Waking Up Tired

John Blase, poet of “The Beautiful Due,” calls this poem “True Autumn” and it seems to my mind to be well understood as “generativity,” that stage in life beyond just being old (see Erik Erikson’s seventh stage of psychosocial development: generativity or stagnation). I have borrowed Blase’s first line, “Waking Up Tired” as the title, perhaps because I understand that so.

John, By the way, is becoming a best friend of mine, not that he knows me at all, but that I am knowing him. You will see his writing posted on my office door at Carey and I often read his poetry in lectures. His rich words resonate with my life and the work that I do, and I often find myself grateful to his sensitivity to all things human and spiritual. I was grateful that he happily allowed me to repost his words. Here they are:

He woke up tired of life. Not life in general but life specific, as in the way he was living it. Yes, that’s much closer to the truth: He woke up tired of his life. He’d reinvented himself about fifteen years ago, surprised everyone including God. It was a bloom for the better, he called it his late spring liberation.

But now he was in his Indian summer, true autumn would set in soon. He sensed this next season would not be one of putting on but falling away, like the leaves. Not a manufactured stripping a la flagellation, but natural, prompted only by the wind’s ways. The feeling was impossible to shake, that his absolute survival depended on this change. He simply could not continue on with the way things were. If he did he might uncle to despair, and that would be more than he could bear. That would be to admit a great defeat. That would be to give up on life, to trample underfoot the gift.