"fastened to a dying animal"

Carl Jung points out that it is as neurotically unhealthy for us as we age to not confront and engage death as it is for younger folk to not confront and engage life. In younger years we spew our sperm and release our eggs at the physical, social, and psychic levels and nurture our progeny. In later years, we face our dissolution (we are dissolving) and realize as Yeats said that we are "fastened to a dying animal."

In this age of scientific materialism and ratio-nal consciousness, with all that is not picked up by the physical senses viewed as nonexistent hogwash, one is expected to simply be stoic and of reasonably good humor about this. One assumes the yogic position of bending around and kissing one's butt goodbye. And that's that.

I can see the value in that kind of attitude but as I age (73 now) see that yogic stance as an abortive process. Something is being born here, here in these geezer years.

I have always been a phenomenologist, accepting and owning my experience rather than some societal creed, or being swept away by the latest fashion of ratio-emotional logic. My geezer experience is that I feel like an egg in an incubation chamber, like a philosopher's stone in an alchemical furnace.

I find dying to be an amazing process. (Make no mistake about it. If you are over 50, you are dying.) I watch myself dissolve. It is a great adventure, perhaps the greatest of all. I am a seed in the ground of existence/nonexistence, a ground far beyond Wall Street and WalMart, preparing to die as all seeds must in order to be born.