VII
While I am reasonably sure that most of us do not tell the ones we love just how much we love them often enough, I am absolutely sure that is true in my case. Don’t get me wrong, I say those words to my children and wife every day — often several times — and to my parents each time I see them or speak with them on the phone. But is that enough? I wonder.
Among the things I love about Wendell Berry’s poem, two stand out. One is the insight and courage to name the reality of getting older, which is simply that we do not feel like we are getting older. Old, a friend once said, is always about fifteen years older than you currently are. There is no accurate measure of time, at least as we experience it, just as there is no precise way to explain clouds. Science and even art fail to capture our sense of these things, and time regularly proves in our experience to be simultaneously fleeting and eternal.
Which is where our relationships and love come in, which is the second thing I value about this poem. Amid the vagaries of time and our failure to understand or explain so much of our life, stand our relationships. And these relationships of shared love, themselves perhaps the only anchor for lives caught in the fleeting and eternal currents of time, when noticed and then cherished prompt the only fit response: wonder and gratitude. In this regard, I find the last lines of Berry’s poem poignant and piercing and believe I could say the same words to my wife as well. And maybe today, though still not fit expression, I will.
VII
I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.
Wendell Berry, VII [2005], from, This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979 – 2012
Post image: “Rain Clouds over Oregon Desert,” Childe Hassam, 1908.
This reflection touched me deeply as I am can see in the mirror that I am aging, but I feel just about 35 in my mind and soul. Aging seems to be necessary for the human to let go and accept the decomposition of the body that comes with death. But then I reflect on the wonderful gift of decomposition and how amazing is that we become the dust from which we were formed. The star dust as well as the dirt on which we step while alive.
Death is not a punishment, but a necessity of the process of renewal. I believe that our souls are being recycled and we come back in a new body…but this is not something I’m hanging on in any way…