Last week I wrote of how I felt turning 65. Perhaps, the effect of aging — with its slow, persistent inevitable pull of my body into dark earth — tempered the message too much with gravity.
Despite being philosophical aware of the imminent cyclic nature of life, and the importance and acceptance of such, I allowed myself the pleasure to wallow in the recognition of the temporal nature and ultimate demise of “this” body. It was, after all, my birthday.
Today I want to focus on the little stories that can mark and punctuate each day with levity and mirth, and, by so doing, keep us in life. Because, in truth, I dearly love those days when surprise and glee greet me, tickle me, make me smile.
At the core of life is levity, and the force of levity is stronger than the force of gravity. Rising is ultimately easier than falling, because all that is alive has an upward swing, and the strength is there in us, in the tendril of the pea shoot, thrusting for the sun, in the oceans, in life itself. This levity is not a shallow thing: rather, levity matters more and is more profound than gravity A joke is more important than a funeral wake, a comedy more serious and truer than tragedy.
Jay Griffiths, ‘Wild’
On Friday the small pantry off the kitchen provided two moments when bursts of joy permeated the mundane reality of existence.
Scrounging around while in the pantry to rustle up some lunch, I heard a real rustling unlike any I had ever heard before. Quite loud, in fact, and seemingly unafraid of my presence. After much searching, the noisy culprit was a very cheeky marsupial, full of temerity and courageous beyond it size. This Little Pygmy-possum was trying to make a nest in a cup wrapped in a plastic bag.
Who couldn’t laugh and find joy in such cuteness?
Also in the pantry was a covered stainless steel cooking pot half filled with chicken soup that I had intentionally left in place for several weeks as an experiment to see “what might happen”.
When I lifted the lid, I burst out laughing at the total ridiculousness of what I was seeing. How disgusting. How marvelous. What colours. What intriguing shapes. What a transformation.
On the one hand, death and waste; on the other, life in full chaotic beauty.
William Blake wrote about seeing the world in a grain of sand. In a pot of chicken soup I saw the universe.
What falls does rise and rise it must: the monk, cycling on ice, falls off laughing and gets to his feet again. The clown falls over and the children know they can laugh because he can bounce back up. We’re all cycling on ice: and we must get up again because life and time are pedalling on, cyclic, and therefore so are we. The shaman goes deep down to the undermind and comes back up again. The philosophy of compost is the same, in its eternal risorgimento against the very idea of “waste.” The force of this is feral, wild and tougher than any tragedy. The seed will explode the husk; spring will wrestle with winter and will win every time. (“For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.”) At the core of the dead and rotting apple is what? The pip. Tiny piece of pure braggadocio. I will survive. I make trees ‘n’ time. Ha!
Jay Griffiths, ‘Wild’
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