SUDDEN YOUTHFULNESS

"Redbud Path", oil,
by Laurel Daniel

“As for the [old woman], she took on a sudden look of youth; you felt as if she promised a great future,
and was beginning, not ending …”

-- Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs 

     Every so often these days I have a feeling of sudden youthfulness, as if I’m 6 instead of 71, as if spring is just starting in me as well as in the trees beside our house. This feeling flows from somewhere I’m not familiar with, somewhere as far off, I guess, as the farthest stars, and I’m never sure when it will show up. Sometimes it starts when I’m eating something special and sensing, for some reason, how young the universe is and how young my love of life is. It might begin when I’m breathing hard on my bike on far-reaching roads on days that sing of cleanness and new starts. Sometimes it’s only a little feeling, but one that finds me just when I most need to feel fresh and unfenced, when I most need to notice the childish shine on my hands. Since, like all of us, I hold this kind of innocence inside me, all I need to do is see it as if I’m seeing the inside of a miracle, and let my life leap and flit around like the young thing it always truly is.

PASSION AND COMPOSURE

I am slowly becoming more skilled at working and resting at the same time, something I sometimes see in the outdoors. Trees, for instance, seem to be busily working when they sway in a strong wind, tossing their limbs in a spirited manner, but they also seem absolutely stress-free. Perhaps their secret is that they don’t resist, but simply settle back and let the wind do the work, allowing them to sway tirelessly for hours. I see a similar situation in the fall, when leaves offhandedly float to the ground in an effortless way and in a few days completely cover square miles of land with their colors.  This is an astonishing achievement, one that would take we humans a supreme effort, and yet the loose and untroubled leaves do it in an almost leisurely way. And of course there are snowfalls, perhaps the most restful of nature’s activities, with whole crews of snowflakes working in perfect peacefulness across the landscape. Within a few hours, a sovereign state of snow can set itself up across miles of fields and forests with a soft but irresistible sheet of white, and yet it does it in the quietest possible way. A snowstorm has a way of combining effort and restfulness, something I greatly admire. Perhaps my goal in life should be to live like snowflakes live, with both passion and composure.

WONDERS WORKING

"Springtime Awakening". pastel,
by Barbara Jaenicke

Driving through coastal Connecticut yesterday, my wife and I were impressed by the colors in the early leaves and blossoms on the trees. We both said we had never noticed so clearly the soft shades of trees in the first weeks of spring – the pastel pinks and crimsons and light grays and even subdued shades of white. The trees looked like sprays of the softest crayon colors – tall, smooth bouquets spread out along the roads. It was astonishing to me that never before in my 70-some springs had I noticed these understated nuances of color in the blossoming trees. I marveled at what I had missed, and I wondered, as I drove along, what other miracles had worked their wonders around me without my knowledge. What marvels had unfolded before me and I never noticed? And are they still happening constantly, like the sunlight that spreads around me every morning, and the air that effortlessly lifts my lungs, and the words that sometimes seem to write themselves when I’m writing?

SILENT UPON A PEAK

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific – and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent upon a peak in Darien.”

-- John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

I’m always hoping to more often feel what “stout Cortez” and his men felt on that “peak in Darien”. Keats pictures them standing on a hill above the Pacific Ocean, staggered by the scene, and I would like to foster more of that kind of bewilderment and wonder in my life. Cortez and his men saw a startling sight, and every day – every moment – I am witness to scenes which, in their own special ways, should be almost as amazing. Hard as it is to remember during the sometimes wearisome routines of the day, the various circumstances that arise around me are as unique and mystifying as an indescribable ocean, and really, the only suitable response to them should be honest amazement. My small seacoast town is my “Darien”, and wherever I happen to be is the “peak” where I can look “with a wild surmise” at the picturesque inscrutability of life. A “surmise” is a guess, a supposition, a hunch, and that’s honestly all I have when it comes to understanding the things I see and experience. In the end, they’re all complete conundrums to me. If you ask me to make clear the mystery of even the simplest circumstance – the look of lamplight on a table, the sound of a car coming past the house, the whole sky shining at 7:00 a.m. -- all I could do is make a hit-or-miss guess, a “wild surmise”. A better response might be to just stay respectfully silent, like the astonished explorer and his men.

LUCKLY LEARNER

"Stream, Trees, House",
oil, by Tom Brown

It’s always a special pleasure to attend a “workshop” of some sort – a chance to dust off some skills or discover new ones – but no structured workshop is any better than the unrehearsed seminars presented to me day by day. It’s as if all the hours and minutes are my teachers, and each separate experience creates the classroom. A quiet moment as I make my breakfast could bring new knowledge to brighten my life, and a short walk with my wife around her prospering spring gardens could give us both a better understanding of ourselves. Even setting out my clothes for the coming day, or shifting my chair as I choose what words to type next, or driving my car in the daylight of a new morning, or simply standing in a store beside bins of apples and pears, can provide opportunities for fresh insights. Teachers are teaching everywhere. The tree that towers over our house holds knowledge I probably need in some way, and people I pass today could tell me stories more instructive and inspiring than textbooks. I’m a lucky learner in a classroom with no walls.   

RUSH RENEWALS

""Spring Renewal", oil,
by Kit Hevron Mahoney

   I sometimes receive renewal notices from magazines, and occasionally the word “RUSH” stands out on the notice, sometimes reminding me that other kinds of renewals are always rushing towards me. Actually, the entire universe is constantly renewing itself, whether I send back notices or not. Each second is a fresh and unsullied one, sent from the center of the universe straight to me and to each of us. Every moment is new- made, ultra-modern, and in mint condition. The little lamp on my desk has never sat just the way it is sitting now, and the stars spread across the sky are shining in slightly new ways from yesterday, and from ten seconds ago. I’m a new, state-of-the-art 71-year-old every moment, and all of our lives, and all stars and streets and mountains and atoms in the air, are -- lucky for us -- on automatic renewal.

 

SPRING SPIRIT

"Sparrow and Hydrangeas"
watercolor,
by Kay Smith

     There’s enthusiasm in the air around our riverside house these days since spring at long last has been let loose among us. My wife and I watched the birds last weekend winging their way across our yard from tree to tree, and it seemed to get us going with greater eagerness on our seasonal chores. While she worked with attentiveness among her steadily blossoming flowers, I swept and dusted in the house with unusual zeal. I seemed to truly care about keeping the house as clean as she always does, and I did my jobs as though they were entertaining tasks I couldn’t help but take pleasure in. While she sat on her beloved soil and set in bulbs and shoots, I shined up bookshelves and washed the shower walls. While she wheeled a wheelbarrow full of flowers around the yard, I found a strange satisfaction in seeing the carpets get even cleaner than they always are. I stopped occasionally to watch the birds going at great speed from tree to tree, and once I saw what seemed to be dozens of small birds dancing beside a bush. Nearby, Delycia was working with passion to prepare some soil, and several steps away some squirrels were springing with good spirit along the stones in a garden wall.               

A MINUET OF THOUGHTS

English Country Dancing

“… a state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other states of mind,and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving place with polite facility.”

-- George Eliot, in Middlemarch

These words of George Eliot exactly describe the dance my own ideas seem to do. My mind is like an old English ballroom where ideas warmly move among each other in a strange kind of sociability and easiness. Thoughts of delight glide beside thoughts of fear, and beliefs that bad times are looming hold hands with beliefs that a bright sky is always overhead if I would only look up.   What’s especially interesting about this is that my thoughts can be so cordial to each other, like English lords and ladies letting their friendliness guide the flow of the dance. Perhaps if I would simply stand back and watch them, the thoughts that move through my mind might seem as graceful as the movements of eminent manor house guests. If I stopped trying to always rule and regulate them, and gave up getting in fights with them, I might be able to enjoy the pleasant movements of my thoughts, their stylish steps and swings.    

