On Time, Permaculture and Living in the Mystery

The mark of another indelible year.

And with each closing that precedes my birthday, now on the horizon in the new year, I can’t help but reflect on the passage of time.

There is a humility that begins to set in when you realize we are only ever here, right now. The people, landscapes, and relationships we’ve known, sometimes for a lifetime, can change in an instant, leaving us with the reminder that tending the interior landscape is as important, if not essential, to growing into time with grace.

Last January, just after the fires, the breakups and the moves, the robberies and the reckoning, I lost one of my best friends. She was twenty years older than me, skipped barefoot along Topanga paths with grandchildren in both arms, wore her long white hair in a ponytail, and laughed with a resonance so deep it filled the room. Her eyes and smile carried the grace of ages, the kind of love only someone who has loved bigger than herself can know.

We shared many laughs and also tears. And her tears watered the landscape I inhabit, softening me, opening my eyes, reminding me how important it is to settle into a rhythm with life that allows me to be with life as it is. To notice the hawk circling in the sky or the bobcats grace, the change in the sky, the pause in conversation, the silence and the secret of the day, each one a gift and a reminder that we are part of this mystery.  Nothing in nature stays dead for very long.  There is constant and never ending cycle of renewal and change and knowing where we are in the continuum both for a moment in space and a cycle in time breeds wisdom.

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu speaks of the “mother of ten thousand things,” the mystery from which all things arise and to which they return. We spend so much of our lives trying to compartmentalize and label, judge and make sense of this wild life we find ourselves a part of. Reckoning with loss and change on massive levels reveals something simpler. The yoga is relationship. The practice is learning how to be with it all. The heart begins to open, slowly, toward compassion for ourselves and our neighbors.

The Tao is the way things are when they’re not being forced.
It’s the intelligence that moves rivers downhill, seasons forward, seeds toward light without asking permission.

When you align with it, you stop asking,
Why is this happening to me?
and begin asking,
How is life moving through me right now?

Each moment becomes an opportunity to cultivate patience and kindness, to integrate, to connect, to learn, to observe and reflect. To remember that how we perceive the world has always been a reflection of who we are, not the world itself.

When we grow with time, when we allow the losses and the successes, the seasons that shape and size us, we soften. The rain teaches tenderness. The wind teaches resilience. The animals and patterns remind us to keep going, that life goes on. And in this way, we cultivate inner beauty.

As time leaves its mark, deepening laugh lines and humbling resistance, we stand the impossible opportunity to actually know who we are. Our depth, our true nature, becomes visible, like a vine ripening or a blossom that can only open with the passage of time.

People come and go throughout our lives. We cry an ocean of tears alongside a cascade of laughter within one lifetime. And then, once again, we become the wind and the rain and the sun, drawing our children or our grandchildren’s eyes to the sky to catch glimpses of stars that remain hidden, inspiring a courage to look more deeply into the darkness of their hearts, their lives, the stories they tell, and find the light there again.

Trust and patience reveal themselves as companions. Allowing life to unfold with grace and teaching us that solutions are always possible and that through creativity, connection, and collaboration, we are capable of so much more than we once believed.

I don’t take life for granted the way I did in my twenties or thirties. And now, nearing the end of my forties, preparing to embark on a new chapter, I understand this:

Time doesn’t heal all wounds.
What heals is living honestly inside time.

Aging isn’t a narrowing.
It’s an accumulation.
Scars, loves, losses, joys.
Evidence. Proof of having been here.

Growing older isn’t about becoming less.
It’s about becoming more yourself, with fewer apologies and sharper compassion.

These days I’m less interested in the opinions I once held as truth and more devoted to truth-telling. To a fair assessment of where I am. To noticing what still draws my own sun-kissed face toward the sky.

I no longer confuse youth with possibility.
Possibility doesn’t disappear with age. It concentrates.

The life you imagined may not look like the life you live within. And in this way there is a true intimacy with reality, with life that begins to reveal itself, where real connection and perhaps even true love are found.

Growing in time means we don’t erase the past. We make room for it. The grief stays. The joy stays. The contradictions stay. You learn to carry them without asking them to cancel one another out.

Growing with time, shaped by the world like a tree, a rock, or a river, is not about becoming smaller or quieter unless you choose it. It’s about no longer abandoning yourself. About telling the truth sooner. About loving with discernment rather than performance.

And so, at the end of another wondrous and at times challenging year, filled with dreams actualizing that I once imagined and losses, too, that I never could have, standing within the changed landscape of these Santa Monica Mountains I’ve come to call home, I realize:

We have never been late.
We have never broken.
We have always been becoming.

There is no arrival, only a deep exhale.