Wisdom and the Women who have Gone On Ahead

The following was kindled by the writings of Stephen Jenkinson and his book, Come of Age, and by women I have known: the quiet courage of my own mother, three aunts, friends, Connie, Ginny, Dixie, and all those, regardless of gender, who have left this world enriched, and those who are yet living before us, aging graciously, purposefully, willingly, unconscious witnesses, unassuming mentors, true elders.

Wisdom and the Women who have Gone On Ahead

I was happy when she said to me, “Do not trouble yourself
with all those personal growth pamphlets.” You see, she’d seen
I was feeling quite inadequate, a feeling, I should add, that arrived
when everyone around, it seemed, was signing up for those courses.
She said other things too, like, “Trade your assurance,
(and by this I think she meant my clutched-to salvation)
for sorrow and sanity and the late coming chance of
getting it right.” And while I didn’t immediately understand,
I did find a kind of comfort in it, like the comfort I found
watching the last decade or so of Leonard Cohen’s life,
that dark saint of surrender. A man who stood so long,
with so much grace and discipline, at two minutes to midnight
that you can find him there still, even now, after he’s gone.
It’s a posture I now recognize in some others, I’d call elders,
this living before, nothing orchestrated, choreographed,
only simple honesty about limits and endings, this deepening
through diminishment and a willingness to mysteriously
slip away at some appointed hour. Not unlike well-aged wine,
spilled for us, “Take and drink,” she said, “for your sustenance.”
He spoke to me once, Leonard Cohen I mean, it was in a dream
and he said, “Why do you hang on to your one outrageous gift
as though it wasn’t given, as though its limits, its end, is not part of
what gives it meaning, depth, as though its end is not itself a gift?”
and when I awoke I felt I could settle into the dust and dry leaves,
the harrowing and winnowing, the bewilderment and uncertainty
of aging, with a sort of freeing courage, and I thought, yes,
this is what she meant,
and I raced back to tell her,
and found that she had quietly met her hour —
found her quietly gathered into wakefulness.