ARROW AND BOW

Years ago, a wise book I was reading suggested that I need both an arrow and a bow in my life: I need to be sharp and piercing like the arrow, but I also need the smoothness and suppleness of the bow. I need to be strong but also sympathetic, incisive but also easygoing. The arrows of my thoughts and actions can pierce to the heart of things only if launched by the flexible bow of tenderness and leniency. True, I want to be a warrior in these senior-citizen days of mine, a strong old soldier who’s not afraid to fling arrows at strong old foes like fear and listlessness, not afraid to pierce when things need piercing. However, the arrows will float feebly to the ground unless launched by the powerful forces of kindness and consideration. This 71-year-old knight in somewhat shabby armor knows that nimbleness is as essential as sharpness. 

 

A SINGLE IMPRESSIVE ENTERPRISE

I’ve been looser and less tense these last few years, partly because I’ve finally begun to outgrow a life-long belief about the nature of life. From my earliest memory, it was impressed upon me (by family, friends, the media, and the overall culture) that life consists of multitudinous numbers of essentially separate entities, situations, and events, all of which are competing with each other. Life, as I learned it growing up, was a continuous conflict among countless hostile elements. My main responsibility, I believed, was to save myself from harm and try to triumph in as many of the daily contests as possible. Now, however, after 71 years  of sorting things out, I’ve slowly come to understand that this view of reality is simply wrong. I see now that, instead of being “many”, the universe is just one. It’s not a confused collection of disparate material entities, but rather a single, cohesive, and harmonious expression of itself. The entire universe, I see now, is as unified as a single cell, and, as in a cell, everything that happens in the universe happens for the good of itself. What this means for me is that I should cease from my nonstop stressing and struggling, because there’s no other “thing” that’s out to hurt “me”. In fact, there’s no “other”, period, and no separate “me”. There’s just the one shared and always successful universe, of which I and everyone and all of our so-called problems are a part. We’re all essential components of a single impressive enterprise called Life (of which death is another essential part), as closely interlaced with each other as the workings of a cell. 
For me, this realization has called for much more loosening up in my life than struggling.

FREELY GIVEN, FREELY GIVING

I don’t do much community service work, but I do often have a feeling of “giving back”. I’m not sure where it comes from or why it keeps flowing forward to me, but I have been on the receiving end, over 71 years, of a freewheeling river of ever-new thoughts. It seems to me that I don’t actually make these thoughts, but rather they unfold of their own accord and continuously cascade toward me. Just sitting here now, holding my hands to the keyboard, countless thoughts from somewhere are showing me what words to type. Since all these mental gifts have been so freely given to me, I take pleasure, day by day, in freely re-giving them to my friends and acquaintances. Because they belong to the limitless universe of thoughts, the thoughts are not actually mine to keep and care for, and so sending them straight on to others seems like the suitable next step. I sometimes picture myself as a strange kind of Santa Claus carrying a big bag of thoughts which came my way by inexplicable good luck, and which I distribute to others with the cheerfulness of an old man making merry.

A GOOD LAUGH

“Honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary's reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.”

