Monday, July 30, 2012

Old Age Day by Day July 30, 2012

I have returned!  I am retreated and cabined and hopefully, with my head screwed on straight.  I had a beautiful retreat, which left me speechless and deeply calm.  I had the opposite experience immediately after, with chaos and lots of people and laughter and good food and swimming and hiking.  I love both, and the integration of the two worlds is my goal. 

My creative activity at the retreat was writing poems.  I wrote sixty three, in ten days of an hour a day.  I'm very pleased.  I'm going to type them up and send them to the other retreatants, as a kind of scrapbook of the retreat.  It felt wonderful to write poems, which is how I began writing, until I switched to prose.  In my old age, I'm loving poems again.

Here is one example:

Orchard Walk

Yesterday I wandered through the orchard
Looking at unripe fruit
miniture pears and apples
hard nuggets of their future
fleshy selves

I do like a crisp pear
but not rock hard
and I will not be here
when they ripen and fall
so I'm witnessing them on their way
to becoming
and the outcome can
only be imagined

Like my children
I watch changes
but maybe not fruition
for the younger ones
I may not see them marry
 have children
or fulfill their dreams

But I can easily imagine it

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