Tag Archives: aging

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The Rival Sisters

They were loyal sisters.
The older
was also more fair,
prettier in an Original Barbie kind of way.

She had been sick
when her younger,
darker,
more tomboy sister
met and first desired
my tall, dark, and handsome Uncle.

When older and fairest of all Sisters
returned home,
after a long healthcare absence,
she too desired Uncle Handsome,
as did we all,
in our time and ways,
but Handsome’s eyes never wavered again
once reset on older and fairest Sister.

Young darker Sister, left behind,
began to heal
when tall, dark, and handsome #2
showed up
and spoke smokey truths
of happiness,
kindness,
quiet gentleness.
But not too gentle.
Slow and steady; confident
integrity could heal all guilt
and angers
and prior disappointments.

These two Sisters
and their TD and H husbands
lived near each other
and grew old together
with unspoken neighborly mistrusts,
unresolved struggles with and about envy,
jealousies and jilts,
but also laughter and deep mutual regard.

Who can control chemistry,
or timing?
Who can forgive,
and how long could this revolution take?

Yet even restrained love
can grow abundantly rich
with both age and generosity.

Younger and darker Sister
lost her husband to cancer
and then her memory,
while older fairest Sister and husband
moved into assisted housing
after reaching golden fifty years
together.

Then good-natured patient waiting
to embrace final retirement,
a journey we each take alone,
as when we entered
except without Mom nearby,
or maybe this too remains the same, somehow.

Older ancient Barbie Sister
did not let go
until younger jilted Sister
quietly stopped breathing in her deep night sleep,
lost in memories not accessible by day.

Ten nights later
Barbie Sister passed out of embodied memories
in this same way.
Safe at last,
knowing it was then too late
for TD and H Uncle
to go back before that place
where they had started.

They say death comes in threes.
I wonder why.

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Aging in a Deeper Place

As I age
the formerly wide chasm between ecstasy and despair
grows narrower,
deeper.

I had not thought this an attribute of maturation,
quite the contrary,
but perhaps an aging crevice,
a thinning fracture
between played-out manic bliss, over-extended harvest,
and depression
nondually faces two extremes
of positive major chords and keys
with negative minor tensions
searching for each other out and in,
become too vocal, focal
looking for tacit evidence
apposition yet lives
on another side
of this darkening
enlightening
divide.

Dr. Jeckyll’s confluence
redeeming Mr. Hyde’s dissonance
double-binding midway balance
now become a treacherously tight rope
tensioned for resonance and buoyant bounty,
just short of snapping side against side.

Perhaps wisdom is learning how to equitably co-invest
in both wonder and shock,
without becoming paralyzed in-between these boundless awes,
deep wavering yes and please not yet,
not yet,
carving a gorge
deep echoing sacred reverence
and secular irrelevance,
ecstasy with ridiculing despair,
boundless sufficiency without endless satisfaction,
reiterating eternal integrity
not yet surely promised
beyond potential disintegration.

If solitude portends sublime co-operation,
what remains for aching loneliness?

Who and what could become redeemed
through double-binding isolations
within voiceless awe
for wonder indwelling silent shock
of ego loss
deep shadowing eco-gain?

To win to lose,
to lose to win,
co-arising deceptions again.

Deeply resonant depressions;
subliminal,
suboptimizing ego dominations.

Two delineations
with hairline fracturing co-definition?

What would be blissful contentment’s promise
without any dissonant content
for comparison?

What are omnipotent spirits
without ego vacuuming materials,
evidence of necessary,
hopefully sufficient,
deep double-binding awe
that we,
even I within we,
have been something,
someone,
someone’s,
rather than the far more statistically likely
nothing at all
evermore.

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The Senior Center

The Senior Center was a beehive of active waiting
to die.

Bingo
but not ballroom dancing.

Knitting
but not garden expansions.

Physical therapy
but not yoga
and not chi gong,
much less mindful meditations
sung in four part harmony.

The new guy,
just growing into sixty-five,
asked them
How would we like to be remembered
one hundred years from now?

That doesn’t seem likely,
I know,
but perhaps more likely together
than playing Solitaire
side by side.

I would like to be remembered
as healers of The River
said a somber SeptemberGenerian woman
surrounded by ancient lady friends.

No one needed to ask why.
We all knew
what was coming downriver
for future regenerations
of thirsty toxined minds
with biodiverse bodies.

