Scenes from the Journey -- Gardens Vol22,#15 Sunday July 27/25

Subject: Scenes from the Journey -- Gardens Vol22,#15

 Gardens

My own barely counts as one. Voltaire might be appalled that this is the best that comes when I tend my own garden. Perhaps (I can only hope) he wasn't being literal. He didn't mean my timid raised bed with limited sun, sown with last year's seeds then poorly thinned, with the result of a total crop of one mess of salad greens and enough green beans for a light lunch for two. Hardly worth the water it took to irrigate them through the summer.

It's time to face the sad truth: my garden is elsewhere. Not physical, not earth-bound, and certainly not in my own back yard.

Each garden has its own delights, only some of them earthly. Other people's gardens are just like other people: each one different. The yield from my backyard garden is scant. But you should see what's growing in my elsewhere garden.

Copyright (c) 2025 Ann Tudor

Virus-free.www.avg.com

One Rickety Answer; Scenes from the Journey, vol. 22, no. 14

Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2025 at 10:21:42 a.m. EDT

Subject: Fwd: One Rickety Answer; Scenes from the Journey, vol. 22, no. 14

One Rickety Answer

Answers are a sham solution,
sought by the cocksure, by charlatans,
by those seeking to be on the winning side.
Let go of answers,
which are rickety at best,
contrived or duplicitous at their worst.

Let's hear it instead for questions and queries,
for expressions of doubt,
for open and inquiring minds.

Especially for the eternal questions,
there are no answers.
There are assertions of knowing,
pretensions of truth.
But not answers.
Ah, those eternal questions:
Why are we (am I) here?
What will come after?

Actually, those two are just about it.
Cogitate on these and you'll be busy
for the rest of your time.

Or don't cogitate at all.
Spend your time living it up,
taking adventurous leaps
into the wilderness.
Just be.

Fw: Once and for All plus Book List for June 2025 (attached)

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: ann turner <annpturner@gmail.com>

To: deantudor@yahoo.com <deantudor@yahoo.com>

Cc: Ann Tudor <atudor1958@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2025 at 01:00:44 p.m. EDT

Subject: Re: Fw: Once and for All plus Book List for June 2025 (attached)

Haha, thanks!

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025 at 11:25 AM deantudor@yahoo.com <deantudor@yahoo.com> wrote:

To: ann Tudor <atudor@pathcom.com>

Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2025 at 11:21:47 a.m. EDT

Subject: Once and for All plus Book List for June 2025 (attached)

Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2025 at 10:54:16 a.m. EDT

Subject: text musings

Once and for All

Once and for all let's deal with this question of age, of being old, 
becoming old. I was with a group of friends recently; our ages ranged 
from 91 to maybe 65. That youngster of 65 had many things to talk 
about besides age, but the rest of us? No matter where our sentence 
started we ended up back at that irresistible topic of what it is like 
to be as old as we are.

So many permutations: what does it feel like? How does the world react 
to your oldness? Analyze the issue from the viewpoint of physical, 
mental, emotional, and spiritual changes.

That's a lot of territory to cover in one little lunch party. Here's 
the thing. It's all new. Wandering into this new land (not 
voluntarily, I might add) separates us from everything else. I guess I 
was more prescient than I knew when I wrote "Hesitating at the Gate" 
and described (from my relatively young 70 years then) the border 
between the Land of Old and the rest of life.

The hardest stumbling block is that things don't get better. Every 
physical insult that befalls you becomes the new normal you. Things 
don't get healed, you just get inured to them and accept them as a 
part of life.

I remember a time (at 70) when I bemoaned the loss of words. I don't 
talk about it as much now because the loss is on such a large scale, 
so all-encompassing, that I can if I wish spend hours fretting over 
the difficulty of finding a word I knew perfectly well in the previous 
moment.  The only thing to do is let go. Let go of your need for the 
word or phrase or idea. Maybe it will come to you some other time. 
This morning at 7 I lost and could not retrieve the name of the 
daughter of a friend. I knew it began with C and had an O in it, but 
Cordelia was all I came up with and that wasn't right. Just a few 
sentences ago it came to me: Courtney. Blessings on you and all of us, 
Courtney.

We inspire fear in the younger ones, I'm sure. Our children vacillate 
between seeing us as immortal and all-powerful ("Mom, you will never 
die") and dreading the day when we lose yet another of our important 
faculties and become the dreaded thing: a burden. The one approach is 
simply denial, the other is a form of catastrophizing.

Not to mention the physical changes that frighten off the young: 
wrinkles, thin and wispy hair, bent and limping legs, groans upon 
rising from a chair, thinning arms with pleated flesh that dangles, 
ears that grow impossibly large, noses that become the focal point of 
the face. No wonder they ask: where is my dear little grandmother?

As usual, I've wandered off the original topic as I imagined it and 
have reduced the whole issue to a catalog of superficial ills. Not 
what I wanted. What I was trying to convey was how very separated we 
become, as old people, from everyone else. Our issues are not 
comprehensible. Blame enters the picture: if she'd done the Wordle 
puzzle every day she wouldn't be dealing with dementia now. If she'd 
walked every single day the way we told her to, her legs would still 
work.

Here I am at the end, still a long distance away from any final word. 
But I'm done for the day.