Creative ageing | Contemplative Inquiry

August 20, 2025

ELAINE: IMAGES FROM A HEALING JOURNEY

In the picture above, my wife Elaine sits at ease on a softly majestic chair. The occasion is the opening of a new University of Gloucestershire building refashioned from an empty Debenham’s department store. Primarily it is for the university’s faculties of education, psychology and social work.

It is also for the local community. The city’s public library is being amalgamated with the campus one. This will be on the bottom floor together with shared study spaces and meeting rooms.

Elaine has chosen one of the plusher available chairs to begin her ownership of a space that is likely to become important in our lives. I see her as showing that she is back in the world, 16 months after her accident in Gran Canaria and all the related health problems that manifested as a result of it.

The picture below is from early October last year, 6 months after the accident. Elaine is in transition from wheelchair to rollater, at least in our immediate neighbourhood. Being outdoors at all under her own steam is new. To me she looks tentative and inward. Looking at the picture now, Elaine says she looks marked by suffering. It is certainly a very different picture from the one at the top.

The two pictures together show healing in later life to be a long process making serious demands on the person who is healing. It is a joy for me to see Elaine’s transformation.

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September 8, 2024

SWEET SUCCESS

The picture* shows Waterstones in Gloucester, not far from where Elaine and I live. It’s a well-stocked bookshop on two levels. The upstairs includes a cafe. Before Elaine’s hip fracture in April (1,2,3) and its attendant complications, we were frequent visitors. The cafe offers good coffee. It is a pleasant place to be. It hosts both a writers’ group and a book group that we have attended.

Waterstones has been out of bounds to Elaine, and effectively me, since April. Elaine was completely house-bound until the middle of August. Even then, we worried about whether her wheelchair would fit the door of the lift giving access to the upper floor. Would the formal ‘accessibility’ option lead to actual access? I measured the breadth both of Elaine’s wheelchair and the lift doorway. The distances were bothersomely similar, and this had a slightly inhibiting, effect. We didn’t want drama or disappointment.

But on Saturday, 8 September, we lost our hesitation. We wheeled boldly into the shop and put the lift to the test. Lining the chair up carefully, we ascended to the top floor. It was indeed a tight fit, but doable, which is what matters. We reached the cafe, and had our first coffee out together for a long time, happy in the familiar atmosphere of a favourite haunt, knowing too that we would be able to attend its meetings and events. A sweet success!

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/06/27/elaine-knight-haiku/

(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/05/25/festive-moment/

(3) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/05/12/unsought-journey/

*Picture from Google Maps.

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September 26, 2023

EQUINOX TRANSITIONS 2023

I am grateful to the Druid community for its varied ways of working with the 8-fold wheel of the year – especially when the festivals are placed in the context of the gradually turning wheel. Within that patterning of both nature and experience, I find the equinoctial periods and my response to them the least predictable of times.

The picture above shows a pre-equinoctial evening in Weymouth harbour, Dorset, England, round about 6 pm. I found this moment gentle and relaxing. The soft sunlight on the houses, boats and water seemed like a welcome home. I was born only 30 miles from Weymouth and it is part of my childhood landscape, my motherland. I took the picture on 18 September, the first day of my first visit for decades. I felt as if I was in a final afterglow of summer, content on familiar ground.

My wife Elaine and I spent only four days in Weymouth. Even over this brief period, we both had a strong sense of the advancing dark, in the mornings and the evenings alike, a shifting alternation of night and day that increasingly favoured night. One of our days was also dominated by high winds and driving rain, followed by a night in which we felt damp and chilled to the bone, unused as we now are to old buildings.

That night I had a rare experience of broken sleep and uncanny dreams. Eventually I woke up fully to a startling level of condensation on old window panes, obscuring an otherwise stunning view. For me this equinoctial period has, at least psychically, emphasised a shift towards the dark rather than a moment of poise and balance. Not a full dark, perhaps, but drained of colour, direction unknown.

The turning of the wheel never stops. On 23 September, the morning of the equinox, I felt the pleasure that can come from enjoying home after a break. I also noticed that the world beyond our many balcony doors was very clearly proclaiming a victory for the darker half of the year. This will be the setting for my journey for some time to come.

Whereas in the world I feel currently secure, I am conscious of uncertainties within. I do not quite see my critical-creative direction. In my 75th year, I wonder about ‘creative ageing’ (an old catch-phrase for me) and ‘critical wisdom’ (a new one). Hot air? Or genuine signposts? The Weymouth visit has stirred me up, but to what specific purpose I don’t yet know.

October 23, 2022

FALLING: 2022

Vivid autumn colour signals a fall. Where I live, we are early in the process as yet. These leaves seem poignantly glorious to me. I respond to a beauty that I know will be short-lived. The tree is immersed in a cycle of dying and regeneration that furthers its larger life. Any sense of poignancy, glory and beauty is about me, being human.

I think of the last thirty years, and my own small deaths and regenerations over this period as I journeyed from my early forties to my early seventies. At the beginning I sensed a pull towards new priorities, which roughly fitted the Jungian notion of the second half of life as having different goals from the first. I experienced a nudge towards an inward, psycho-spiritual turn. I developed interests in experiential inquiry, Druidry/Western Mysteries, and contemplative spirituality, as part of this mid-life nudge.

This reduced my interest in career, acquisition and influence – though such interest had always been limited. In the nineties and noughties, I didn’t need a lot of money both to live well, if modestly, and accrue a reasonable retirement income. It would be much harder now. I am grateful to have experienced (relatively) favourable times, though of course the seeds of our current crises were already being sown.

Now I am ready for a new chapter, as my wife Elaine and I get ready to move to a new place of our own in Gloucester. The next move is into a smaller, more manageable space, and will involve elements of de-cluttering. I am the same tree but I will be shedding leaves and waiting for new ones to grow next year. In the moment I feel fragile, though my unknowing about the future also has an edge of wonder about the magic that may unfold. Falling is an oddly potent process at a special time of year.

Tag: Creative ageing