80 and a day, Oh My!

Be-coming aging

Here’s what I know about being 80.

Nothing. I was just born into this decade this morning at 1 AM.

Here’s what I suspect about my 8th decade.

While the body needs more attention, and the mind might slip a few more gears, the soul breathes a sigh of relief that it has more of my attention. I think “coming of aging” is the work of transitioning from middle, busy and of the world decades, to my last years (weeks? decades? minutes?) with an ear cocked for mysteries hidden from younger eyes.

When I was in my 20s and visiting ecstatic realms through psychedelics, I shaped my life to mirror what I saw on those journeys. I was very wet behind the ears, like a toddler learning to walk in adulthood. I was idealistic by nature, reinforced by these visions of pure love and trust. So I stumbled around psychologically, got myself in over my head again and again, and got up again eager to learn and grow.

We (the group that shared this journey) and I were determined to shed our egos. Get it. Using the will to wrangle with the ego is like walking into fly-paper.

We were living in a beach bungalow in Mexico, 10 miles via a sand road from the nearest electricit. Only our 4-WD Landcruiser and the Coca-Cola truck could navigate it. We were on the edge of a fishing village that had only one generator which ran the masa machine for their daily ration of tortillas cooked on a clay wood stove. I learned to make tortillas by hand from a young wife who kept getting pregnant and didn’t know how that happened - and didn’t want to. I gave her a lecture on birth control, and she told me that in the village women did this - not very effectively - by standing with their backs to the ocean on full moon nights and spitting over their shoulders.

There was one treadle sewing machine in the village, and by chance I knew how to use it. The women all gathered around when I sat down to it, saying, “A ver si sabe patear.” Which I did so I earned their trust. There was a full solar eclipse coming and one of our group proceeded to explain it to the woman’s husband, using a grapefruit for the sun and an orange for the earth and a lime for the moon. They thought he was nuts. Everyone knew the earth was flat.

We only had weekly contact with the outside world when we went for supplies in Acapulco. Determined to leave the “straight” world behind, we combined our scant collective knowledge of consciousness and invented our own language for our inklings of live beyond the ego. Every night we’d circle up to try to access “the voice within” and pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps. To say it was heady is an understatement.

The ego, however, was ferocious and sneaky, so our philosophy was tainted by our inexperience.

Oh dear. Why am I telling you about this? Oh, I’m 80 and starting to reminisce.

My prayers for my 80’s

I want to lay a table for myself for this time in my life.

May I listen ever more deeply for those soul whispers about why I am here in this tragic/comic time in the declining decades of Western Civilization. May I hospice the systems and all who are trapped in them

May I enter the silence as often as possible and stay there as long as possible. I stole this from Robert DeRopp’s The Master Game, which we read in Mexico and tried to live. Ooops, no more Mexico stories.

May I laugh a lot. Remembering now how I found and sang this song in those early years. “I used to laugh a lot, that’s why my face is wrinkled that’s why my teeth are chipped by sandy winds…”

May I be of some use. I’ve had a series of dreams recently, all asking me to consider what my role is in these terrible times. I think my old Doña Quixote self wants me on the front lines but my wisdom-self says, cook food, be available as needed as an old lady. A snipped from a poem by Hafiz we read this morning in my writing group:

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon language,

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to Hear.

Given how this poem moved me, may I be more of a poet every day. Put down my lance, stop seeing every windmill as an enemy, go sane.

This is enough for my first morning of my 8th decade.

There will be more poems and stories soon, sprinkled with analysis of the topics I consider here.

Oh, one more recollection. From those early days I’ve carried around a piece of paper with a picture of a smiling old woman. The last sentence of the poem was: “and evaporate in pure joy”. Yes. That.