Compost

I remember a college teacher's definition of tragedy: the death of a beautiful woman (which, when I refreshed my memory through that scholarly tome Wikipedia, turns out to have been E.A. Poe's definition), and have often pondered (oh, why not use Poe-language?!) its truth. One thing I do believe: few of us have much sympathy or patience with dying and death----or even darkness. Just scrolling down my own sparse little entries here reminds me of how much I try to focus on the positive (though I'm not always successful).

Yet sandwiched between everything beautiful is the stink of decay, without which that beauty would not have the strength to bloom. Who wants to smell it at this stage? Few if any hands go up. After all, that person who agreed to take a whiff? She has nothing to say about it. It simply IS. . . No consolation but in sharing company in the stink.

As a fifty-something (knocking on the next decade's door in a couple of years, if you must know), I protest being pidgeon-holed because of my age, yet that glance in the mirror tells me I am (at least on looks) properly placed. It's funny how I will look at photos of people who have their age typed neatly beside them, and I compare----Oh, my! He looks like he's in his 80's, or She looks so much younger (it's the hair dye and that "Life Lift," likely)! I could work harder at cheating the judgments and gain, perhaps, ten years, but it wouldn't negate the reality.

And it's REALITY I have the hardest time with: the reality that my mother has Alzheimer's and lives over two thousand miles away, that my daughter and granddaughter are comparably distant. And I? Though I live in paradise I am often miserable because my mind is with my loved ones, whether they want me or not, and mostly they do not. (Here, my long-gone grandmother's voice resounds: "Oh, Chris, of course they want you," and I say, "No; they do not, and they have even said so.")

And so I sit in meditation for a time each day, reminding my body that the mind's stories are only a part of life (and that these stories we tell ourselves are not real), though we once lived a version of them and are now living in the moving stream of time, but even though this gains me some semblance of equanimity in my daily life, I will still break down sobbing, deeply saddened by these disconnects and overwhelmed by my own upstream-striving that seems to change very little.