Writings on Aging:

Mary Pipher, in Women Rowing North: "We do not have to settle for just being diminished versions of our younger selves."

J. Philip Newell, in One Foot in Eden: A Celtic View of the Stages of Life: "It is not particularly surprising that our Western world, characterized by a busy materialism, should also be a world that in many places has ceased to venerate old age . . . . Old age is repeatedly devalued into an inferior state of being, regarded as a decline or fall from the fullness of life. We have forgotten the fruit that an old tree can bear, yielding an abundance that will far outweigh the crops of the young." (p. 76)

And again from Newell: "To say that wise men and women are like beautiful old trees deeply rooted is also to say that their wisdom did not grow in a day and a night . . . . Their wise spirit in old age is a valuation of what they have been over many seasons. In the midst of busyness at the different stages of life they have found time also to nurture the inner grace of wisdom" (p. 79)