And so we found younger allies
who owned property along The River,
beginning with the railroad company,
and the Mohegans
and the Pequots,
where a Senior knew a Senior
with a well-placed daughter,
and sometimes a son
of unusual cooperative and long-term focus.

Together we planted firs
and cedars along polluted and denuded banks,
for future generations to manage,
harvest for housing
and furniture
and fiber
and possibly even coffins
waiting for memories of polluted rivers
to die.

That was one hundred years ago
we started
in this regenerative Senior Center,
and still going strong
as each year
a new incoming class
of those who finally reached sixty-five
joined our river healing project,
more recently also producing fruit trees
and berries,
flax
and hemp,
mushrooms
and nuts
and sweetgrass baskets
woven by SeptemberGenerians.

Women and a few surviving men
and some more in-between
smiling together
at the round cedar table in the back,
remembering Elder healers
of our barren land
and naked River.

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Saturday Night

It’s another Saturday night
ending this week
as started
alone again.

I came here
almost two years ago
to my retirement hermitage
but oddly,
and often uncomfortably,
shared with my hurt kids,
mental and physical illness
adopted and then adapted;
an asylum for the perpetually incontinent.

Cars pass by.
Sometimes a loud motorcycle
or two or three or four
or even more
here on the southern boundary
of a county seat
in a State
where rural counties
have been disenfranchised
of political purpose.

Our largest employers
are two tribally owned casinos.
One across the Thames River
flowing past our backyard retreat.

Our second largest income producer
may be the County Courthouse
where attorneys and police
collude to extort voluntary donations
from poor young adults
red and yellow,
black and white,
guilty of speeding
and texting
and smoking medicine
without a license
in Great White Father’s sight.

I have been listening and watching
for what this half acre is.
We are not as rural as I had hoped,
with State highway 12 too near my front yard,
but this place is also not urban
or suburban.

What it is not,
whom we are not,
seems more clearly articulated
than any positive definition,
refining our becoming quiet place,
alone together,
shunned by healthier neighbors.

It’s another lonely ending
anticipating yet another not new beginning
tomorrows stretching out alone
long retiring shadows
on this southern edge
of a Connecticut County Seat
without apparent purpose
or co-defining meaning.

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Final Operatic Scores

Of all vocations calling each of us
perhaps it is this final ecopolitical stage
most arduous.

To reflect with full integrity,
both Left dominant hubris history
with Right-recessed notnot full incarnation,
those unfulfilled promise valleys of aptic time
lost to Ego’s yangish self-promoting memory,
past vocations sequentially emerging transubstantiations,
pregnantly nurtured with Left/ElderRight bicameral balance.

But, balancing or notnot yet,
to reconsider one’s sins,
both consummated and omitted,
bringing slow-growth ballast to one’s enculturation of grace,
both those healthier blessings fully consumed
as therapeutically strived for regenerate production,
yet also known only through past struggles stretching ego-compassion’s constitutions,
declarations of Self+Other incorporating cooperative interdependence,
laughter’s miraculous love moments
best shared, yes,
but yet bittersweet nutrition alone,
remembering what lives best not forgotten.

This final vocation,
to merge our previous lives together
with those we hope to follow.

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All Growed Out

And EveryBody to Play With

Cognitive maturation,
that portion of “please just grow up”
evolving climatically large transitional lifetime matters
of choosing to grow up,
to not just act as if I am an adult,
but to also know I am always of an emergent adolescent species,
one of the new anthro-kids on the old-school regenerating block
of organic communities emerged from healthy Elders,
still playing cooperative-co-therapeutic mentoring and role play games,
speaking and sometimes even writing daily creation stories
preparing for night-time dream decomposition
co-evolving regenerative strings of years of intergenerational narrative,
but one self-transparent integrative moment in each day,
one day within each maturing egoconscious lifetime
of therapeutic mind
and nondual co-arising body

Of Basic CoEmpathic Embryonic Trust
growing up in an ecoconscious deep-learning bicameral process
and economic lifetime project environment
of organic historical-permacultural eco-systemic co-evolution
of dipolar TaoSpacetime 4D co-empathic
reverse-bilateral dream/imagination,
winwin polycultural Game Designs
focused solely on our (0) soul universal love through ReGenerative Elders
open-systemic evolutionary health insurance EarthTribal Group Theories.

