What is an Elder?
Elders are not old people
An elder is not an old person. Nor is an old person necessarily an elder.
An elder is someone who has been carved and shaped by nature into a guide, someone who knows they know not-so-much, including about nothing.
An elder has rejected certainty, and has developed an intimate familiarity with the unknown. Whether they know it or not.
To become an elder is a path full of the riskiest risk and the bottommost bottoms. It is about being ripped open repeatedly, and then, as if that isn’t enough, it is about being turned inside out completely, and then folded and re-folded incessantly. Like a sword-maker folding a sword thousands of times. Which is not in the least a pleasant thing to experience. Try asking a sword how it feels to be beaten a million times.
To become an elder begins when you are far from being an elder. You may start quite young. And you will likely never say something like, “I’m a very old soul.” This odd path welcomes you with derision, discouragement, mockery and constant temptations of insanity. As a bonus, you have little to no understanding that you are on the path to maybe becoming an elder. It mostly feels like you’re an outcast and a fool, a minority of one in the cattle herd of pooping, shitting humanity.
To become an elder guarantees a life of being misunderstood, mental or physical isolation, and having your heart broken a thousand million times. That’s part of the folding over and over thing.
An elder is also a bit of a bottom dweller, someone who has become accustomed to living in the mud, seen by most as a fool. I suspect elders would deny they were an elder. Perhaps what the term does, in a genuine sense, is acknowledge that someone is inept. A real elder would certainly agree.
You’d be more respected if you claimed you are homeless than if you claimed (or someone else claimed) you are an elder. Society today disparages such models. We have the Internet. Somehow that makes us all Instant Elders. So such a claim or implication would typically have you deemed as a misfit, or delusional.
when hope
is hopeless
less is left
To become an elder is a constant struggle. It is not a life of ease. Just ask an elder.
But then again, don’t. They’re often shy or reserved. For a reason.