Words become more precious as you age. Each one is required to be right, exact, capturing and cradling a clear intent. It is my belief there are several reasons for this.

First is that life itself becomes more precious. A limited supply of anything good becomes more precious, and as you come to grasp what remains of your life, to deal with it daily as people around you die, you want to have what remains to be superb. That includes the words you use. They must not degrade the preciousness of life.

Second, but related, is a desire to understand what life is in its pure form. In the living of your life when you are younger, you seldom need to understand what being alive is. You just are. You do what your species does. You don’t obsess over what is real and what is not real, or try to enter the DMZ area between consciousness and unconsciousness. You don’t focus so intently on your reactions to events and people that you have seen your reactions as passing sensations, vapors, mists, sandstorms, waves, occasionally particles. You don’t yet know that you are forming a matrix of these sensations and labeling them as “now” and “here” and “memory” and “reality.”

But, there is a need as you realize that your life is by all definitions at least 75% over to re-examine what life is – what it actually is instead of what happens within it. In this re-examining you can discover that being alive is more than living a life.

You feel the universe expand as your physical life shortens. To explain this intangible reality through tangible words is a delicate art. It has stymied me, though without anxiety. It is, actually, why I have not written in more than a month.

During that time I also spent two weeks in London, loathed a winter that overstayed its welcome, and for not altogether bad reasons have felt a lessening of closeness with two men who matter to me dearly. Yet I wrote of none of this because something larger is happening and it avoids words.

In any case, I don’t have the right words yet. I don’t believe there are any. Even so, I am trying.

I feel on the outer edge of the reality within which we classify and categorize sensations, memories, responses, and beliefs, and we call them reality and we try to hang on to them, when they are only imprints on our consciousness. I’m trying to say there are two worlds and they are both real, but in different ways.

I feel I am gently against the inside of the skin of a large bubble and on the other side is all time as timelessness and all space as beyond space. I think I may have stumbled on why so many older people become gentle. We have become more aware of what is on the other side of the bubble skin, and it gives hope, love, and patience. It also reorganizes our priorities. It tells us to live in ways that add beauty. Just that one rule.

I don’t pretend to know what is beyond individual consciousness, but I trust this awakening relationship with timelessness and unending space. I ask It questions occasionally.

Two nights ago I said: You will have to spell this out for me. I don’t quite get what is real and I don’t know what I am do to.

I asked It to spell it out and that night I had a dream in which I sing a song that flowed through me. I woke to listen to the song. It is the letters W, A, I, and T.

Only the letters W A I T, over and over. I will wait. There is time. There is eternity.