Half Awake

We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream
barely touching the ground
our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.

~ Stephen Levine ~

(Breaking the Drought)

What can the heart abide?

One thing I am seeing as I get together with my senior friends, is the importance of friendship, love and activity in our later lives.   Friday, F said with a nod, "You've got to be tough to grow old."  Yes, but is there more...?   This was followed by a short silence and someone answered, "And say a prayer of thanks in the morning for every day given you."  We dropped our knitting into our bags, rose from our chairs and hugging one another, parted for another week, or more. 

There are those in the group who are quite willing to share some feelings, but I must admit, as a group, it is difficult and rare for us to share much at an emotional level.  By the late seventies and eighties we have a layer of the cultural restraints of our age, and also the reluctance to allow ourselves to feel--we have hurt too often.

Steven Levine's work casts a light on why we are the way we are and what we can do to help ourselves:  As he says in the above poem, "when the fever breaks".

 Born in 1937, Levine has immersed himself in almost all the religions including sufism, Christianity, Buddhism and others.  In other words, he is an inclusionist, which is where I find myself.  To quote Goethe, "What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us,"  and here, I believe we can use the older meaning of 'genius' as one's most basic personhood. Goethe continues, "the greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources."  "Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things."  So much for Michelle Bachman's recent remark that "let's get rid of the gray."  It is the openness and inclusion of other people, thoughts and experiences that allow us to work through these later years with a positive, healthy attitude.

Without this, as we age,  Levine says, "Our ordinary, everyday grief accumulates as a response to the 'burdens of disappointments and disillusionment, the loss of trust and confidence that follows the increasingly less satisfactory arch of our lives. In order to avoid feeling this grief we "armour our hearts," which leads to a gradual deadening of our experience of the world."   A Half Life or a life?