Living our Blessings: Aging, Mortality & Gratitude. A Wising Up Anthology

We invite stories, poems, memoir, and non-fiction that explore how, in ways small and large, our awareness of aging and mortality intensify our appreciation of our present (and past) in ways we never anticipated.

Age is a strange place—filled with abundance and scarcity, more fixed and more fluid than we imagined before we arrived there. Our bodies teach us it is now or never. We have passed our apogee and the arc of our life bends relentlessly earthward. But our hearts won’t stop growing, expanding, revising, and revisioning—and we have to acknowledge that as well. Here the surprising questions are often positive. All that angst, was it really necessary? All that will and drive—did it steer us in the right direction or did it narrow our focus unnecessarily? Has the love, the good, both momentous and minute, we have experienced in our lives gone fully recognized, born fruit, multiplied? Savoring can become a call, a necessary rebalancing of the scales.

One of the simplest ways to do so is just to open to the mystery of the mundane and our own participation in it. It is often so simple it shocks us: The way, after twenty-five or fifty years together, we remain such an intriguing surprise to each other we still can’t finish each other’s sentences. The way we can so vividly recall a decisive, perhaps anguished, moment in our childhood or middle age and see it fall into place in an entirely new, more beneficent, story. The way a minute on the porch listening to the cascade of cicadas can feel like a baptism.

Country of Publication & Year Established

United States

Established in 2024