"Cloud Bank Laughter",
oil, by Thaw Malin III

     -- George Eliot, Middlemarch

       Occasionally, someone seeing me from a distance when I’m alone might be surprised by the fact that I seem to be laughing. It’s not an uncommon occurrence. I often find myself almost folded over in laughter when I’m alone, and it’s usually directed at myself. I often cannot believe some of the silly, self-promoting, and completely incomprehensible things I say and so in a day’s time, and it doesn’t deserve anything but a good laugh. Looking back on a day, it’s as if I’m sitting in the audience at a comedy show, and my strange shenanigans that day make up the show.  I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m a complete catastrophe as a human being, but I do seem silly to myself when I’m pridefully prancing around like some shrewd mastermind. I know a little about the laws of good writing and how to choose chicken thighs for grilling and when to write a note in the margins of novels, but there are hundreds of thousands of things I know nothing about.  No one is less of an “authority” than I am. I suppose I’m sort of an expert at using commas correctly, but I’m a downright dimwit when it comes to correctly carving a turkey or turning a lawn into a lavish garden or giving the right gifts to my grandchildren.  This is the reason for my occasional amusement at myself when I’m alone. I just have to laugh at this well-creased senior citizen who gives off such a sense of self-assurance and astuteness, but who is truly dancing one simple (albeit spirited) step at a time.    

IT IS GOOD FOR ME TO BE HERE

Yesterday I overheard someone say, “It is good for me to be here”, and I thought, Yes it is – always. There’s always something special, something useful and even shining, in every place and situation, if only I will let myself see it. I suppose some of the distinctiveness derives from the fact that wherever I happen to be is wherever I must be at that particular moment. I can be somewhere else one second from now, but right now – and every right now – it is absolutely necessary for me to be wherever I am. It’s as if each moment is an immaculate and private place prepared just for me – a place where wisdom waits with its gifts. If the place seems sad or scary, wisdom sometimes sets its greatest gifts at the precise center of trouble, and insight can shine brightest inside a disaster. Even if my life seems to be shaking with concerns and sorrow, it is good for me to be there, for I can always find some freedom I’ve never felt before right where I am, right where the universe has placed me at this well-timed and eminent moment.

MY BEST

"High Valley Spring", oil, by Don Gray

 Like most of us, I have been trying to “do my best” for most of my life, but lately I’ve been looking at another way of living – a different sense, you might say, of what doing my best might mean. As I was making a start on this paragraph this morning, I caught sight of some clouds that were shifting their shapes in the sky outside the window by my desk, and it occurred to me that they were the best clouds they could possibly be. They weren’t struggling or striving or working out ways to be the best; they simply were, and always would be, as good as clouds could be. Even if they slipped off into just wispy streams of whiteness, they would be the best possible wispy streams of whiteness. I thought of this as I sat at my computer in my crumpled shirt and dirt-stained pants, and it seemed like I was similar to those clouds, and maybe just as marvelous as they always are. Maybe I don’t need to struggle so sincerely to be the best I can be, because perhaps, in a sense, I always am. Maybe my saggy shirt sags in the best ways possible, and maybe the dirt on my pants is perfectly placed and displays the best possible shades of brown. If I can’t seem to think of the finest words for this paragraph, perhaps, like those always perfect clouds, I can confidently come up with words that will shine with their own simple brightness. Maybe the best I can do is simply believe in who I am at this mint-condition moment, and let each word do its own remarkable work.           

HOME

"House on the Sneem River",
pastel, by Nita Leger Casey

     My wife and I have a small home beside a river in a small town, but I wish I could more often feel like I’m home no matter where I happen to be. Home is our white stone house in Mystic, but home should also be the sidewalk I’m walking on, or the store where I’m browsing among beets and cabbages, or the hope-filled forest in which I’m walking on an unruffled April day. Home, as we say, is where the heart is, and shouldn’t my heart be wherever I happen to be, whether at the beach beneath a few first stars or at a meeting that seems boring but that brings out brightly-shining thoughts from each of the participants, if only I could see and appreciate them? Shouldn’t I feel just as “at home” holding the door for a friend miles from our house as doing the dishes in our kitchen, and shouldn’t speaking to the clerk at a store be, in a way, as pleasant as passing thoughts back and forth at home? I live in little Mystic, but I also live in the limitless universe, so perhaps my real home is among the stars and galaxies. It could be there are countless doors in my true home, all leading to moments that could be called miracles, all opening to places as comfortable and kindly as our living room on Riverbend Drive.     

