Love and Age Shame

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Not age itself. We don’t actually need protection from age. Our changing bodies beautifully express the nature of all creation: change. Constant change. We don’t look 20 or 30 anymore because that is a particular and beautiful state of being. As is 40 and 60 and 80. Love allows us to feel the wonder of exactly this cosmic mystery, expressed and felt within this body. Every shiver. Every movement. Every wrinkle. Every soft curve. Ourselves, transforming.

What love does, is protect us from age shame. From our society’s pathological obsession with youthfulness. The imperative to keep every tree a sapling, every dog a puppy, every human in an unblemished, smooth, young-looking container, with fear and loathing for anything that hints at our mortality, our ability to shift gently into softening, moving earthward, slow and graceful dissolution of this flesh in harmony with all that lives in this natural world.

Age shame is shame of our organic nature. Rejection of our belonging within Eros, with the Goddess and the old gods, with the animating principle of the universe. With Life, which pulses and shifts in all realms and never holds one shape for more than a moment.

Love allows us to feel all of this deeply. To touch the courage and exquisite tenderness of loving, knowing everything we love, we will inevitably lose.

Then touch, with reverence and love, the extraordinary temple that is the evolving body of your Beloved. Breathe slowly and touch, with endless love, your own body in all the mystery and magic it holds in this moment.

Image by Jade Twilite Beall from her latest book “The Crone Body.”