Grace Notes
Last year, with my friend Michael Mele, who co-founded the travel company Il Chiostro, I conducted a week-long program called “Gay Men and the Art of Aging Gracefully” in Mérida, Mexico, where I’ve been spending part of the winter in recent years.
The program was partly a seminar, loosely modeled on Plato’s Symposium, in which the participants shared their thoughts, fears, and collective wisdom on pertinent topics (health, money, travel, family, sex, community, touch, intimacy). Morning salons centered on these powerful conversations alternated with excursions to nearby attractions: the archaeological site at Uxmal, the gorgeous cenotes at Hacienda Mucuyche (above), the breeding grounds for pink flamingos in Celestún (below).
The program was a resounding success. One participant said, “Participating in the Il Chiostro ‘Gay Men and the Art of Aging Gracefully’ program was an energizing and exhilarating experience. The men in the group were perfect examples of active aging. Sharing our fears, desires and feelings about growing older with each other was enlightening as well as inspiring.” Another said, “For me, ‘Gay Men and the Art of Aging Gracefully’ was both deeply meaningful and lots of fun. I learned much from our group’s frank ‘Salon-style’ discussions and put it all into practice in our excursions in beautiful Merida and other parts of the Yucatan.”
So this year we offered the program again and welcomed a whole other group of men to El Pueblo, a splendid seven-room luxury guesthouse in the center of Merida. The conversations covered many of the same topics, tailored to the interests of this year’s group. And we took the same excursions, including a cooking lesson from a charming gay chef named Wilson Alonzo. At his rustic outdoor restaurant called Yaaxche in the small town of Halacho (above), we made from scratch a full traditional Yucateca meal: botanas (sikil pak, kibbeh), sopa de lima, tortillas, pollo pibil .
In the course of the week, we shared many delicious gourmet meals, some at local restaurants and some made by private chefs at home.
My own thinking on the subject of aging has been enriched by reading The Force of Character and the Lasting Life by the renegade Jungian analyst James Hillman. One of my intellectual heroes, Hillman always had a knack for overturning received wisdom. I shared this passage with the group: “Our experience of aging is so embedded in numbers of years left to live, as given by longevity tables, that we can hardly believe that for centuries late years were associated not with dying but with vitality and character. The old were not mainly thought of as limping toward death’s door, but were regarded as stable depositories of customs and legends, guardians of local values, experts in skills and crafts, and valued voices in communal council.”
This prompted a stimulating conversation revolving around these questions: How are you a stable depository of customs and legends? What local values are you guardian of? What skills and crafts are you expert in? What communal councils value your voice?
One of our first orders of business this year was to unpack the notion of “grace.” What does it mean to you? Not surprisingly, the answers varied from person to person. Here are some of the responses.
What does the word GRACE conjure? Some keywords:
soft edges
compassion
abundance
kindness
gentleness
gratitude
golden glitter from heaven (per Catholic iconography)
thoughtfulness
intention
self-forgiveness
non-attachment to outcome
elegance
beauty
integrity
acceptance
managing expectations
By the end of the program, we determined that a big feature of the aging process — especially given the political climate that we are living in — is uncertainty. And uncertainty absolutely invites the practice of any or all of these flavors of grace.
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