The Decline of My So-called life - a meandering...

The other day I got up as usual and did the usual morning routine
with my sister - I'm her caregiver...

I went upstairs to post a blog post - and needed to prepare
several photos for posting.

I sat in front of the computer, just staring at the screen,
not knowing what to do...

I had totally forgotten how to prepare a photo -
what the steps were.

I sat several minutes, blank, until I started to *try* to
 figure it out again...

I couldn't make my mind work!

I tried different things on the computer
until I began to recognize the steps...

It was a shock to me that my mind could do this! -
could go totally blank on something I've done
for 15 years!

I'll be honest, no amount of "spiritual practice" can

prepare you for the sudden, startling awareness of
your mind's (and body's ) decline -
"spirituality" will not save you
from the natural order of life and death...

It starts off slowly - forgetting this or that,
a memory here, a word or name there;
where you put this or that thing, finding it
eventually, but not in its usual place...

Nothing can prepare you for the frustration of
your decline...

When your legs don't want to work-
and you stumble and bumble across the floor;
Thoughts of wheelchair enter your mind -
or having to move to a one level home -
even worse - assisted living...

My once "got it all together", 
"I'm on top of things" life
is falling apart,
a little at a time -
has been for several years.

Then suddenly there's a cliff - and
Humpty Dumpty starts falling off the wall.
What's worse is I'm aware of it - and know

that: all the king's horses and all the king's men
will not be able to put "me" together again...

And so I breathe,
and try to remember 
that there is a Deeper Reality
beyond my experience,
and try to rest there...

But I wonder if I will forget that too...

Mystic Meandering
Dec. 8, 2024

At least I can still write -
writing is my "therapy"
when falling apart :)
although the poetry
doesn't emerge 
like it used to...

 

Ceaselessly Being Written - Wendell Berry

We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from,
though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a
distant shine like that of a house window at night on the far side
of the valley, perhaps what some have called "the inner light," to
guide us when finally we have been jolted awake.  And so we 
don't come from nothing.  But once here we don't know where we
are.  At first I learned the world as a book written, completed the
day before my birth, not to be changed by another pen stroke. 
And then I saw that some I know were departing from it, never
to return, and new strangers were arriving.  The newcomers, if
they stayed, would learn more of less of where they were.  And
then, in time, they too would depart, taking with them the sum
of all they had learned, leaving behind them maybe a few who
would remember them, and then the rememberers too would go 
and be gone.  I see in this order of things, nothing to complain
about.  I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of 
the wheel.  I see that we are passing through this world like a
river of water flowing through a river of earth.  A far cry from a
written book, the world - to extend my desperate metaphor - is
a book ceaselessly being written, and not in a human language.
This too has not been submitted to our judgment, and it is not
for us to regret.  To give thanks seems truly to be the right
response, for as we come and go we learn something of love,
the gift and the giving of it, if we accept it...

That is the heart speaking in the heart's language, and out of
a mystery so vast that order and chance may be reconciled
within it.  Because, for all we surely know, we come into our
times and places as much at random as leaves falling...

Wendell Berry

from How it Went - Thirteen more stories of
the Port William membership

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo -Mystic Meandering