My Golden Years?
For most of my life, I was a person of blue, black, and gray. Cool colors felt safe—masculine, steady, protective. They were the palette I wrapped myself in, as much armor as aesthetic. Gold, brass, or yellow had no place in my home or on my body. Too bold, too warm, too vulnerable. To me, yellow was simply ugly.
And then, unexpectedly, something shifted.
When I moved into the Loveshack, my home dressed in wood paneling from floor to ceiling, I found myself craving a different kind of light. The house carried a kind of darkness—warm, yes, but weighty. To cut through it, I instinctively turned to yellow. A color I had never welcomed before suddenly became the only hue bright enough to break the shadows. It was more than decoration. It was medicine.
In a way, it mirrors the golden light I’ve tried to channel within myself—the light I imagine streaming through the dark recesses of my body during meditation, dissolving the corners of my mind that grow too heavy these days. Like the sun breaking through clouds, it is both spiritual and physical, a reminder that illumination often comes only after long seasons of shadow.
In many traditions, gold represents the divine spark—the “inner sun” within us all. The yogis of India describe it as the golden energy of the crown chakra, the light that connects us to the infinite. Christian mystics speak of divine illumination, a radiance beyond the earthly. However it’s named, the image is the same: a golden thread weaving between heaven and earth, binding us to something larger than ourselves.
Recently, my father gave me his corporate watch, the one he wore through a successful career as both doer and leader—gleaming, unapologetically gold. With it came two other rings of gold: my grandfather’s wedding band, etched with Masonic detail and bartered for by Grandma Irene with the trade of a heifer, and my father’s high school class ring. Generations of men carried into my present. I never sought these symbols, but now they sit with me—heavy with meaning, glinting with a continuity I can’t ignore. Gold, once foreign, has become legacy. It represents the love of my ancestors, along with the light of the universe.
At sixty-one, I find myself wondering: have I stepped into my own “golden years”? Traditionally, the phrase refers to retirement—the time when work slows and life is meant to be savored. But golden years aren’t only about age, and I’m not retiring anytime soon. They are about entering a season where lightness replaces weight, where clarity cuts through dimness, and where one’s life gleams with a new kind of value. The Stoics wrote about the ripening of spirit with age—when we learn not just to endure, but to glow from within.
And then there is alchemy—the ancient art of transformation. Alchemists once sought to turn base metals into gold, but the deeper work was always symbolic: the transmutation of the self. To pass through fire, shadow, and time, and emerge with something rare and radiant. When I look at my father’s watch or feel the weight of my grandfather’s ring, I see not just gold but the process behind it—the refining, the burning away, the slow emergence of what is luminous. In my own way, I have lived that journey. The years have been the furnace. The lessons, the flame. And the result, perhaps, is a spirit a little more golden.
For me, gold has become both inheritance and invitation. In my home, it is the yellow that cuts through wood-paneled dusk. In my body, it is the energy I breathe in to soften the harder edges of thought. In my family, it is the watch, the rings, the proof that time moves forward even as it threads backward.
Maybe these golden years aren’t about retreating from life. Maybe they are about finally stepping into the radiance we once resisted—the alchemy of a lifetime, the more polished glow of our true selves.
