My childhood was spent in a small college town. Our three-story apartment building stood watch over what seemed at the time a very large park across the street. I loved to run down the hill to the playground, joining other kids on the industrial swing set, crawling over the giant steel jungle gym, and letting centrifugal force wing me off the merry-go-round.
One of the great rites of spring after a drenching rain meant taking off our shoes, toes squishy in the mud, to push that merry-go-round as fast as we could. We’d jump on at the last minute gleefully dipping our heels in the puddles below and watching the arc of mucky water plaster our bare arms and legs. It was baptism by mud, a renewal of our faith that summer, and summer vacation, would come soon.
Even today those experiences are embedded in my muscle memory.
Recently I went back to visit that old park. It was much smaller than I remembered. Filled with memories but not much else. I couldn’t help but feel the passage of time.
These days it doesn’t take much for me to reflect on time’s evolution. Balancing on the fulcrum of life’s teeter-totter, tilting toward the end, it’s not just my memories that are aging, it’s my body. Last week someone guessed my age correctly.
At 50 the jig is up, at least for women. You can no longer pass as a “young” person unless you’re talking to a 70-year-old. I won’t go into the litany of things that change in a now arrhythmic heartbeat, but change they do.
These sags and bags seem to arrive overnight. Unlike Rumi in one of his most famous poems, I want to tell these unwelcome visitors to go home. The problem is they are not visiting. They have taken up permanent residence and I am forced to accept that I will age and I will die.
The beauty of this eternal realization is that wisdom blossoms, like bulbs of hyacinth and paperwhite, when vitality is forced against the absolute limit of any life. It’s the wisdom of no escape that sensible friends and sage teachers counsel us to remember.
It may seem strange to write of death in the midst of spring but that’s how it is in the natural cycle of growth and decay. Buds die so that flowers can bloom, flowers die so that fruit flourishes. Ours is a journey of discovering what must die so that life can renew itself in infinite variety and form.
We all wish for a peace-filled death. Lately I’ve taken up a practice of snuffing out the flame of my meditation candle by watching the wick slowly deprived of oxygen. I invoke: “May all beings go out gently like this flame.” May all of us be blessed to give up our last breath with grace and conviction, and release our spirit to its next abode.
Photo credit: “She Saw” by Hiroh Satoh.
