Forming Your Aging: Porosity and Poetry

Forming Your Aging: Porosity and Poetry is the newest addition to Stanley Keleman's series Essays in Formative Psychology. Stanley has this to say about aging: As adults we are many bodied and each of our bodied shapes has its time. As life moves past the full grown alpha adult many people have difficulty envisioning a desirable future and are vulnerable to loss, sorrow and despair. From a Formative perspective living our older age does not mean simply waiting to become older and die, it means we are challenged to continue forming ourselves. It means valuing our accumulated lived history, bodily, emotionally and creatively and enlisting all its richness to re-body, re-define and give new meaning to the late phases of our human embodiment. Aptly describing Stanley's writing, his friend Peter Marin has this to say: Stanley penetrates into the hidden and unspoken truths of human experience, trying to get them down in a way that satisfies his sense of truth and also allows others access to them. What you see in his new book is a sequence of startling thoughts, short essays and poems, that represent the way Stanley thinks. You see him pondering in a series of different takes about aging as experience, as adventure, and you hear him speaking directly out of his own experience trying to make an order out of what he has seen and thought. It pleases me very much to see its finished form as it now goes on: in your experience, in your aging. How lucky Stanley is in that! In the chance to pass on to others, via the gift of his work. I am glad, myself, to have had the chance to share in the excitement of that, the joy of it. We at Center Press hope you find the book useful for yourself and to share with others.