
I recently made the argument that aging is biomythical. It’s not simply a biological process (although it is that, of course). It’s also a big story we tell, culturally, about who we are, and where we’re going. This week, I decided that—frankly—I’m a bit tired of what other people have to say about aging. I suspected that the more than human world might have a more glorious biomythology for me. You’ll have to let me know if you think I was right.
From Growth to Decline
Aging is something that we’re always doing. It’s happening from the moment we’re born. When we’re young, we call aging “growth”. When we’re old, we call it “decline.” The changeover—the moment when we get off the growth track and onto the decline track—is undefined. There’s no formula for when, where, why, or how this should happen. To some extent, it’s a change that each of us execute on our own. Getting onto the decline track is, at least in part, an elective decision.
Some of us will spend years jumping back and forth from one track to the other, impulsively. Some of us decide, quite early, that whatever happens from this point on is clear decline. Others choose the path of denial, and willfully label any change as “growth.” But inevitably, at some point, even those in denial will be overwhelmed by the fact that everyone around them looks and acts very young—naive, even. And they find themselves consistently being called “old.” It’s a process more inescapable than a law.
Algorithms everywhere are throwing many of us constant ads for preservation creams and hormone confounding diets. There’s an ambient sense of urgency to maintain the illusion of being elastic, estrogenic, and reproductive. In other words, there are massive undercurrents that are trying to convince many of us—from a very young age—that we are already on the decline track. And yet, I think it’s crucial to continue resisting what might feel like inevitabilities in the stories we tell about who we are, and where we’re going. We don’t have to be on a linear track from growth to decline. We can be transformed differently, by time.
Why am I tired of what other people have to say about aging? I suppose I’m not tired of what all people have to say about aging. My friend Krista Dragomer recently posted a powerful piece about what she called The Shift that left me feeling inspired by the many possibilities of change. What I’m tiring of, more particularly, is the biomythical narrative that sees decline in bodies that have been radically transformed in time and space. I want a big, grand, glorious biomythology that can give witness to the power that these transformations also generate.
A More Glorious Biomythology
In search of this bigger, grander, more glorious biomythology of aging I consulted some of the clear experts in the natural world. I’m not talking about the women who excitedly let their thick and healthy hair go gray and then post gorgeous photographs on Instagram. I’m talking about elements, forces, and processes around us we often take for granted, but that shape our sense of time itself. Here’s what they had to say.
Rocks
At some point during the pandemic, under duress no doubt, I started grinding my teeth at night. One day, inspecting myself in the mirror like livestock, I noticed that my two front teeth were wearing down in totally new ways. I had braces as a kid, but my bottom teeth are crooked again. I also have a couple of weird fake teeth that leave my smile asymmetrical. I take good care of my teeth. I brush twice a day for two whole minutes. And I floss. Structurally, things are sound. I’m even working on getting a nightguard. But I’ve recently been told by a dentist that my mouth is looking “a bit ugly” and might be due for some cosmetic work. The first thing I thought of, when I saw my two front teeth in the mirror were rocks: mineral bodies that had endured great force and pressures.

When I asked rocks for advice about aging they told me: be weather blasted. They reminded me of all the little glimmering specks that can be revealed, when water and wind and time really wear away at you. Becoming weathered can soften you at the same time as it also makes you a little more rough and grizzled, they told me. Both of these things are important, and good. We need our soft places and our sharp edges. Embrace the weather blasting. Let the rain fall, and the wind blow.
Roots
At some point, when I was little, my mother noticed that I have my grandmother’s hands. Not her mother’s hands (hands that looked deeply familiar). Rather, these were my father’s mother’s hands. I started looking more carefully at my grandmother’s hands and, I realized, it was true. Hers were covered with wrinkled and papery flesh. But we both had long fingernail beds of the same shape. Our knuckles were of the same proportion and distribution. As I get older and my flesh becomes more papery, I look at my own hands and they feel both more and less familiar. I feel both more and less familiar to myself.

Given that hands, especially where the phalanges meet the metacarpals, look a bit like the spaces where a tree’s roots split away from its trunk, I decided to look to roots for some advice about aging. They told me: keep moving and pushing and growing, until you can’t really tell if what you’re looking at is yourself, or someone else. Whether they be arboreal or rhizomatic, roots are connectors. They keep a plant rooted in space, and connected to the other living beings around it. They draw strength from their surroundings. They are part of what makes one thing, in the complex world below our feet, indiscernible from another. And this indiscernibility is also a deep and inextricable form of connection. This is what it feels like to be plugged in. To power share. To be part of something that endures.
Waters
I’ve been hearing, for a very long time, that our bodies lose muscle mass as we age. I suppose I always understood that this was obviously related to strength and power. But I didn’t really see how it was related to much of anything else. As I get older and have come to understand what it means to lose muscle mass, it’s made me fully understand how corrosive and vile our culture’s relentless focus on thinness truly is. Because thinness (especially without the forgiving strength of muscle mass as a protective coating) is just fragility. It just makes it easier to break you. It’s a way to make you less able to move and bend with the flow of life.
I asked water—that expert on moving with the flow of life—for some advice on aging and the water told me: get wide, and widen the way. If, as we age, we are always on the verge of breaking then we can’t hold space for ourselves, let alone for anyone else. So much of what it means to be able to move and work with the flow of life is to know how to take up the space that there is. Water knows how to do this well.
Decay
In my book, Sister Death, I argue that if we are at war with death then we are also at war with what is aligned with death—forces such as aging, and decay. I say this, perhaps, as if decay is something that doesn’t scare me. Of course it does. I love decay when it happens in my compost pile. But tooth decay, especially in my own mouth, scares the hell out of me. I can welcome decay in the world outside of myself, because I know that it has so many necessary functions—that it’s also a key to growth and change, itself. But to welcome decay within my own body seems to go against every fiber of self-preservation in me.
I suppose that I’m copacetic with aging, until it becomes a clear form of decay. So I decided to ask decay itself for advice. And what it told me was: the beginning of wisdom is the fear of decay. This is fear not in the sense of abject terror, of course. But, as in the book of Proverbs, fear in the form of awe. This is fear as respect. This is fear as a knowledge of limits—knowledge that there are limits that shape us. And we can either respect these limits with a sense of wonder, or stew in the juices of our decay.
Stars
Of course, decay isn’t all there is. It’s not the end of any story, but instead part of a narrative of transition. As much as decay might want us to respect limits, there’s something in us that also seeks to violate, question, or test those very same limits as well. This is something we learn to do over and over again in the growth phase of our aging process. And if we can’t learn how to incorporate this reaching, testing, or questioning in a sustainable and empowering way, we won’t keep growing and will only decline.
For advice, I turned to what I can know only at the very edges of my sense experience—what feels like the most distant sensible body, to my naked eye. I asked the stars for advice about what to do with my hunger to push past the limits and what they told me was: burn, and burn, and burn. Until you just can’t do it anymore. Then explode, and become mysterious.