The Apprenticeship
The elderly man that used to wave from his garden as I drove by on my trips to town has been gone now for several years. His house is for sale for a second time and the grass has grown over his vegetable plot, a long rectangle of plowed earth that was lined with pink flowers in the summer.
I think of him whenever I pass his house and contemplate what poet David Whyte calls “the great disappearance,” how life seems endless and goes on day after day, until one day we find ourselves in a new place and the vanishing of the people we know, one after another, seems like a science fiction plot.
I’m impressed that the man worked in his garden till the end. I think about the words spoken by my friend Alex who died at home from cancer. “I’m dying, but I’m not dead yet,” she said the last time I saw her in a hospital bed in the middle of her living room. She faced her death inhabiting her body till her last breath, living life at the level she was able to and believing that her leaving would make room for someone else.
“As we grow older the internal conversation grows richer and richer, filled by absent friends, colleagues, and family members who gave a gift to you that you didn’t fully appreciate at the time, who are still living and experiencing life through your eyes and ears, and who are still speaking to you,” Whyte says.
I’m drawn to the pull of the internal conversation. I ponder the mysteries of life and death, knowing that an awareness of impermanence can make life feel all the more precious. But when I wake up more mornings than not with the looming knowledge that we are meant to lose everything we know and love, including our selves, I wonder if I’m not suffering from a low grade depression. Or is it a natural part of aging, or as Whyte calls it “apprenticing ourselves to our own great disappearance?”
The course study gets harder as we grow and the tests come more often. One day it seems unbelievable that people we love disappear, the next I’m in awe that we are here at all, and that, with all the ways there are to die, so many of us do make it to old age.
November 12th, 2012 6:12 pm
And then the time comes when we accept that we are just stardust allowed to shine now and again. Only starlight left, and maybe we eventually are forgotten. But what hubris to think we would be remembered, anyway?
November 12th, 2012 11:35 pm
Wow Colleen, what a powerful post. I’m speechless, but truly touched by your eloquent words.
November 13th, 2012 3:00 am
Yes, die to make room for someone else, some who leave others coming.
November 13th, 2012 4:08 am
Hello Colleen, your blog is rich with thoughts that will bring me back again and again, I think. I read the first 25 “things” about you. There are only 7 on my blog and number 6 is no longer true. I’ll leave a link to them in my next post as they were written close to 4 years ago, I think. I realized after reading your post that there is quite an “internal conversation” going on in my mind. Nice to be made aware of it. Thank you. The message in your photo made me smile. i wasn’t sure if it said, “Love Harper” (Canada’s Prime Minister, and unpopular with many, although I neither love nor hate him) or “Love Harder.” Perhaps, both are good 🙂
November 13th, 2012 11:37 am
Lovely and thoughtful post, thank you.
November 13th, 2012 3:51 pm
Indeed—Great food for thought, my dear Colleen. I often wonder what I am doing here—Why I am still here and that I actually made it to 81!
November 13th, 2012 4:13 pm
I came for Our World (cute little guys!) but had to comment here. Life and Death are the only 2 things we’ll definitely all experience on this Earth. And even those 2 things will be different for each of us. I try to live fully each day. At the end, I doubt I’ll wish I’d run the vacuum one last time.
November 13th, 2012 4:17 pm
PS per your100 things – definitely ink needs to be black!
November 14th, 2012 12:27 pm
important things to consider. thanks for putting it out there.