Figuring Out Life While Aging
By the light of my digital devices,
I wander in darkened rooms.
This world is too much with me,
early and late:
I twist and turn, whirling.
I go to the lake
with its hint of wilderness.
Despite landscaped edges,
the lake shifts and breathes:
womb of potent Mystery:
Stillness in sunshine,
quiet under clouds,
watchfulness in wind,
release in rain:
Peace, - I settle and ease.
Weathering storms and
pausing for moments of joy:
sunlight in shadows.
Sometimes, when I realize I am awake, my mind is already moving down a path of words, pausing briefly to evaluate whether they say what I’m meaning, whether they fit together well.
I pause, remembering the small, youngish woman, struggling her grocery cart loaded with bulging yellow plastic bags across the subway car door threshold, and lurching it around. Her eyes behind thick glasses, her mouth never fully closing, she stared openly at the man in a suit, then at the man in jeans next to him. I was pulled from staring at her by a deliberately loud voice approaching and straining to make out what it meant. A large scruffy man was moving through the crowded car, chanting in a loud monotone “Spare some change,” never pausing or thrusting the ragged paper cup towards anyone. The small, youngish woman turned to an attractive young man sitting near where she was standing and said, “That’s wrong” and gestured towards her yellow plastic bags. “I do this; never ask for money.” The attractive young man kept looking away, while the rest of us watched, relieved she wasn’t talking to us. When the disembodied subway voice blurred out the next station name, she clapped her hands together, then struggled her cart over the door threshold and through the impatient pushing-in crowd.
Sometimes, ingrained politeness is a weakness.
Credo 2
I have lived long enough
to understand
I will die;
I choose
to delight
in moments
of bright joy.
In the early morning light
I surrender
to the glory of June.
In the morning breeze
branches move and sway
while their shadows
dance
in the sunlight.
In the quiet of solitude
I am
alive.
Leaves
in sunlight and shadow:
a harmony of greens,
plus the bass notes
of pine.
June reaches
into hope
set free by beauty:
a green time
thrusting into more life.
When you have touched an other’s
pulsating heart
and felt the difficult path
they’re walking on,
pity becomes respect.
We are all
unreliable witnesses,
sorting and resorting
our memories
crafted from
what we couldn’t see
(then or now,)
as we pin each reshaped story
to our current consciousness.
Who are you? My enemy?
Or another searching soul
lost in your own
wilderness,
your own storms?
Dawn
Through a dusty screen,
black branches on rosy gold:
morning awaits me.
Spring
Lilacs are leafing
and blossoms budding, green mist
coating trees across the road.
A streak of rosy gold
behind black pines:
the grace of a day beginning.
The silence of a Sunday morning
with lilacs in exquisite bloom
and a squirrel moving under the bush:
time passes and releases
the fragrance of memory
and ghosts of the past.
The insistent alarm
and furnace sounds ---
I open my eyes and,
out my window, see
young leaves, sun-touched,
sway, disturbed by a squirrel.
I stand hesitantly
and move stiffly
into another morning,
accepting the gift
of this time
and place.
Black winged and gold-tipped
butterflies, and I
feed from the lilacs’ fragrance
and mourn
in this secular wilderness
as I map out my day.
Learning Living 