People around me have begun saying, “We’re getting older,” with an almost palpable panic.
A desperation to cling to the youth they speak of as though it were long lost, when it was only just yesterday.
But I simply do not feel their ways.
The sun rises, and I, too, return. Reborn.
I wonder how much of human suffering is sourced from the insistence that one dimension of existence must conquer another?
Must youth surrender to age?
I do not wish to guard my identity so fiercely, there is no desire to become a monument to what I once was.
A terrible fate for the seed to fall in love with its shell.
Nor do I wish to flee loneliness at its first visitation, its very arrival has come to introduce me to a presence.
I do not wish to wage war against the discomforts of my becoming.
Even blooming asks something of the bud as birth demands a labor.
I’ll remain a companion of Heaven as I am companion of man.
The work is not to conquer one part of ourselves in service of another, but to allow the seemingly opposing parts of our being to belong to the same life.
So I feel born in the right era and right on time, the sages get to wear leather pants.
That is a fair trade.
