Traveling North: Wisdom, Release, and Legacy

The North

I am exactly where I am supposed to be: entering the second half of life, traveling North, into life’s afternoon.

In many Indigenous traditions, especially the Lakota Medicine Wheel, the four cardinal directions — East, South, West, and North — are more than geographic points. They are spiritual pillars tied to life’s stages, seasons, and unfolding path. I offer them here not only as symbols, but as a way to understand where I now stand: in the North, the season of wisdom, release, and legacy.

East – Yellow – Spring – Fire – Eagle – Birth / Childhood

The East is where the sun rises, symbolizing birth, childhood, illumination, and the spirit’s first awakening. It teaches beginnings: learning to see, trust possibility, and step onto the path.

South – Red – Summer – Water – Coyote – Youth / Growth

The South embodies youth, energy, emotion, growth, and learning through experience. It teaches relationship: building trust, developing skill, adapting, and finding one’s place in community.

West – Black – Autumn – Earth – Bear – Adulthood / Reflection

The West marks adulthood, reflection, responsibility, and the inward turn toward purpose. It teaches endurance: testing strength, carrying burdens, and beginning to understand what experience has taught.

North – White – Winter – Air – Buffalo – Elder / Ancestor – Wisdom

The North is the direction of wisdom, spiritual insight, cleansing, and elderhood. The buffalo symbolizes strength, unity, endurance, and ancestral knowledge. This stage is about releasing what no longer serves, gathering the meaning of a lifetime, and offering its lessons to the next generation. It is life’s culmination, where wisdom becomes presence and experience becomes blessing.

These stages reflect life as a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and wisdom — a circular journey, not a straight path. Each direction offers a lesson.

The Afternoon of Life

Carl Jung wrote: “The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purposes are different.”

Here, the symbolic North meets aging not as an ending, but as a sacred shift in purpose.

You are standing in the afternoon of your life. Perhaps you are sixty, sixty-five, or seventy. The morning — the years of building, striving, and becoming somebody — has passed. The sun has crossed its peak and now casts longer shadows. Inside, a quiet question may persist: Was it enough? Was any of it real? What do I do with the time that remains? This is not weakness. It is initiation. The second half of life has its own architecture, tasks, and meaning. It does not repeat the first half. It asks you to become something else entirely.

The first half of life is governed by ego and persona. You had to build an identity, prove yourself, and claim a place in the world. You needed ambition, boundaries, and the capacity to say, “I am this and not that.” This was not a mistake; it was necessary. But many people never leave it. They carry morning’s psychology into the afternoon, trying to live the second half by the first half’s program. They cling to productivity, relevance, and fading applause. They measure themselves by old metrics — income, status, physical strength, influence — and suffer as those measures recede. Jung warned us: “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” The old program is not wrong; it is simply outdated.

What is happening now is not decline. It is the necessary dissolution of the false self. The roles that once defined you — professional, provider, parent, spouse — are thinning. The children have left. The career is ending or has ended. The body no longer obeys as it once did. The face in the mirror may surprise you. This can feel like loss, and it is. But it is also the beginning of individuation. The persona, the mask you wore to meet the world, is cracking. Beneath it, something has waited for decades to be seen: the Self. It is not diminished by age. It may be nearer now than ever.

The Inner Reversal

The task of the second half of life is not to achieve more, but to become more. It is not to keep expanding outward, but to descend inward. The vocatus, the inner call, may not lead to a new career, marriage, or city. It calls you toward a deeper source. It asks you to shift your center of gravity from the outer world to the inner one, from persona to soul, from ego to Self. This is the great reversal, and it requires a courage the first half never demanded. It asks you to stop performing for an audience that has already left the theater. It asks you to sit alone in a quiet room and meet the person you may have been running from for sixty years.

The Self has been there all along. It waited through every mask, role, and compromise made to keep the peace. It did not judge you for getting lost. It remained like a quiet anchor in deep water, waiting for the day you would tire of the surface and dive down to find it. In life’s afternoon, the surface is less compelling. The noise fades. The silence grows. And in that silence, you can finally hear the voice that has been whispering from the beginning: not your parents, not your culture, not your fears — your own voice. The one that knows who you are, and what you came here to be.

I am grateful for the painful challenges I have lived through because they awakened a deeper search for meaning. For years, I believed the life I was living was fully my own, only to discover how much of it had been imposed upon me. That discovery led me, over the last seven years, into Self-realization.

Legacy

The inner reversal changes the meaning of service. After years of looking outward for achievement, approval, or identity, I now understand purpose as something quieter and more enduring: being present, offering blessing, listening well, and passing forward what life has taught me.

The inner journey does not end with the Self. It widens into relationship, presence, and the quiet ways love is passed forward.

That legacy is most visible in my grandchildren. At this stage of life, I feel deeply fortunate to be present with them — especially my youngest granddaughter. Since her birth nearly three years ago, I have been a constant presence in her life. Our bond is tender, enduring, and sacred to me. In them, I see love, wisdom, and belonging carried forward. Through them, and through the love I have given, I hope to leave the world brighter, kinder, and better than I found it. That is my purpose, learned by living within the cycle of life.