Aging is the separation of the material from the sense of self which enables transcendence.
Okay, there has to be a simpler way to say that. So; if the jewel is in the lotus, at some point, the lotus has to drop it's petals to reveal the jewel, no?
Aging, and ultimately dying, reveals the material for what it is: temporary.
Aging is increasing evidence that YOU are not your body. That you are something else entirely. Your body becomes increasingly irrelevant. Nothing more than traveling clothes on your journey in this life. This realization is what is essential to balanced detachment.
Aging is increasing evidence that YOU are not your body. That you are something else entirely. Your body becomes increasingly irrelevant. Nothing more than traveling clothes on your journey in this life. This realization is what is essential to balanced detachment.
In order to be an effective healer, you must be detached from the outcome. It is only when we recognize that our own illness and infirmities and disabilities are not ourselves, and the body's increasing and ultimate failure to align with our spiritual nature in a necessary peeling away of material things, that gives us that detachment. It is then we may heal ourselves. Or not. It really doesn't matter then, does it?
I just see myself as quite old and round and merry and laughing my ass off in a zen fit of glee over this.
The greater the degree of our recognition that the physical self IS NOT ME, the less the sense of suffering. This can seem a paradox, because often we must suffer the awareness of this disconnection prior to transcending it. When you understand that the body is not you, it becomes a much simpler matter to tame it. It is a matter of conducting oneself within the lotus as the petals peel away.
The challenges of aging, then is not the decline, but a turning-up-the-volume of existence.
If it is true that the harmonic scale of our years is a musical 7 X 7 octave to the cadence of our lives. 49 ends the first scale of your life, and 98 concludes the second.
I'm taken with that notion, although I don't yet fully get it. Still, it's quite interesting to see 50 as a new beginning, corresponding to a second journey. I'm wrestling with the notion of whether one goes up, and then back down the scale, or if it just begins over again. (can you hear the piano in my head?)
It may be an important distinction, as each octave has it's own level of vibration. I can easily equate the 90s with one's first decade, and a re-descent into physical babyhood again. However, entering one's 50's as I am now, begins that confrontation with aging which seems to increase in pitch until a final vibration is reached which rattles you loose from mortal existence altogether.
The former seems a feminine outlook. The flower blooms and then fades. Gives rise and then yields.
The later is a masculine climb up the mountain into thinner and thinner air with increasing exertion.
Perhaps both are correct.
I am awake at 2 in the morning capturing these ideas because they feel like they will be essential to how the rest of my life plays out.
This is the answer to question I wished I had asked my grandparents before they passed. “How do you grow old without despair?” Now, instead of despair, I see an entirely different scenario. One which reminds me of a poem which impressed itself on me when I was barely 20:
i want to live to be
an outrageous old woman
who is never accused of being
and old lady
i want to live to have ten thousand lovers
in one love
one 70 year long loving love
there are at least two of me
i want to get leaner, and meaner
sharp edged
color of the ground
till i discorporate
from sheer joy
This was from the book Country Women, a handbook for the new farmer. It was written by both Sherry Thomas and Jeanne Tetrault but the poem itself is not attributed. My husband gave me this book when we were first starting out, and it is one of my great treasures. The book now has yellow and brittle pages. The front cover is lost, Instead, the first thing you see is the cover-sheet where my husband once scrawled in pencil: To my wife with great love. He was 22 when he wrote that. It seems from where I sit now an age where love and its greatness could have only barely been an inkling, yet as I write this, I can hear that same man stirring in our bed down the hall.
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