The Other Birthday Essay

Schist at the Cliff Walk on Prout's Neck, Maine

Sept. 2021

I originally posted this on Facebook Oct. 1 2021.

It’s my 66th birthday today.

Thanks in retrospect — and in advance, for it is early in the day — for all of the birthday wishes, for which I am very grateful. Without you friends, and my relationships with you near and far, old and new, life would have nothing worth being here for.

I’ve been busy with the ordinary things of life for the last month or so, and had little time to post on Facebook. That is to say, more honestly, that there was plenty of time to post on Facebook, but I had other priorities. 

At the same time, I’ve been engaged in a little project that I think I will post on Facebook, a travelogue about our recent trip to Maine.  It began with a single introductory essay which I enjoyed writing, so I thought I would continue, and it has expanded into an extended rumination about not just Maine, but the process of living. I’m not quite ready to post it yet, but I’ll get there.

The process of living is of perpetual interest me. We’re like solar systems inside; over the course of a lifetime, the dust cloud of impressions we take in coalesces into planets as the gravity of the different things that happen to us attracts the material of our life. In the process, we form an inner solar system. Some of the planets we form in ourselves are cold and distant from the center; they lack compassion. Others become enormous but have atmospheres that are hostile — this is our negativity, which can come in many different flavors. 

One of them, the inner earth, gives birth to life which evolves and eventually produces an environment of extraordinary beauty and complexity. This planet is our inner soul. And then, of course, there is a sun inside of us which gives light to everything. Sometimes that sun is faint; at other times it is brilliant, because its light is erratic and the energy it emits isn’t always consistent.

Yet there’s more than one sun that can illuminate our inner life. The dawn of a new light and a new sun can fill us. That new sun has a unique gravity and is capable of things that exceed our own knowledge and the knowledge of our sciences. It exceeds, in fact, everything that man is, just as our ordinary sun in the physical world does. 

I’ve been reading a book on the geology of the earth, centered around North America, called The Way the Mountains Grew, by John Dvorak. It’s a very good book, but a bit technical and perhaps best suited for those with a real fascination for geology and the biology of evolution, which plays a significant supporting role due to its presence in the fossil record. I think the main point the book brings across (which I don’t think the author was aiming at, actually) is the enormous amount of work, struggle, effort, and suffering that this planet has gone through during the course of its being. 

We walk across the rocks and stones of our landscape taking them for granted; we take nature as it is for granted. The immensity of what it took to put everything here as it is is rarely, if ever, a thought in our minds. Yet the processes are complex and astonishing, the results unexpected and infinitely complicated. The very fact that you can sit here and read this is highly dependent upon the physics, chemistry, geology, and billions-of-years-old timeline that has already taken place.

What forms in us is equally so. There is a geology of being in us. That gives rise to our essence, our personality, the soul. We engage in equally momentous processes in the formation of who we are; the analogies are extensive.

We are part of something much larger than anything we can understand with our minds.

Life flows into us; and in itself it is a force of mystery which we participate in most of the time without a second thought. But, if for just a moment we become more alive, if we sense the vibration of this strange and beautiful life of ours in the molecules of our being, one sometimes catches a whiff, experience a fleeting taste, of how unusual and inexplicable all of these processes are. As one grows older, this becomes more possible. 

So while age brings its own new forms of suffering in terms of the gradual deterioration of the body, the aches and pains of arthritis and all the ordinary complaints which people in their later 60s tend to share with one another, greater glories also arise. A new light dawns within being; understanding deepens, and a sense of reverence for this process of being expands through the cracks that appear in the assumptions that personality plasters itself with in its efforts to pretend that the house is already whole as it is.

These are my thoughts for this morning.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.