I want to grow young with you, she said.

It made perfect sense.

People had it all wrong.

You don’t grow old, your body, this borrowed vessel,

it withers and ages and decays, your body grows old,

your brain grows old, but you don’t, or don’t have to.

To give yourself a playful chance,

to fully engage the spirit of youth,

and its cyclical nuptial blooms,

one needs an endless supply

of wonder, curiosity and zeal,

what you might call a beginner’s passion

for the mystery and miracleness of it all.

There is that, and the fact that, life, if regarded

from a circular perspective, means that the

baby and the old man, the infant and the old lady,

are nearer to the Source, and to each other, i.e.,

a newborn, six days fresh from the womb,

if you could hit rewind, or set their life in reverse,

would get sucked backed through the portal, into the Source,

and might find themselves 93, on their deathbed,

same as the deathbed nonagenarian isn’t too far removed

from birth canal re-entry into babyland.

You might call all the life that takes place in between, the Out of Womb Blues.

Everybody’s got em,

some sing it, some paint it, some rant it, some dance it, some sublimate it, some deny it,

some write it.

So yea, growing young, which is not necessarily the same as looking young,

or acting young, but growing young, something that occurs from within,

something self-generated and spirit-endowed.

Picasso said, “You start to become young when you’re about sixty, and by then it’s too late.”

Henry Miller called adolescence, “premature old age.”

George Bernard Shaw famously stated, “It’s a shame that youth has to be wasted on the young.”

Contrary to popular opinion, to commonly accepted reality, I have no intention of growing old. My body will wither and age and decay, and I, that is the I-less “I” will one day shed this vessel as my spirit, ageless in its quest for God knows what, continues its education course through astral nursery school, through the cosmic playpen, and hopefully, I will leave this life a little younger than when I started.

Growing young within yourself, and perhaps with someone else, yea I can swing with that while I’m here penning and singing the Out of Womb Blues.