Gifts of the Second Half of Life
“The second half of my life will be ice
breaking up on the river, rain
soaking the fields, a hand
held out, a fire,
and smoke going
upward, always up.”
I begin this reflection on second half of life spirituality with an excerpt from Joyce Sutpen’s poem “Crossroads.” With so many poems on the topic from which to choose, I picked Sutpen’s for its evocative imagery and its outright acknowledgement that we can choose to thrive in the second half of our lives. In just a few lines, the poet describes some of the beautiful gifts we can anticipate.