Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.
~ David Whyte ~
Coming on the heels of Monday’s post on midlife and eldering questions, Whyte’s words speak to the power of such questions. Questions which, like the white fluff of feather caught on the leafless limb of the red willow bush I met a couple of weeks ago, might easily go unnoticed. Soft and tenacious, in stark contrast to its surroundings and time of year…is why it caught my attention…had me stop to capture its moment and possibility. This is the stuff of questions that matter, that wait patiently, sometimes in obscurity, for our us to stop and notice and make something of them.
What might be some of the questions waiting patiently for you? Perhaps in the growing dark of these December days, with its invitation to go slow and look within, they may appear to you.
Over the years I’ve blogged some of my responses to entering the eldering stage of life, with one of my earliest references in 2016, when I cited the transition from ambition to meaning in Angeles Arrien’s The Second Half of Life. Searching this current blog, A Wabi Sabi Life, I again referenced Arrien in February 2020, mere weeks before the world was stopped by covid-19. In Threshold of Uncertainty, my first post of 2022, I described my experience standing on the threshold of a new year. Recently the gift of a question to a friend who has just crossed into his 7th decade – What joys and challenges will wearing the mantle of early eldering bring?… Last week’s wistful musings prompted by my short visit with my parents and to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral…Yesterday, an excerpt from Dr. Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude, cited in her weekly Art of Enchantment Substack…like a bell thrice rung:
In the last part of our life, focus is everything. The years when we imagined we needed to be all things to all people are long gone, along with our dilettante days: the days of experimenting with this and that, of adopting and discarding different personas, of reinventing ourselves for every season of the year. Now, it’s time to get serious. To let the inessential fall away and focus on the essence of who we are. What is it that is left of us when Old Bone Mother comes along and strips that old, decaying flesh from our bones? Who is it that we are; what is it that we feel we are here to do? What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for?
Dr. Sharon Blackie
Like Blackie, who says she asks herself these questions every year at this time, when the dark grows long, and she grows older, I’m feeling a similar urgency with similar questions. I realize typing now, this is part of the root of that knot I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and wondered what thread I needed to pull to loosen its persistent grip.
For me, the urgency is more in asking the questions with an open heart and mind, rather than anticipating a set of simple answers. As in the old stories of the Grail, the Question That Must Be Asked is always more important than the answer it provokes.
…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Who is it that we are, or think we are? What is it that we feel we are here to do? What is the world asking of us now? What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for? What joys and challenges will wearing the mantle of eldering bring? What thread(s) do I pull in hopes of loosening the interior knot’s persistent grip?
Sitting with, in the growing dark, growing patient with uncertainty. Light a candle in this season of light, advent of a holy reminder, a mystery we learn to trust.
A Wabi Sabi Life 