Which of your five senses awakens first to spring? Is it a splash of color that catches your eye, or maybe the cloying trill of a pine warbler at your kitchen window? Does your seasonal gratification delay until blades of grass tickle your toes? Or is it the communion of warm rain tasted on your tongue when you lift your face to the sky?

For me, it’s the scent. My nose is mostly useless but very keen to certain cues. The first exudations from the bogs and buds of a yawning woods catalyze my vernal memories. Part virile mud, part redolent fragrance, those harbinger molecules waft through the woods with a thousand primitive notes that stir my soul. Head notes, heart notes and base notes they are called in the world of perfumery. The feral part of me is peculiarly responsive to them. Therein lie my ancestors – and yours – awakening down the ages.

It’s rebirth, isn’t it? The power of suggestion blooms all around us with youth and beauty, and the demiurge to freshen life becomes a contagion. Desire warms our blood, and everywhere there are searching looks. Love comes in three flavors: if you are 20, you are “twitterpated”; and if copies of your genes are sitting across the table from you in various sizes and ages, you may exchange lingering looks with the co-author of their being; and if you are beyond that, love may be enriched by knowing you are the safe harbor for someone, their rock, the historied vault for all that they are – all that you are – when you tangle in each other’s arms each night. At a minimum, memories surrender to fantasies. Stimulation may change, but attraction is ever new. Aging is such a liar.

And yet, so many buy into clichés and stereotypes about growing older. Yes, there are bothersome changes all through life. Aches and pains may become infirmities calling up rafts of prescriptions, surgical interventions, wheelchairs and more. And there comes a time to pay the piper for life’s indulgences, vices or sedentary habits. No one is forever, and in the blink of an eye every one of us will clamor no more upon this planet. But the journey is so very much what goes on between your ears right up to the moment you reach your destination. If you fill your mind with learning, you never stop adding context to your life, never stop adding more dots to connect. Never stop.

And what if the space between your ears is filled with bitterness or negatives or defense mode instead of growth mode? Maybe life has kicked you in the teeth. Dismay chokes you. Regrets at the way things have turned out sit like a stone in your gut. Failures, addictions, infidelities, dashed hopes have taught you to stay on your guard.

But for what? Stay on your guard? You’re still in the driver’s seat. Forget the rearview mirror; the present is coming at you through the windshield. The knowledge you’ve accumulated is begging to be turned into wisdom. This is your time to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Don’t you see, it all came out of your mind! Discovery, joy, energy, love, sex, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, accomplishment, even mobility – they weren’t just jangling nerve endings in an amoeba. You processed the feelings and thoughts inside your mind to connect the dots and expand the world into Technicolor.

You can still do that. Here’s how I put it on Facebook recently:  

Everyone builds a prison for themselves as they age. The bars are fashioned out of habits or beliefs or values. They may be youthful beauty that cannot be sustained, or vices that cannot be controlled, or poisonous outlooks that toxify the self, or idols that crumble, or skills that flag, or inflexible attitudes, or hopes that die of attrition, or dreams that fade, or shiny shields that rust, or perfections that disappoint. It may be all those things overwhelming a pilgrim on the way to a natural end. But they are not inevitable, not terminal unless you surrender to the inertia of heart and mind.

Do you see the bars of your prison? Or do you see the spaces between where the light comes through? There is always light, always love, always passion, always a way to escape and reclaim your crystal sanctuary. It was there when you started your journey, and it’s still there, afloat in the lotus perfection of a serene pond. Come home to who you are inside. Forever passionate. Forever a stargazer. Forever young. In the words of J. R. R. Tolkien: “…deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

Thanks for reading. Photos below of my Nordic ski Eden – Elm Creek – plus four turkeys (the two feathered ones are an injured wild turkey who took refuge in my backyard). 

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan