On Age and Beauty

Loving our aging, with reverence for our bodies in every change, daily and over time… is loving our evolution. Truly unconditional love, by us, for us. For ourselves and all others ,in all the varied ways they present over time, in these resilient, fragile, and changing bodies.

Age shame is a cancer in our society. It is a spiritual and emotional toxin that we swallow whole, day after day from early childhood. It metastasizes into fear of our own physiology: twenty- and thirty-year olds anxiously searching for the first sign of wrinkles or hair loss; young mothers hating the changes in their bodies after birthing babies. Surgical alterations of our bodies to lift, tuck, erase, and deny — at the cost of our beautiful, exquisite sensitivity as we deliberately create scars and numbness all along the way. Pathological fear of menopause. Extreme fixation on intercourse as the only acceptable gold standard for sexual connection — requiring instant and youthful genital responses  — and suppression of all other forms of erotic play as non-normative, weird, dangerous, or some kind of sad consolation prize. Pathological fear of erectile variability. Collective denial and silencing about naming and acknowledging our actual ages as we would any other truth about our bodies. Relational damage: grandparents insisting they be called by their first name rather than acknowledge generational expansion of their relational role… the list goes on.

The medicine is not just in accepting aging. Not just unlearning all the ways we find ourselves apologizing for still being alive after 40, 50, 60 and beyond.

It is making the full radical pivot to LOVING aging.
Aging is our birthright as much as is youth, pleasure, love, s e x, community, and joy. It is not a disease or a problem. It is a gift. It allows us to experience ourselves anew: to discover today, who we can be, who we have been. To discover the one who asks the question: who is feeling these changes, this aging? This deeply individual and yet utterly universal experience?

Loving aging is loving our belonging in this alive world of changes, cycles, and impermanence. Loving being mystery and change itself: ancient tree, sweet elder dog, millennium old mountains, unfathomably deep sea bed.

What could be more beautiful than that?