Outrageous fractal-dipolar DNA/RNA waves of jazz-rooted
comedy-operatic drama creation liturgies
of trees co-mentoring life and dualdark death.

While our bodies cannot choose to age into maturity
of wise cooperative behavioral conduct,
our minds can and must choose maturity,
to follow what wisdom of our bicameral-bipedal bodies
regeneratively,
ubiquitously
lavish-resonantly,
rich harmonic humorously
and dramatically full-revolution co-arising co-operatively
reminds us,
reweaves us,
reconnects anthro with wild maturation’s wisdom,
longing for long-term affective and effective karmic-health,
positive medicine folding cards
through double-binding notnot dipolar grace
of ecoconscious empathic-egofractured enlightenment
co-arising political and economic choices
to cooperatively grow up.

What would happen
if all existing cooperative bodies
and businesses
and healthy-value Commons Ownership,
were to become mutually financed
within a zero-interest global on-line cooperative
and deferred loan guild?

Whose ego’s would grow healthier?
and who would lose everything that could possibly become pathological?
who would love everything that makes them happier?
through cooperative ownership responsibilities
and authority for ecosystemic maturing-network justice
and confluently sustainable,
regeneratively multicultural,
health-trending
aging-goodkarma-gracefully
regenerating peace?

Just show up
growing out to-gather,
just show deep
grown wisdom together.

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Healthy Seeds Produce Wealthy Leaves

Mindbodies unfold from embryonic seed
toward full living-loving
sense-synthesizing leaf production,
full YangPower during warm light-drenched days of summer,
Earth’s rotation fuelling healthy growth,
yet weedy monopolizing tendencies as well.

Seed unfolding is our first longing half,
maturing toward healthy EarthTribe speciation,
in fullest life glory.

Our second half returns fading leaf powers
to regenerate next season’s healthy yin-seeds
for EarthTribe’s full forest embryonic memories,
folding out from winter through summer,
then refolding summer back toward yin-hibernating winter
of each perennial ringed life.

Folding in from political and economic production leaves
through symbiotic breath of maturity,
searching metaphysically exhaling iconic paths,
now imprinted with Earth’s nurturing light air,
wet soil,
inhaling and exhaling revolutionary fires of transubstantiation,
giving way to new fetal forests,
understories of regenerate future recreations.

This first half, unfolding,
needs nothing yet wants every source of digestible nutrition.
Then second half, productive leaves
giving way toward next generation’s seeds,
wants nothing
yet mysteriously needs this entire forest
to evolve belonging together;
mutual nurturance full-powered.

Life’s premillennial unfolding seed
consumes energy toward maturing fullness
as postmillennial aging refolds balancing consumer-producer dancers
leafing leaping fertile enrichment,
co-messiah bodhisattvas,
Earth’s ecosystemic embryonic regenerators.

Basic Attendance shadows our co-present humane capacities
to know and love
how seeds and leaves
are both same and different
each moment of each unfolding/folding love,
synergetic political events, relational transactions,
networks,
nutrition-rooted economic trees
transforming yin seed into yang leaf
and back again,
reforesting,
ecosystems recycling within as without iconic Earth.

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Leaving Stems

Imagine yourself as a tree
with a leaf named Yang
and a coarising nondual twig named Yin,
having a sappy conversation about life and mortality.

Do you think this twig would be so foolish as to correct the leaf’s beliefs
that life and death are analogous to evolution and retrenchment,
dormancy decomposing into further incarnations of Earth’s soul,
feeding root systems of future tree’s healthy coarising development?

Yet, for the leaf named Yang,
once separated from your embryonic twig
and Yin’s ecologically breathing economic and politically symbiotic treehome,
healthy life is but a nutritional season.

Your incarnate tree’s rings of revolutionary root systemic development,
of resonant evolution,
of regenerate virginal life,
span many growing seasons, as a tree
thriving, then gradually slowing, within your interdependent forest.

And,
many enculturing centuries more,
as a speciating voice within Earth’s nutrient/boundary skin
of RNA/DNA scripted life,
further potential regenerations
of Earth’s abundant love.

Imagine Earth preoccupied leaves
decomposing sunny fuel and healthy nutritional function
for yin’s well-versed root systems
forging future virginal yet regenerate occupations.

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