SleepingOrchid

Age=WISDOM “What would you advise your 20 yr old self?”

When we start racking up the years, we have a choice. We can “grow up” or we can “grow down”. Growing down would mean becoming more self-absorbed, demanding and infantile, a mass of entitlement compromised by bodily aches and pains. Growing up means assuming the mantle of Wisdom, which is the crowning glory of Age. Wisdom is 4-D vision, seeing past, future, possibility and the most productive outcomes freed finally from the furnace of desire into understanding and compassion, as one member of a species instead of a competitive protagonist with multiple agendas and axes to grind.

Age means insight, intuition, masterful judgment and correct calibrations.
In the well-known prayer, we request the ability to “change the things we can change and to accept the things we can’t change “and for the wisdom to know the difference.” This is not just a question of “picking our battles” and learning not to “tilt at windmills” but of Self-Knowledge: knowing ourselves – deeply and thoroughly. What is possible for us? What’s a stretch – but a healthy stretch? We all know we need some taking “out of our comfort zone.” What will the “discomfort zone” feel like? We’re also familiar with the idea that once we make a resolution there’s a difficult period where the work we’re given feels hard, unfamiliar, even hopeless. “Wisdom” is knowing that period will have an end. “This too must pass” is the common phrase. Wisdom means we can begin to rely on ourselves: ”I always get discouraged at this point. By tomorrow I’ll feel better,” or “When I’m down in the dumps is not a good time to make a new plan. One foot in front of the other.” And tomorrow’s a new day. It always is.

Is acquired wisdom worth the loss of youthful energy, and its crazy optimism? The pursuit of the Soulmate tells us that it is. We seek one who shares our gift of vision; seeing forward and backwards.

Just as “folie a deux” is shared madness, so is shared wisdom. Someone makes a statement you know will hurt your partner, who answers intelligently but compassionately. Then you share A Look – they know you know their truth, and in that moment a delicious balm falls upon the soul. You are making love invisibly, souls touching in the eternal now, where you can bask in the others’ pure and total comprehension. A joy shared is multiplied, pain shared is an indescribable comfort and release. The incomprehensible is suddenly clear as day.

Dream

The window opens of its own accord.
He’s catapulted forward; waked.
Outside the walnut tree is hung with wolves
Each to its own branch; they watch him
Blankly. Stillness must have its
Consequence. They are fat
As sheep ready for castration; round
As dogs; white
As his mother’s underdrawers.
Such tails! Such thick tails
Perked up and listening!
Blue snow rumples into bedclothes; stiffens
Into plaster. The sky leads nowhere.
The child’s eyes are frozen like the window
They do not close; the tree
Is butchered at the crown; it will
Not grow.
The wind that frosts the room is welcome
Stirring like a scream and like a scream
It alters what it sees.
The wolves levitate.
What they know the child
Must discover.