Passing Years? Deeper Living?

Here is a post first published in March last year. There is much in this which relates to the general theme which seems to be developing here over the past days.I think I’ve reached that point which children do when they are PLEASED to see the number of their birth years rise. So I’m slightly wanting my years of living be a larger number and it doesn’t make sense. No, it isn’t my day today and I’m not telling when that was/is, for security reasons. However I can say I’m living/will be living my 70th year through 2017/18.

I’ve an image in my mind of a measuring stick (once called yard sticks) held horizontally representing ‘a life’. It starts at Zero at one end and somewhere over to the other end, it’s all over. Thus caught in a time-line with accompanying past stories and future imaginings. The present takes care of itself. Or does it. Now, in my mind’s eye the yard stick pivots on its axis where time (now) and space (here) intersect. From horizontal time-line with stories and imaginings to vertical where there is an up and a down.

We talk about deepening ones training and that’s often puzzled me as to what exactly that might mean. I do know what it means and as best I can say it is a deeper more three-dimensional encounter with existence. The divide between self and others being less distinct somehow. We are not so dependent on past experience, although always influenced by the time line to define who we are.

Talking to a woman yesterday as we hiked in the Grizedale Forest in the Southern Lakes reignited this yardstick metaphor gently pivoting on its axis point. Ever in motion, dynamic AND anchored. We attempted to voice what that anchor was and looked/felt like. A pleasure for hearts to meet and words to give voice to that.

As when a child so when reaching a larger number of years, what one can and cannot do is significant, however that fades into the background. If one lets it.

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5 thoughts on “Passing Years? Deeper Living?”

  1. What a lovely post! I’m enjoying my seventieth year, too, and feel much the same way about the mounting numbers.

  2. “Life is a stocking,” grandma says,”And yours has just begun. But I am knitting the toe of mine, And my work is almost done.”

  3. returning to the countryside yet again, I can look back at younger me’s. Now it feels like sinking into the earth, into an eternal home. What I do here is just scenery, it is the earth and life itself that calls.

  4. Had my 77 th. birthday last Thursday and can only agree with all the foregoing including the comments.

    Sometimes the question arises, “How long have I got?” It is an absurd question. There is only now. One day at a time, eh? Circumstances constantly change.

    Norman

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