BROTHERS AND SISTERS

"Beach Sunrise", oil, by Sharon Schock
     .    

     It’s easy to understand how “connected” I am when I see the sunshine spreading across my wife’s gardens on these spring mornings, for it’s the same sunshine that warms the whole world. We live in a small town, but we share the sun with limitless numbers of living things, sharing as close as brothers and sisters. The light that lands on her daffodils also fills valleys in France, and the same sunshine that sometimes brings out our sunscreen starts trees setting out new leaves in Italy. I try to think of this when the world seems like a disjointed, straggling place. When I feel like a confused sightseer on an utterly undisciplined planet, I try to see, in my mind, all the many millions of us living our lives lit up by the same sun. It’s like we’re all the offspring of sunlight. We all need the sunshine to restore us each morning, and all of us say thanks, in our own ways, when it does. It’s like we’re living in an infinitely large family that finds comfort together under a light that never leaves us for long, and that illuminates each of our lives in similar ways. Even in our most troublesome times, the sun stays with us like a father for brothers and sisters, like a mother making sure her children are sharing, as one, her unfailing light.    

WITH NO HELP FROM ME

    

"Rush Hour", oil, by Dana Cooper

 It’s reassuring to realize, each morning, that a thousand things are all set to assist me during the day, and that they were made ready with absolutely no help from me. I sometimes smugly think of myself as my own major source and supplier of the tools of success, but it’s simply not the case -- not when I consider, for instance, my car that is cared for occasionally by master mechanics, with no help from me; the streets that have been kept smooth and clean for my car, with no help from me; the stoplights that successfully send my car and others from one intersection to another, with no help from me; the sunshine that makes it easy to see the promising spring trees, with no help from me; and the trees themselves that are making major miracles on these mild April days, with no help from me. I’m set to have a fine day each morning, mostly because of the countless tasks undertaken by people and forces unfamiliar and far away, the loyal laborers who do their duties so that ease and comfort can be a much bigger part of my life than pressure and stress.               

RETIREMENT FROM THE CLASSROOM

I spoke to Goodbye, 

but it didn't speak back to me. 

It stayed silent, 

so we both stayed silent 

under the stars that say goodbye

each morning as a new day is made, 

as a new life is given 

to a grateful teacher 

at graduation. 

YIELDING

"On the Road: Trans-Canadian Highway",
oil, by Robin Weiss

       Sometimes, when I see a “YIELD” sign on an entrance to an Interstate, I sigh in reassurance, and smile, for it reminds me that I can constantly yield to the bountiful power that runs all things. I’m not talking about God, at least not the God that gave me fits all through my childhood – the God that could crush me in anger as easily as bless me. No, the power that I can continuously yield to is simply the force that flows through the vast universe, the force that both thinks all my thoughts and throws the starlight across the sky each night. It’s the force that’s forever doing all the jobs that I usually mistakenly think I’m responsible for, everything from lifting and lowering my lungs to making sure I’m safe in stressful circumstances. It’s the power that pushes spring winds through blossoming trees and places feelings of all kinds inside me. It tells me to turn left or stare at a stunning sunset. It leads me, and therefore lets me love my life rather than worry about it. I have to have the good sense, though, to yield to this power, to let it freely flow like the traffic on I-95, like the blood that streams through me on its own.     

JUST BENEATH EVERYTHING

"Spring Blooms by the Pond", oil,
by Jamie Williams Grossman

     I'm slowly learning that if I look under old or unlucky things, I can almost always find windfalls waiting for me, though I still rarely remember to look. If I feel frayed and worn in my 71^st year, I can lift up that feeling and there’s the sparkle that’s always been there, bringing brand new life to me moment by moment. If something crashes in my life, I can look beneath the debris to discover the wisdom that waits there in its surprisingly shining wrapping. Something beneficial always reveals itself if I simply remember to lift up what looks frightful and find it there, just where it always is, where good gifts always are, just beneath everything.