Do you have any wisdom for me?

“Do you have any wisdom for me?” Jasper asked as we took down the pea trellis, with a few brittle dead vines still coiled around it. He’s part of a landscape crew who, on his off days, is “on loan” to me.

He’d just moved some of the spent raspberry plants to the east fence.

I’d just clipped every red, pink and green tomato off the trellis in another bed, yielding two full buckets which I later carried up to my kitchen to be sorted and either allowed to ripen or turned into relish.

We’d been chatting about our lives, each curious in equal measure about the other.

Putting the garden to bed each year, now a ritual for over 50 years, has a bittersweet flavor. The lush jungle had withered in the chill of October. A few immature cucumbers and zucchini still clinging to plants now done with bringing these last fruit to term. The kiwi leaves on the back fence are brown. The asters are dying back, while the dahlias blooming still as if freezing temperatures weren’t due in a week or two.

With my first garden, I grieved when the first frost turned all the tomato leaves black, as if a plague had come through. Now, I understand the seasons. I’m less amazed when seeds sprout, less surprised when some transplants don’t take and much less sad on days like this one with Jasper. I now hire young people to do the heavy digging, lifting and bending - but I still garden.

With a lovely maturity, Jasper always asks how my week had been before I even get to ask him the same. Within months he’ll take off for Europe with his girlfriend for a great adventure. I’d done the same at his age, the future wide open and a certainty that nothing that bad could happen.

Then he asks me for my wisdom.

Do I even have specific wisdom, not just general perspective, and a well composted life? Do I have wisdom that, when spoken, doesn’t sound like platitudes or pretension or a 4-point plan?

I recall a poem I wrote as I emerged from a season of self-examination that may have helped cure my cancer. For a year I’d lived in deep waters. Now I was coming to the surface, like a diver, heading for the light, for the everyday terrestrial world.

Lessons

August 18, 2004

Surely
For all the anguish
There is a gift
Surely
For all the insult
To tender cells and self
There is some wisdom
Surely
For all the knives and poisons
Some trace of words should stay
Some reminder to the well
Of what the ill can tell
Surely
There’s something more than
Brush your teeth
Take your pills
Say your prayers
Touch your toes
Surely
This valley of the shadow of death
Has more truth in it than
Eat your vegetables
Chew well
Don’t overdo
Surely
Having stood on the edge of the abyss
Having borne the howling winds
Tattering my life, silencing my plans
Some whisper will come to stay the willful one
Now returning to claim her throne.
What can I say to her
This Queen of Heaven
About the Hell she’ll soon forget?
What will draw her glance and slow her step
As she catches the scent again of
New lands and new quests?
Will she listen if I say…
“This too shall pass”
If I say…
“In the end all that counts is
receiving and giving
and kindness
and reverence
and gently touching this sacred thing called
living.”
Will she – big, bold, beautiful – turn her head if I whisper,
“Cherish,”
If I say
“Breathe”
If I invite her to pause
Lay down her glorious crown
Take off her wing-ed shoes
Feel the cool grass
And hear the one-life’s
Sweet melodies
like angels singing
Like angels singing?
Surely she will.
Surely.
She will.

Cherish. Breathe. Brush your teeth. Touch your toes. No, not that.

I took the honor of Jasper’s question to heart.

Older people, like me, sometimes ache to offer their life experience to younger people. Rarely, unless you are Jane Goodall or Joanna Macy, do you get asked for wisdom with any frequency. Too often we try to insert our thoughts into the wrong pauses in conversation, wanting to be seen. Sometimes, people like me, writers, will start a blog to spin wisdom out of the shorn fleece of our lives. Sometimes readers take it to heart, whether they respond or not.

Thinking back to the choices I’d made, I saw how, in that time in my 20s of swinging wildly, untamed by specific ambition, I’d made a fateful choice of letting go of my wonderful husband and bonding with a man who shaped me from then to now. We clashed; he brilliant, impatient, controlling, entitled… and me brilliant, inventive, creative, and a generalist. Yet he was addicted to sex and I was a romantic - I never stopped loving him, he never stopped seducing other women and insisting I be fine with it. I couldn’t leave, even though I sometimes longed to. Eventually, I saw that he’d become the compelling central man in a cult of the people he’d drawn to him. And cults are hard to leave - or stay in.

He’s become like the father I never had, though he taught me like a son, or a gang member, rather than a daughter or equal. He’d been raised in Harlem with an absent father and a timid mother who didn’t speak English. He didn’t trust women, but he relied on my intelligence and capacity as he built the life he wanted. And I wanted all the competencies he taught. I learned engineering, mechanics, design, business acumen, critical thinking, systems analysis, single-focus and an instinct for survival. No one I knew was as smart, exciting nor radical. He did not reciprocate, in that he never plumbed my real depths, but eventually I found my way back to myself. And in the last half of our time before he died, we taught and wrote Your Money or Your Life. Two million copies. Perennial best seller. Empowering hundreds of thousand of people to step out of conformity and into lives they loved. That would not have happened if these two opposites hadn’t been flint to one another, making fire.

I’ve come to peace with all of it now.

Coming of aging has required facing all the ghosts of my past, plus all the glories, tainted by vanity but still, all good, all metabolized into wisdom. I’ve freed myself from my past in the sense that it’s all clear and available to me, all beautiful and human and, for better or worse, mine. This is the wisdom of my years, the alchemy of turning, finally, my choices into gold.

I said to Jasper, “Be aware that the choices you make now will set you on the path of your life. Be aware, not wary, that what you say yes to will be what you live with. That’s not to say be cautious. It’s to say to choose, fully knowing that choice becomes destiny. All choices have consequences. That’s the nature of life. Embrace consequences, even if you can’t see them in the moment, and your life will teach you.”

I also gave him a piece of wisdom I picked up early on from Robert deRopp’s The Master Game: “Enter the silence as often as possible. Stay there as long as possible.” This guides me still, in meditation, in wrapping words around the wordlessness within. I sit here, beholding through a huge glass door the great Northwest conifers, the calm waters of the inland passage east of my island, the North Cascades in the distance and an exquisitely changing sky. I crave nothing, as in the nothing of a quiet mind, of silence.

This was not practical advice, not like the older man said to Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate: “Plastics. That’s the future.”

No, Jasper, choices and consequences are your future as they are for all of us. In this “fact of life,’ we join with everyone, and every thing and every civilization that’s ever lived - and died.

I’ve been shaped by everything, and now, at 80, I cherish it all. I can’t wish any part of life away, because then, it would not be my life. I used to say, “We’re Gods eyes and ears on the scene.” The eternal tastes delicious mortality through us. Only through mortality do we feel, and do we learn. Even in really hard times, I’d say, “Here, God, taste this misery.”

I’d have no wisdom to share with Jasper had I not embraced this very life, not the one I might have had. Perhaps my words will bob to the surface for him from time to time when he wonders why he did this instead of that. It’s the Master Game.

“The Way It Is” by William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.