We had rain last night and the sun is shining brightly in a clear sky this morning, so the garden is littered with diamonds. The air is cool and clean. I sit on the back porch with my Yorkshire terrier Percy on my lap and sip coffee, being. This is what I do in my old age. I be.

 I don’t get to do the things I enjoyed doing when I was young. I used to work in the garden, cleaning, trimming, weeding, planting, watering. At the end of the day, I would sit on the porch with my dog and a glass of wine, looking out at the garden and delighting in a day’s work well done. I can’t do that anymore. We lose things to find better things. That’s the way life is, the way God is.

Some years ago, I was consecrated in a single life vocation. A consecration of any kind is, properly speaking, an affirmation of what already exists, not an action agenda. Full of happy expectation, I imagined doing work for the church—any kind of work. I volunteered for everything, but I was never needed, or chosen. The disappointment led to a discovery (as disappointment so often does) that I was trying to do my own will, not his. My spiritual director (Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, who’s been dead for almost three centuries) would have been displeased. I must have been a silly sight—a cloistered nun trying to be Mother Teresa.  One loses things to find better things.

It has been interesting to see how the life of the mind morphs so easily and naturally into a life of prayer. My work now is prayer, wordless prayer. I used to teach, read, and write—words. I spend time now in listening to the silence. It’s not easy to shut up and listen. Much practice is needed.

I can’t say I love him; the word is too small and trite, but, risking some banality, I can say that I love my life of solitude and silence, my three or four friends, my dog, the morning, and other people, both strangers and friends. Percy and I watch the birds at the feeder, the diamonds dripping from the leaf tips. We are both immersed in here, now, breathing in the morning. It is good to be old.