My Mama and Grande

Aging is an interesting thing.
I see my Grande outliving her desire to be here. I watch her as her body becomes frail, halting and withered. She laughs and tells me, "Getting old is a bitch". She is ready to leave, but can't quite find the exit. I watch my once spry Mama creak and crack as she slowly rises from bed, taking longer than usual to make it to her once impressive stature. I watch time change her face and hands. I look into the mirror and see the furrowing of lines across my forehead and the crinkled edges of my eyes.
Aging is an interesting thing.
You can watch it happening and still feel so disconnected from the whole process. I see women rage against time with undaunted gusto... botox, implants, lifts, tucks, peels and products. Groping desperately for a face remembered in the mirror of an eighteen-year-old many years ago...And yet, age is also beautiful in the same way that a canyon worn from years of trickling streams is beautiful, in the way that the sandy shore is beautiful, whispering of ebbs and flows too distant to be remembered. I see that too, in the lines that grace my once smooth skin and the wrinkled face of my Grande' Cia.
Age is beautiful too.

Comments

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

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angelbirdflies

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