Dear Friends,

It’s been a little while since our last newsletter. Did you miss me?

Some of my time in recent weeks has been spent working on a new edition of my book Buddha’s Nature. You’ll hear more about that later this year.

Meanwhile, aging has been on my mind lately and I often find myself engaged with friends in a conversation that I call “geezing.” It starts with an innocent greeting, such as “How are you?” When we were younger, the answer was usually, “Fine, how are you?” Lately however, with friends of a certain age, I find that the question will open into an extended discourse about health and aging, reminiscent of the classic Buddhist reflection on the 32 parts of the body – a report on the liver, lungs, joints, muscles, kidneys, heart – a conversation sometimes known as “the organ recital.”

Geezing can be about any part or function of the body. So, for instance, I notice that I’m not as steady on my feet as I used to be. While I’m not actually stumbling, I am wobbling a little. What should I have expected? I’ve been carrying this over-sized head around on two thin legs for over seven decades now. It’s a balancing act, and gravity is beginning to win. I am homo erectus, looking for a place to lie down for a while…

But geezing is not just about physical infirmities. There are mental ones as well. At one geezing gathering, after cursing our loss of memory, a few of us came up with a memory game. It’s probably a good brain exercise, and also offers a dharma teaching — revealing the impermanence of cultures and beliefs and how much we are defined by our moment in history. I made a list of some of our memories. We start every line with the phrase “I’m so old I remember…”

I’m so old I remember when “a million” was a very big number.
I’m so old I remember when people used to drive around in their cars for fun. It was called “going for a ride.”
I’m so old I remember the 1900s.
I’m so old I remember when the TV channels stopped broadcasting at about 10PM every night, leaving us to sit around and watch our radios.
I’m so old I remember… what’s his name? The star of the movie? The book author? My aunt?

Recently, during a session of geezing I looked around at my friends and realized that the map of their faces had become topographic, the wrinkles sculpted into the masks they wear: the eye edges crinkled from decades of smiles and squints; the worry canyons etched into a forehead; the pensive valleys around a mouth, disappearing into the growing folds of the neck skin. It was as if their personalities had emerged onto their faces.By the way, speaking of the exposed epidermis, I finally figured out why we get those little age spots that appear on our skin as we grow older: It is simply nature’s way of marking us as part of the next group to be taken. Yikes!

In recent sessions of geezing I find myself trying to put a positive spin on aging. Look at it this way: You wouldn’t want to be facing death with a youthful mind and body now, would you? Think of all the fun you could still have! But aging forces you to give it up, piece by piece. And when there is hardly any energy left in the body, and it hurts here and it hurts there, and your definition of fun is a long nap, then you might consider death as not so terrible. It all fits together. We bow in gratitude for it all, including aging and death.

So enjoy the rest of the newsletter and as always if you don’t like the news go out and make some of your own!

Love,

Wes

PS: Don’t miss this classic from the archives. It’s just what we need. Another Summer of Love.