Carrying

 

I have found that I have a hard time consciously changing. Aging has revealed some patterns of behavior that have surprised me with their intractable nature. It appears that elements of my former identity are not easily transformed. Some old aspects of me, have really grown old. This is bringing about a wonderful discovery. It seems I am pregnant with an emerging self. Since, I am a male, I’ve never quite had an experience like this, and I am shaken with the challenge of carrying this latency. This is what I want to focus my attention on here: the challenge of carrying a new vulnerable and more aware being.

 

Growth is an organic process. So, carrying, as in harboring what is coming to pass, isn’t new. But, it is new in my awareness. I have to credit growing older with this burgeoning awareness. I am now capable of being aware of what I was not aware of before. Unbidden, it seems that my consciousness is being re-worked, and I can feel my growth process like never before. This has plus and minus qualities. Even as I age, I am growing, re-discovering how easy and how hard it can be. 

 

At the moment, my attention is riveted upon my role in the process. This is where a lot of the hardness is located, for me. To insure, that something better comes out of me to replace a life-long pattern, I’ve got to uneasily carry what I hope is developing within. I am learning about what that takes.

 

Naturally, I have been sensitized to the tremendously mysterious aspects of pregnancy. Women, who have gone through a similar vulnerable time, when they are at the mercy of the uncertainties of Life, have undergone a particular form of initiation, that I admire and honor even more intently now. While giving birth to another human is totally miraculous, it isn’t the same as the equally precarious process of giving birth to one’s self. The outcome is less discrete, and perhaps more iffy.

 

So, while I can turn to good female friends who have given birth, and had to go through carrying the unborn, for advice. The process of carrying a developing self, is more idiosyncratic and exacting. Everyone has to go through it — but each in their own way. Feeling the support of female human beings — who have made possible the generations before now — I have to turn to the private initiation we have to endure, to give birth to the future.

I have learned that it is my grief, chagrin, and embarrassment that feed this internal pregnancy. I have to come to terms with the past, and let go. Strangely, it is my pain that is the life-blood of this metamorphosis. I have to give up control, but not caring. I get to feel some ambiguous unfolding, but I don’t get to know what. Mystery is having its way. I am being reduced, giving up illusions about myself, while being grown into a new larger, hopefully more compassionate being. Old skin is giving way, making room, for the new. I am pleased with my unfolding potential, while feeling the grief of what I have to let go of.

 

Currently, I’m in-between. Neither what I used to be, nor what I’m becoming. Some indigenous folks refer to this stage as being the one defined by ‘being the un-dead and the un-born.” I can relate. I feel a little like a zombie, still doing the old behavior, but without much zest. I can also attest to carrying the un-born. Death and re-birth. All in its own time.

 

All I have to do, is what a pregnant woman does — be patient, don’t miscarry, and endure a certain amount of discomfort. In each case, the mantra is “may I live long enough.” Carrying requires a humble stillness, a letting go into Mystery. 

 

Hush! Something is cooking!

 

 

 

 

Circling The Drain

 

This is for those who are now feeling a subtle pressure, that is distorting life, robbing energy, and slowing every move. You know who you are, though you might be reticent to admit it. Your galaxy suddenly has a black hole at its center, and it has begun to assert a pull on you. You’ve crossed into the event horizon, and realized your life was never your life. Something inexorable, something that doesn’t adhere to the cosmology of this world, is placing you under exquisite pressure, zapping you towards the inevitable. 

 

Congratulations, your circling the drain, in the lexicon of our conventional world, going down. Actually, being stripped of your extra weight, the materiality that has kept you in love with gravity. Now you are losing the grossness of your former being. The presumed trip down into oblivion is a cosmological event, a stumble beyond.

 

Rather than dwell on imagined arrivals, let’s celebrate what circling reveals. There is no other phase of life where death is so palpable, and as a result, paradoxically, there is no other stage of life where Life itself is so visible. Circling illuminates. The pressure of losing, of not being what you used to be, reveals what remains, the spirit seed that will be planted in some other circumstance. And, the incredible loving beauty of this rapidly passing existence.

 

Everything passes so quickly! Somehow gaining luminescence and meaning in the going. This green vulnerability becomes more vivid, it’s diversity of life-forms, a fountain of creative preciousness. Relationships shine more brightly. The final time is rich with wholing memories, frailer touches, and hearts opening like they have never opened. A poignant joy becomes possible!

 

Surrendering to an insistent tide seems like an easy thing to do.  But, the business and bustle of this dream keeps calling to us. It insists this is where it’s at, and for a time, that’s right, but the tide prevails, no matter if one is still trying to grasp the elusive gold ring. Going, going, gone is our reward. Slipping into the flow, we join something larger, more persistent, and old enough to be our truest ancestor.

 

Circling the drain can be confusing and disheartening. If one takes their cues from younger, as yet, under-initiated souls, then the latter era looks grim. But, the view of the soon to pass, is much more accurate and acute. We know, because of its steady pull, what’s going is what’s coming. Now, we are getting, as never before, that the flow has always been with us, and that it is us.

 

 

 

 

A Gift Of Age

 

“We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.”

                                                                                                                                  Kabir

 

Surprise is the marker I use for being alive. Life has a way of knocking over my applecart. Every shocker stuns and reorients me. I’ve lived long enough now, to see these moments of disequilibrium and dismemberment, as favors.  The greatest surprise, is how these dumbfounding blows, make me a dazed but better person. Gifts have rained down on me — some have been hard to take — because they have asked me to go past my comfort zone. Now, that I’ve grown older, a gift like this, always introduces me to a familiar stranger, my unknown self.

 

Some say the later years can be filled with regret. Letting go and forgiving oneself certainly has to happen.  It is painful, experiencing again, the insensitivities of your younger, more naïve, life.  Memories of more choice-less times, are always poignant, but seeing how you hurt yourself, and others, changes the poignant to a form of revelation. Then, when one realizes, that a lifetime pattern has been revealed, one’s internal fortitude turns to jelly. Life has turned things upside down.

 

The dismay, and sometimes depression, that can follow such a revelation, threatens to disrupt everything. What had seemed to be a slow descent into dotage, suddenly becomes a painful life review. The slow loss of mind accelerates into recollection, and the past has gained a new more revealing life.

 

The revelation of the past, in my case, brought home the innocence of a neglected childhood. I made a good choice from a very limited palette of options. It worked at the time. And, I couldn’t know, I was committing myself to a pattern of behavior that would turn out destructive and soul-debilitating. Carrying the pattern into the rest of my life, I now can see, has been my downfall, and is a failure that now haunts me. 

 

Now, I have to look at my journey from innocence to insensitivity. I can forgive myself for having been naïve and less than aware. I was so young and unformed. But, I’m not now, and I’m still prone to be so insensitive. Forgiveness now depends on me changing the behavior. Can I do it? I don’t really know. Can an old human change his spots?

 

Evidently, Life thinks I can. I’m pretty sure this awareness, coming to me now, while I’m still alive, is a painful reminder that I still have potential, time and desire. Ripening, for me, is an exacting process. It isn’t always fun, is sometimes painful, and is frequently surprising. I will stop what I used to do. Somehow. Life has given me a chance to become a me I can cherish. Wow! What a gift!

 

The painful process of seeing my childhood naivete and innocence, the pattern of insensitivity that grew from it, the identity it gave me, and the desire to choose again, has been one of the best, most unsung, gifts of growing older. It hasn’t been fun to receive, but even at this late a date, it has made my life so much better. It reminds me, that I am not Lucky by accident. 

 

Neither are you!