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At the food coop in Placerville, they told me they are no longer selling fresh fish. Their suppliers are unable to provide food from the sea without high levels of toxic mercury. This was an occasion for grief. Going to the fish monger on Broadway with my mother when I was growing up was an outing we both looked forward to despite the sliminess and the stench. Shopping for  flounder, mackerel, sole, swordfish, their glassy eyes staring impassively, their scales cold and slippery, we chatted with the rough-shaven old men standing over the mountains of ice while we hunted for the freshest filets.  Those men have vanished along with the salesmen who gently set your foot on the special device that measured your shoe size, the wisecracking, chain smoking women in the dress shops who flattered and cajoled you, and the bent refugees from the darkest corners of Central Europe with loupes at their eyes who repaired jewelry and watches. I can feel them slipping through my fingers like the clean water from the creeks upstate where we filled our canteens on hikes in summer camp. Every day, there is less texture, less scent, fewer signs of the marvelous diversity life. All the nuance of speech patterns, gestures, facial expressions has been replaced by self-check out, passwords. Convenience is king. Sometimes it hurts, don’t you think? Sometimes it feels like my brain is being clawed at, scrambled and fried.

Photo by S Turby on Unsplash

We are connected electronically but not heart to heart. This is not what our spiritual teachers had in mind when they offered their first teaching, Interbeing. By Interbeing they meant Love, the understanding that we are all entwined and embedded in one another and that your reality and my reality cannot be separated, as hard as we may try to distinguish ourselves from one another, as much as we are devoted to discriminating. Are you from Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Nashville? I’m from New York. You wouldn’t believe how many languages I heard in the street when I was a child, how many books by writers from all over the world I’ve enjoyed. My reality and the reality of the people starving in the street in Gaza cannot be separated, nor can any of us be estranged from the Earth, be it parched or flooding. We are our ravenous neighbors and we are the degraded natural world we have inherited. How could it be otherwise? We are all drinking the same poisoned water, breathing the same venomous air. But we won’t be breathing it for eternity because the second teaching is Impermanence. By Impermanence our teachers meant Transformation, the understanding that nothing stays the same, even from one minute to the next, and that it is in the nature of Love that we will lose those we care for most deeply and that we too are mortal even if that fact continues to elude us. Loss is the sea we swim in. There can be no Interbeing without Impermanence. There can be no Love without Transformation. In our lifetime, Interbeing and Impermanence are approaching one another with arms outstretched as if in a ballet. Swan Lake, Swan Song. The more it seems our hearts are breaking from Love, the more who and what we love is being taken from us.

Still, I must add that my great-granddaughter Madelyn meets every illustration of a bunny or a duckling or chick in one of her stiff cardboard books with the breathy, rapturous announcement “it’s a baay-bee.” At 2 1/2, she’s close enough to the very new to immediately identify with it and appreciate its magic and its fragility. Small children remind us of our sacred origins.  Frank and I are blessed to discover this again as  great-grandparents. When our children were small, we were too preoccupied with the effort of childrearing, with getting it right. Our grandchildren lived far away. But now we have Jaxson and Madelyn to marvel at. My orientation towards them is not into the anxious and insubstantial future that I dare not envision, but into the wellspring of all life, backwards into the mythic past. I see them floating out of the ocean, emerging from the ooze of the earth. I watch them learning to navigate their lives, learning the names of things. They remind me of the energy of birth and rebirth, even of the power of the Christmas story which isn’t even my story but represents the universality of Transformation. Behind and underneath the darkness of the historical moment, the observation that life is permeated by suffering and loss, the disappearance of fresh fish from the market, and the incontrovertible fact that we have grown old, there is rebirth and there is love and celebration of the new.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In January, seventysomething is delighted to offer the artwork, prose, and poetry of Berkshire artist Rosemary Starace. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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

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