Barefoot Dancing

 

Remembering Twenty

“I wish I was twenty and in love with life/and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs! There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side/ the roses are blooming and finding their labor/ no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea/ shining like a song, like a body/ I want to touch.

Though I’m not twenty/ and won’t be again but ah! Seventy. And still/ in love with life. And still/ full of beans.”

Mary Oliver (“Self-Portrait,” from Red Bird, 2008; republished in Devotions, p. 117, Penguin Books, 2017)

          Mary Oliver speaks for me in this poem, “Self-Portrait.” When I was in graduate school at the age of 33, older than most of the other students, one of my professors, Fain Guthrie, told me he was “sixty-five on the outside and twenty-five on the inside.” It is an interesting phenomenon, I think—this business of aging.

I’m told by people who think they know what they’re talking about that there is no reason for aging, that it is only because we expect to age that we do. Perhaps, but when I look at nature, I see that everything is born, lives for a certain length of time, gradually loses strength and eventually dies. I don’t think trees only age because they expect to. Or squirrels. The normal cycle of life contains all things, including birth, aging, and death. Like the roses in Mary Oliver’s poem, we labor and bloom without adversity to the spirit.

          But there does seem to be a disconnect between who we are inside, and who we are on the outside. Not that inner change doesn’t happen. We hopefully increase in wisdom, even as we decrease in knowledge—not because we don’t know, but because we can’t remember what we know! I often hear myself saying, “I used to know the name for that.” And I did, and I still do, only it may take twenty-four hours for it to surface in my brain.

          I find too, that even though I no longer dance barefoot in the sand, I still watch with deep appreciation those who do. That twenty-year-old in me, still dances in her mind and sometimes in the house when no one is looking. I still enjoy flirting and acting young, even as I did at twenty. Only now it is done with generosity of affection, and not with the intention of conquest. I kind of like this way better.

          Unless one becomes bitter and resentful, old age is a time of sweet remembrance, and celebration of life. We don’t lose our beans; we just add a dollop of maple syrup and a pinch of cayenne to them.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane