Old age can be a wonderful time to develop the art of inner harvesting. What does inner harvesting mean? Inner harvesting means that you actually begin to sift the fruits of your experience. You begin to group, select, and integrate them. One of the places where inner harvesting is most vital is in the abandoned areas within your life. Areas of inner neglect and abandonment cry out to you. They are urgent for harvest. Then they can come in out of the false exile of neglect and enter into the temple of belonging, the soul. This is particularly necessary in relation to the things that you have found difficult in your life, things to which you had great resistance. Above all, your inner wounds cry out for healing. There are two ways of doing this. You can do it in an analysis-driven way, where you go back to the wound and open it up again. You take off the protective healing skin that has grown around it. You make it sore, and you make it weep again. A lot of therapy reverses the process of healing. Maybe there is a less intrusive art of attention that you can bring to your wounds. For the soul has its own natural rhythm of healing. Consequently, many of your wounds are very well healed and should not be opened up again. If you want to, you could select a list of your wounds and spend the next thirty years opening them up until eventually you become like Job with your body a mass of sores. If you engage in this practice of woundology, you will turn your soul into a mass of weeping sores. Each of us has a wonderful but precarious freedom in relation to our inner life. We need, therefore, to treat ourselves with great tenderness.
Part of the wisdom of spiritual soulful self-presence is to be able to let certain aspects of your life alone. This is the art of spiritual noninterference. Yet other aspects of your life call urgently for your attention; they call to you as their shelterer to come and harvest them. You can discern where these wounds are in the temple of memory, then visit them in a gentle and mindful way. The one kind of creative presence you could bring to these areas is compassion. Some people can be very compassionate to others but are exceptionally harsh with themselves. One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit again the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging. This art of integration is very precious. You have to trust your deeper, inner voice to know which places you need to visit. This is not to be viewed in a quantitative way, but rather in a gentle, spiritual way. If you bring that kind light to your soul and to its wounded places, you can effect incredible inner healing.
TO KEEP SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR HEART
The soul is the natural shelter around your life. If, during your life, you have not continually scraped away this shelter, your soul will now gather around you to mind you. To approach your soul and memory with neon analysis can be very destructive, especially in the vulnerability of your old age. You should let your soul be natural. From this perspective old age can be a vulnerable time. Many people, as they age, get very worried and anxious. It is precisely when times are difficult and you are vulnerable that you really have to mind yourself. I love Blaise Pascal’s idea that in a difficult time, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart. Perhaps, as a poet said, it is beauty that will save us in the end.
How you view your future actually shapes it. In other words, expectation helps create the future. Many of our troubles do not belong to us. They are troubles we draw upon ourselves through our gloomy attitude. There is a friend of mine from Cork who lived near an old woman named Mary who had a notoriously negative and gloomy outlook on everything. She always had the “bad word.” A neighbor met her one beautiful May morning. The sun was shining, flowers were out, and nature looked as if it wanted to dance. He said to her, “God, isn’t it a beautiful morning, Mary.” She replied, “I know sure, but what about tomorrow?” She was not able to enjoy the actual presence of beauty around her because she was already troubled by how awful tomorrow was going to be. Troubles are not just constellations of the soul or consciousness; frequently, they actually assume a spirit form. Perhaps there are little crowds of miseries flying along through the air. Then they look down and see you gloomy and miserable. They imagine if they come down they might be able to lodge for a week or a few months or even a year. If you let your own natural shelter down, these miseries can come in and take up tenancy in different places in your mind. The longer you leave them there, the harder it will be to evict them in the end. Natural wisdom seems to suggest that the way you are toward your life is the way that your life will be toward you. To have an attitude that is compassionate and hopeful brings home to you the things you really need.
Old age is a time of second innocence. There is the first innocence when we are children; but that innocence is based on naive trust and ignorance. The second innocence comes later in your life, when you have lived deeply. You know the bleakness of life, you know its incredible capacity to disappoint and sometimes destroy. Yet notwithstanding that realistic recognition of life’s negative potential, you still maintain an outlook that is wholesome and hopeful and bright. That is a kind of second innocence. It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there. That light is innocent; it is not inexperienced but rather is innocent in its trust in the good and the true and the beautiful. Such a gaze from an old face is a kind of blessing. You feel good and wholesome in that kind of company.
THE BRIGHT FIELD
One of the most destructive negative attitudes toward one’s past or toward one’s memory is the attitude of regret. Often regret is very false and displaced, and imagines the past to be totally other than it was. Edith Piaf’s song “Je ne regrette rien” is wonderful in its free and wild acceptance.
I know a wild woman who has lived a very unprotected life. She has had a lot of trouble, and things have often gone wrong for her. I remember that she said to me one time, “I don’t regret a bit of it. It is my life, and in everything negative that happened to me, there was always something bright hidden.” She brought a lovely integrating perspective to her past, a way to retrieve treasures that were hidden in past difficulties. Sometimes difficulty is the greatest friend of the soul. There is a beautiful poem by the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas about looking back on life feeling, maybe, that you missed something or that you regret something that you did not do. It is called “The Bright Field”:
I have seen the light break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great prize, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying