Young by Heart, Not Years

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”― George Eliot, Middlemarch

What Can I Say by Mary Oliver

“What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.”

Old, young, in-between
Fast, slow, stop
More slow for awe
Less doing for being
Rapt attention and reverence
To hear the song in the leaf
Rock solid in patience of unfolding and becoming
In the flow and current of life
Young by heart, not years
Embracing joy, wonder, delight

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore