Poetics of Aging

A Many Voices guest post by Carol Sill

I ask myself how I can confront the reality of this aging business directly and connect with my own real concerns at this time. For me, it is always easier to sneak in the back door, to turn to my pen and ask the question in a poetic way: Am I losing some of my abilities and even some of my old ideals? Of course the answer is Yes.

The reality has hit me hard the last few days, and it came up directly when I realized that I just couldn’t see as well as I had even a year ago. Before, I might have said, So what? But now it is different.

How do I know? A little bird told me….

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

A hummingbird brings the message, and it is held in the whirring of the wings, in the buzzing and shift in the air around her. She is telling me now what is to come. I am finally stilling myself to allow her to come closer, to feed me from the point of her beak. While I am dazzled by her iridescence, momentarily, she inserts the beak, not in my mouth, but in the temple, then returns to the top of my head, then the back, where the spine connects to the skull.

She is busy buzzing me and she is not alone. She brings her entire entourage with her, and each one finds her spot and inserts the needle. I don’t feel a thing, I don’t see a thing, for my eyes are closed as the wings buzz and whirr like delicate automatons in a rare Austrian museum.

She tells me what is to come by her presence and in the sounds. The beak piercing numbs the body as this is happening. I had imagined that she was accompanied by all those others, but it was only her. And she hit me directly in the heart, an injection so deadly that I could not feel a thing, only perceived as if I were an observer.

That is how the message was given into me. Not by words at all, or even in intuition. That part was to surface later and become a source of wiser understanding. First, there was the deadly injection. A paralytic. An agent of calm. And all over my body came this wave of peaceful rest, a wave of love you could say, if this were a romance. But it is not. It is a pharmacon, a healing poison.

Time to sleep, I thought, and then, counting backwards from 100, I never reached 99 before I was out.

By out, I mean I emerged to observe the body from a short distance. I was still in the room of course, and near my own body. I was looking down at her with interest and compassion. I added that compassion part, now, in the writing, but may have got in wrong. It could have been dispassion. Yes, that is what it was.

Before, I could laugh these changes off and carry on with other aspects still holding the magnetism and power. But this time was not like that. I was shocked by what I suddenly understood.

It happens gradually and then in bursts, intense and direct. As if you were a child with growing pains, or as if there were an orchestration of the system to bring out one aspect after another. Each one is not exactly fading, but losing its grip. The danger is that when one part fails, then others entrain along with it. I am still the master of myself here, so I can’t let that sort of thing destabilize me entirely, or so I hope.

I let the hummingbird give me her message. I stop and see the changes, then move on. But I don’t yet let her paralyze me. That is for much later on.

The Gentle Shedding

I learn to make peace with each event as it happens, and let myself shed the parts as they come and go through me - as they loosen and shift and then finally fall away.

Now I’d come to think that this was something internal, having to do with memory, kind of psychological, or metaphysical, as a growth into wisdom while the old life peels off of me, one bit at a time. But I didn’t think of it as physical too, and that is where I find myself now, weakened in body as the freedoms come in more and more quickly metaphysically.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

It is a gentling, a coming of wise life that returns us to simplicity. Innocence and experience. As the calcifications of experience fall off, the open places where they were held are soft and vulnerable. They are the parts of self that had been covered over by barnacles that had protected them over the years. Each barnacle covered an area that had been hurt or changed throughout my life. And when they fall off, the place that had been covered, now exposed, reveals its experience in the mind as if it were happening now in the present. A kind of wisdom comes from simply seeing this, and allowing the place its air and light once again. So it is a reforming, and a new breathing. For each open place is able to breathe again, and to be part of the whole, no longer hidden by the cover of time’s working.

Ascent and Descent

At the same time two things are happening. First, this miraculous opening revelation of life history is coming out to bring all sorts of new energies into the system, for energies that had been blocked are now free again. And they require new balances and love and acceptance in all the good ways these things come in. Second, there is the fading accompanied by sudden changes in function, those “hummingbird moments”. These seem less and less important in the light of the openings, and that makes them less frightening or concerning when they are seen in their natural way as part of this process.

As the ascent is going on, the descent is also happening. The barnacles fall off back into the sea, and with them some of the functionality of the physical body may also fall away. This can’t be avoided, for it is the nature of life, and it can be relieved or rebalanced as part of returning to a new state of sensitivity.

Photo by pratik kasbekar on Unsplash

As it all happens, a bright fire lets the life force enter all parts of the system, and aligning with this life force brings more power and beauty to the process of aging.

Aging is inevitable, the gentle approach of wisdom is up to us to accept. It is an embrace, and a long lovemaking.

Carol Sill is a contemplative writer and editor, whose interests include Platonism and Sufism, meditation and media study, art and culture. She lives on rocky Salt Spring Island in BC, Canada, with the abstract artist James K-M. Her “Personal Papers” Substack has been going for six years!

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.