Love is Verbing

Rethinking Adolescence and Adulthood

This morning Woodpecker (an adolescent) made its first appearance here at the House of Light.

What an honour.

Woodpecker is an old friend who I’ve come to love as deeply as they’s (that’s a poetical for Friday) penetrating bill digs into tree trunks. How fascinating they choose a branch of supposedly dead Elder to perch and feed from.

Woodpecker interrupted (always reframed as divine intervening since my life is perpetually subject to it) my morning musing on the noun ‘adult’ and the verb ‘adulterate’.

Surely they are connected?

Following Woodpecker’s lead, I dug in to extracting the treasure beneath Elder’s brittle surface which turned out to be extremely nourishing. Thank you tree with many roots – Etymonline.

IN SHORT (Ha!) To become adult means to ripen. Following the mycelium of words, it stems from the root ‘adolescence’. Adolescence has its roots in two parts:

We do not grow OUT of adolescence into adulthood. Adulthood includes and grows the expressing of our adolescence: sensual, curious, wild, passionate The media seldom seems to acknowledge those beautiful adjectives today!

When a fruit is ripe, it is plucked from the tree – it’s ‘gathered up’ or falls to the ground and is consumed. It no longer grows.

We reach ‘adulthood’ when we die!

I find this an extremely liberating idea. It demolishes the belief that adolescence is a brief period to get through. It also erases the lie that adulthood is the sad long period of our lives when we have to sacrifice our adolescence and childlike innocence. We’ve been led to believe that we are destined to become ‘adult-erated’ by ‘others’. almost exclusively human.

Now… if you’re still with me, here’s the grub (and the rub) to feast on. The word ‘adult’ has no connection to the verb to adulterate, nor to adulteration, nor to adultery which means to make impure, to corrupt, to falsify!

All those variations come from the root ‘alter’ which – quoting my fab resource above was recorded as meaning ‘to become otherwise’ by 1580.

I’m not blind to the dangers of becoming ‘other–wise’, our true nature often falsified by other humans as we ripen. It appears to happen! But do we become involuntarily 'other-wised' or truly 'other-wise'? I’m going for the latter – obviously given this is Love is Verbing. I'm feasting on the thought that to be fully ‘other-wise’ presents the possibility of being nourished rather than corrupted by ‘the other’. Woodpecker’s symbolism with being discriminating comes to heart.

It seems like as a human society we have largely adulterated our true adulthood when we condemn our ‘adult’ generation. Is there even any value in making distinctions between adolescence, adulthood and childhood? They are a trinity of aspects, ever-present.

Have we hooded what we are and become blind to our natural ripening? Does dead Elder offer the nourishment or – if you prefer – ‘other-wisdom’ of the unheard majority creatures, feathered friends and animate beings who have no concept of age? And who gets up closest and utterly absorbed by them? The children and the youths who break away from society to pursue a passion?

From a forever teenager always relishing opportunities to become more childlike and embrace them all in my ‘manhood’. With thanks to Woodpecker and Elder.

#words #age #woodpecker #elders