know how hard it is to get people to pay attention or to really understand what we are doing at Mythic Imagination Institute. I know how hungry people actually are for contact with the wisdoms of the elders, and how relieved they are to find us - we're a focal point for other people who care about it.

Personally, I like newness. I like change. I like to try things. But I have always had older friends and mentors, because I was never confused about where the gold is. Still, it is a mixed blessing, because as time goes on, there are so many deaths. Which of course is much of the underlying reason for ignoring the old. Their presence, as is that of the sick, the handicapped, the poor, is a memento mori. Mementi mori are not good for maximum shopping.

I like shopping, but not the Rollerball world we have created. There are days I want to stand in the middle of the street and scream, "Stop the madness!"

But I am afraid people will think I'm a crazy old coot. And the day I get labeled that, I know how deep my invisibility will be and I fear I will be even less credible as a witness, as a voice for the importance of the Elders.

For me, there are few things as sorrowful and disappointing as meeting what Michael Meade calls an 'Older', who is therefore not an Elder. It is agonizing to listen to my parents fret about household tasks they cannot do, to waste their time attempting to do them and not understand how unimportant this incapacity is, to understand that what they need to be doing is talking to their grandchildren and other children. My mother, lately, is transformed by the presence of an infant. A tenderness rises from her that is as palpable as the smell of God-stuff that rises from an infant. This natural affinity has always been known. Why isn't she anywhere where babies are?

In my feelings, the degradation of old people is part of the degradation of the environment. In both cases, a failure to recognize which side of the bread is buttered prevails. It does not make sense to poison your bloodstream. It does not make sense to waste life forms. It does not make sense to ignore the interconnectedness of our mutual health. It does not make sense to ignore the repositories of human culture and wisdom.

So why do we?

Wisdom involves memory. It involves actual memory of your life, or of the residue of character that the memories of your life will leave. It involves memory of the world. It involves memory of the ways. I love cleverness; I find myself delighted by a brilliant solution or turn of phrase. But cleverness is not sufficient. The world is a difficult place. Let me say that again. The world is a difficult place. Life is difficult. You can only fake it for so long. Your cleverness will only do for so long. But when the real thing comes, when the heartbreak comes, cleverness will not help you. How often have I seen someone devouring their mind with their mind, trying to think their way around death, betrayal, illness, divorce? It isn't enough.

The old ways in the old stories will not stop the pain, but they will let you know its use and its meaning. Part of its meaning is that there is no meaning. Grief is grief, and now be still child. We have all had it. We have all had it and we are here beside you. These are the memories of the earth. These are the memories of the people. These are the seeds of resilience and the purposes of community. Clever one, alone in your computer, come home.

The old stories birth new ones. The new ones are the old ones, different.

"Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides...I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."

From David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

The old stories and the Elders are the cloud atlas. Begin compiling yours now, before it is too late.

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