You are invited to reflect with me in my weekly blogs on aging well. I see creative aging as living midlife and elderhood in ways that foster inner development and help us to better serve wider human communities. Each week I open a topic for discussion on positive and negative aspects of growing older. As aging populations throughout the world increase, people are looking for roads to mental, physical and spiritual growth. They also want to contribute to the welfare of others near and far. Please join me in our mutual search for innovative ways of aging creatively. The blog allows you to comment on weekly reflections from your own experiences.

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My recently published memoir Taking a Long Road Home traces my spiritual formation in the context of many ups and downs as I struggle toward intellectual and moral awakenings. Reviewers praise the candor and insights of the memoir; you can read their reviews on this site. Readers remark that the memoir has helped them explore their own life journeys. My two novels, The Bishop of San Francisco and The Children's Crusade also reflect personal experiences while juxtaposing events in the Catholic Church with happenings in the wider world. Both books have drawn positive comments among readers from various religious and secular backgrounds. My three books on creative aging have been republished with new forewords: Aging as a Spiritual Journey, On Growing Older, Elder Wisdom: Crafting Your Own Elderhood. These three books will soon be available for downloading at nominal cost. You can read the first chapter of each book on this web site. Autographed copies are also available through this site.

I have been writing poems for many years. I would now like to share some of them with you. I am also working with a publisher to produce a volume of my poems. The themes cover many topics and express my own development into later years. I hope you will find them enjoyable and even stimulating. I welcome your own comments on the poems in the response sections provided.

       A sample poem

Smaller World

“Your world shrinks but that's okay”
      --old man overheard in an Atlanta grocery

Aging is a concave mirror in playland

as I walk my garden

with squirrels and snapdragons.

I was never much for fantasy

as if fairy grandmother

with her wand and magic sparkle

reduced me lately to a tiny denizen

of a miniscule land where news

of the great ones seeps down

as they muscle ocean and sky

to vie for gold, glory and pain.

Their boasts thunder

in my small patch of rustling leaves

where my dumb phone rarely rings

and the Fed Ex man delivers down the street.

Drunk with energy and necessary blindness,

the young drive by not seeing

the old who should be dead anyway

while we cluster under our canopy of hydrangeas

conversing with stones and armadillos.

Yet it's revelation time down here

close to beginnings and ends,

and if we pay attention

the red fox with warm breath and glowing eyes

will nuzzle down to tell us

how close we are to hidden secrets

about humus, growth, flower and more

on caring ways that count.